There are nearly 3 billion email users worldwide, and this statistic is prone to increase in the upcoming years. Email marketing is an opportunity that no business should miss to enhance its sales quotient. Hence, as an email marketer, you want to deliver your marketing emails to the mailboxes of all your intended recipients. Your success in it determines the success of your email marketing campaign. In technical language, this is email deliverability.
An email passes through several filters before entering into the mailbox of recipients. You deliver your email to the latter only if it passes through these filters. For this to happen, you need to adopt the best practices.
You benefit from marketing outreach and sales by delivering your email to your recipient’s email inbox. Follow the four practices below in 2022 to land your email in one of the folders of your recipients’ mailboxes.
1. Authentication
Mass email senders complain about email deliverability issues even if they send mass emails to a small list of recipients. You run into this problem primarily if you start sending mass emails without authenticating your email account. Email authentication gives your emails the license and acceptability for delivery to the mailboxes of email users.
To successfully deliver your marketing emails, consider four kinds of authentication. These include the following:
- SPF: SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. A domain consists of many mailing servers. As a protocol for authentication, SPF helps admins define the list of mailing servers. Some authorized servers of your domain name system (DNS) send your emails. SPF prepares a list of those servers and records it in your DNS. A recipient’s email service provider (ESP) accepts your email only if it has an SPF authentication.
- DKIM: DKIM stands for Domain Keys Identified Mail. It helps an Email Service Provider (ESP) verify that an incoming email is from a verified source. With DKIM email authentication, you prevent yourself from being a part of many email scams. In addition, it also helps boost your email sending productivity.
- DMARC: Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a helpful email authentication process. However, it is not mandatory.
- Custom Domain: You improve your email deliverability by adding a custom domain. If you use many tracking links without offering a custom domain, an ESP may blacklist your domain. You avoid it by including a custom domain to your links.
2. Sender Reputation
Email Service Providers assign a score to your IP address and domain based on certain factors. In technical terms, it is sender reputation. A higher sender reputation improves your ability to deliver emails to intended recipients.
You can begin your initiative to boost the sender’s reputation by warming up your email account. In this practice, you increase the volume of sending emails gradually instead of doing it in bulk at once. Sending fewer emails at the initial stage helps you to create email conversations. The more you do it, the more credible you appear to email service providers at the subsequent stages.
If you follow this practice for a few days, your emails look credible to email service providers. Accordingly, they increase the score for your email reputation.
After email authentication, you also get a higher limit for sending emails. If you exceed it, then an email service provider may block your emails. You prevent it by counting the number of emails you send daily.
In addition, you also need to be aware of email blacklists that relate either to domains or to IP addresses. A real-time database blacklists a few domains or IP addresses for sending spam emails. Your best bet to avoid getting blacklisted is to monitor your IP address and domain from time to time.
Verifying the email addresses on your mailing list also helps you to improve your sender’s reputation. This way, you identify which contacts are valid or invalid. Accordingly, you remove those email addresses from your list that are either invalid or risky to avoid email bounces.
3. Email Content
Your email lands in a specific folder of a user’s mailbox based on its content. The first thing that a potential client notices in your marketing email is its subject line. If you use spamming keywords in it, they may report it as spam. Generally, 69% of target audiences do so after opening a marketing email. Spam filters also follow this rule.
Also, try not to use too many spammy keywords in the body part of your email. Instead, focusing on email personalization provides you with better results. You receive a better response to your marketing emails by addressing your business prospects personally. Using visual content at a higher ratio than text content enables you to engage and interact with your potential business prospects effectively.
If you use colored text in the content of your email, then try to keep it down to a minimum level. Also, avoid writing the text in capital letters, and maintain a mobile-friendly design to facilitate viewing your content.
4. User Engagement
User engagement occupies a top spot on the list of ways to boost the open rate of marketing emails. To maximize user engagement, make the subject line of your email as persuasive as you can. This tempts your target audience to open your marketing emails and read them.
If you have a list of recipients, segment them into different categories. This practice helps you to identify other prospects and send relevant emails to them. You must follow this practice, as your target audience may mark irrelevant marketing emails as “spam.”
Final Comments
Email deliverability is an essential step toward implementing an efficient email marketing strategy. You need to adopt the best practices to do it correctly. Follow and enforce the above email deliverability practices. As a result, you achieve desired outcomes in your email marketing campaign in 2022.
