How to Increase Email Deliverability

Email marketing is one of the key tools to keep your consumer database connected to your company and your products/services. However, in order to make sure your emails reach your customer’s inboxes there are a few rules you must follow. Here are five easy steps to maximize your deliverability.

1. Avoid spam words

Allowing your email content to become spammy is easy to slip into, however there are ways to prevent this from happening. The main things you should avoid strange punctuation, repeating paragraphs all capital letters in your emails and miss-leading phrases such as ‘FREE’ or ‘SPECIAL OFFER FOR LIMITED TIME ONLY’, you should try and keep the ratio between image and text equal. To try and prevent spam even more you can download spam filters such as SpamAssasain, this will tell you if your email consists of too much spam words. 

2. Only Send To Your Consumer Database Who Are Interested

It creates a bad impression of your brand if you try and push your emails into the inboxes of those who really aren’t interested. As well as this it will seem harder for the emails to even reach those who do not want it as ISPs will make it more difficult for your email to get delivered. 

3. Good List Hygiene 

Spammer’s lists are often filled with out of date information and invalid information. A way of detecting if an email has ‘bad hygiene’ is by ISPs detecting mailing with a high percentage of invalid emails. So for example if an email ‘bounces’ back at you or good quality email marketing systems will filter out errors, this is an indication to automatically get rid of that email address. 

4.  Remove Inactive Subscribers From List

You will be able to identify those subscribers who are no longer interested by spotting whether they have responded to any of your emails, or by checking if they have opened the email at all. You can then simply send a re-engagement email to them asking if they are still interested in your emails. You can also give them the opportunity to unsubscribe. This may seem counterproductive, but think of it this way, it’s better to not send at all than continuously sending to uninterested parties.  It is important to have regular checks of your email database to ensure you maintain ‘good list hygiene’.

5. Send To Seed Email Accounts To Check Deliverability

A seed-emailing list is list you will send your test marketing to which is not your whole email list. This will then allow you to see the deliverability response to certain groups of your email database.

When sending an email out to your ‘seed’ list you should ensure the email goes through your own Firewall, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. You must ensure you send up to ten to ISP addresses or sometimes more depending on the size of ISP.

For more information on enhancing email deliverability for a client please contact Louise Davies, Digital Marketing consultant on Louise.Davies@livelinknewmedia.com or 0161 870 8194