Navigating e-mail deliverability – steps for success!
What happens after you’ve sent out your newsletter? Having good e-mail deliverability is an important part of succeeding with your marketing efforts, since it’s important that your newsletters actually end up in your readers inbox. In this article we’ll share several ways you can start improving your deliverability today!
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Avoid purchased e-mail lists
When you have high deliverability of your newsletters it’s a sign that your e-mail list has high quality. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to avoid sending out newsletters to purchased e-mail lists of unknown origin. Purchased lists usually contain outdated e-mails or spam trap addresses, which can harm the deliverability of your newsletters. It’s also worth pointing out that it could be illegal in some countries to use purchased e-mail lists, especially in countries where GDPR is applicable. Focus instead on creating a process where the recipient of your newsletter have to make an active choice to recieve your newsletters.
By using a “Double Opt-In” method for your e-mail lists, the subscriber is forced to verifying their e-mail address before receiving a newsletter from you. When the subscriber signs up for your e-mails they’ll get a confirmation e-mail sent to them where they have to make an active choice agreeing to the subscription before they’re added to your e-mail list. By using “Double Opt-In” for all your e-mail lists you’ll avoid getting spam and incorrect e-mail addresses in your lists, which will increase the deliverability of your newsletters. You’ll have more active and interested recipients too, since they expect your newsletter to come and will look for it in their inbox!
Keep your e-mail lists updated
It’s always a good idea to keep your e-mail lists up-to-date with who is in your e-mail list since you want to prioritise building your relationship with real subscribers. By going through and regularly clean out your e-mail lists of generic e-mail addresses that for instance starts with “info@…”, you’ll make sure your newsletters actually reach real subscribers. You should also remove e-mail addresses that are mistyped since they’ll usually create a “bounce”, which is something can affect the deliverability of your newsletters.
What do we mean when talking about a “bounce”? There are several ways an e-mail can bounce, but the two most common types are a “soft bounce” or a “hard bounce”. A “soft bounce” usually indicates a temporary problem with the recipient’s server, but this kind of issue usually resolves itself over time and the recipient should be able to receive your e-mails after a while. A “hard bounce” indicates there’s a permanent error which means your newsletters won’t reach it’s recipients. A “hard bounce” could for instance mean that an employee at the company has quit and the company has removed that persons e-mail address from their system. In other words it’s important for the deliverability of your e-mails that your lists doesn’t contain a lot of addresses that leads to bounces or are stale and generic. By doing regular maintenance on your e-mail lists you’ll increase the deliverability of your newsletters and make sure your marketing reaches the right people all the time.
Write a good subject line
The content of your newsletter is an often-overlooked reason that can be a reason for having a low deliverability. There are several ways you can adjust your content to boost the deliverability of your e-mails, and your subject lines are one of the first places to look! A common mistake is using excessive punctuation (example !!??!) or multiple emojis in your subject line. If you’re unlucky your recipients spamfilter could trigger because of this and your newsletters would end up among their spam. Best practice is to keep your punctuations or emoji-usage to a minimum when writing a good subject line, which will increase the deliverability of your newsletters. There’s also lists of words that can cause a spamfilter to trigger (here’s an example in English), words that you should try to avoid using. Our best tip? Write your subject lines in a natural way and avoid using extra punctuation or emojis, then you’ll increase the deliverability of your newsletters!
Think about your content when creating your newsletters
It’s also important to think about your content and your newsletters design. For instance, when choosing a font color you should avoid using red if you want to make your text stand out. Unusual color combinations in text is something a spamfilter can discover, which can make it trigger on your newsletter by mistake. It’s also important to not put any important information you want your readers to see in an image. Most desktop e-mail clients (for instance Outlook) don’t load images by default, which means your recipients wouldn’t understand your newsletter unless they downloaded the images. Depending on how strict the spam filter is in their workplace, they might not be able to even do that, which means they would quickly unsubscribe to your e-mail.
Talking about unsubscribes, don’t forget to always include a link in your newsletters that makes it possible to unsubcribe from them. Make sure the link is easy to find and visible to your recipients. If multiple recipients are on the same server and can’t find the link to unsubscribe, they might mark your newsletter as spam. If enough users on the server marks your e-mails as spam you risk having your entire domain banned and blocked from the server, something that could be a major issue for your business!
Don’t forget to personalise your content
One of the best ways to increase the deliverability of your newsletters if by creating more personal content. Not only is personalisation a way to show spam filters that your’re communicating with your audience, but it’s also key to adding relevance and building trust with your readers. When using an e-mail marketing tool that’s integrated with your CRM, you have access to huge amounts of customer data at your fingertips. You can for example insert information into your e-mail content that automatically pulls customer data and information straight from your CRM, such as first name, company name or product interest among other things. This powerful way of making your content more personal is one of the reasons our customers loves using Lime Marketing together with Lime CRM!
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Don’t forget to proofread
One last tip when it comes to your content is to always proofread your newsletter for simple spelling mistakes or broken links. Broken links are not only a hassle for your recipients who want to engage with your content, but can also be a contributing factor to a newsletter winding up in the spam folder. Make sure that you click through all links in an e-mail before sending it to your audience! You can do this easily in Lime Marketing by sending yourself a test message to experience and see the e-mail just the same way as one of your recipients.
By using our tips you’ll increase the deliverability of your newsletters and have more success with your e-mail marketing!
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