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Three Tips For Helping Your Email Campaign Reach Inboxes

Forbes Communications Council

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.

In email marketing, you can write the most compelling copy, include an impossible-to-resist offer, create an attention-grabbing call to action, and still have the campaign fail to drive results. What’s one reason why? A low percentage of your recipients actually see the email. Before anyone can react to all that amazing email content, the email first needs to reach their inbox. So, if your campaign deliverability is subpar, your performance will likely struggle.

This is why the marketing discipline of email deliverability has become so popular and important. There is a strong argument that deliverability (or inboxing) is the most important aspect of any email campaign. The rationale is that even poor email marketing content can drive some results, as long as recipients actually get the email.

Today, reaching the inbox is arguably harder than ever before. Email platforms and inbox providers have become adept at identifying incoming email messages and quickly determining whether they should be delivered to the user’s primary inbox, a subsidiary folder (like Google’s Social or Promotions tabs) or the Spam folder, or whether they should simply not be delivered at all. Clearly, the goal is to make it to the primary inbox or at least the Promotions folder. Hitting too many recipient Spam folders makes driving effective results from a campaign extremely difficult.

In this article, I won’t get into the myriad reasons why an email might not make it to the inbox, but instead, I want to focus on three practices that could improve your chances of having your email campaigns delivered successfully to a larger percentage of your recipients.

Regularly Cleanse Your Email List

One of the easiest tactics for improving your campaign deliverability is to practice good email hygiene. Two key terms here are “email validation” and “verification.” You might find them used interchangeably. But, they typically refer to two slightly different processes used for identifying email addresses that should be removed from your mailing list.

The first step is to validate that all the addresses in your list contain the structural requirements of an email address. This process will catch addresses missing an @ sign or other structural issues that make the address undeliverable from the start. There is no reason to keep any of these invalid email addresses on your list, so remove them once you identify them.

The second step involves verifying that an email address is real and active. This step can help catch any made-up email addresses on your list, addresses that have gone dormant or those that are no longer in use. A good example might be a person’s work email address a year after they moved onto another job.

Removing these emails from your list will improve your overall deliverability rate simply because they won’t be delivered. Alternatively, as SparkPost explains, sending to a list with numerous invalid or undeliverable email addresses over and over can lead to an inbox provider lowering a sender’s ratings, which makes it more likely that any emails they send will be routed somewhere other than the inbox.

Remove long-term non-responders or at least put them on a separate list for reengagement campaigns.

Make It Easy To Unsubscribe

Many email marketers consider an unsubscribe request to be the worst possible response they can receive. However, this doesn’t need to be the case. If recipients don’t want to receive your email messages, they are highly unlikely to open or respond to any of your messages. They may even take the step of flagging messages as spam.

All of these activities (deleting an email before opening, not responding or spam flagging) can have a negative impact on your sender reputation or sender score with inbox providers. The sender score is a quantifiable method for email platforms to rate mailers and incorporate those ratings in their email delivery algorithms. These are exactly the types of user behaviors that email platforms track and may use in their algorithms when deciding how to process incoming email campaigns.

So, a best practice is to make it as easy as possible for recipients to opt out of future mailings from you. When you receive an unsubscribe request, in the U.S. you have 10 business days to process and honor the request under the CAN-SPAM Act. As a best practice, you may want to simply stop mailing them immediately. Once they have unsubscribed, what are the odds that they are going to respond to a last-ditch email campaign? They’re likely very small, and you risk sending a bad signal to inbox providers. This ensures you stay compliant with the law and also deliver the best user experience to those recipients who don’t want to receive your marketing emails anymore.

Deliver Relevant Content

Long-term deliverability success is reliant on more than just technical processes like list cleansing and ensuring an efficient opt-out process. If recipients actively engage with your email messages on an ongoing basis (opening, clicking and so on), these positive signals are not only good for you immediately (due to a stronger response to or sales from your current email campaign) but also for long-term deliverability.

Just as email platforms may penalize marketers for sending emails that recipients never interact with or flag as spam, they may reward marketers whose campaigns consistently receive higher engagement from recipients. It’s a bit of a virtuous circle where the more people who seem to “like” your emails, the more likely they are to be delivered to the inbox. This can certainly happen on the individual level, where emails from senders who a recipient interacts with are often more likely to be sent into the primary inbox. But, these signals may also be extrapolated in an inbox provider’s algorithms across recipients, making it more likely that your campaigns will reach the inbox of other recipients who have yet to show that level of engagement.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these are three strategies that will all have positive impacts on your email campaign deliverability.


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