For most online businesses, email marketing is crucial to selling your products and increasing your revenue. Unfortunately, not every email sent is an email received, and the possibility that your marketing and/or transactional emails are not making it to your recipient’s inbox is pretty high. As an online business owner, you want to make sure you are continually optimizing your email deliverability to ensure that your emails are landing in your recipients’ inboxes and receiving engagement.
In order to examine whether your email deliverability is optimal, take a closer look at your open rates. This metric serves as a key indicator to test the efficiency of your marketing strategy. If you’re curious about how your statistics stack up against others in your industry, refer to Mailchimp’s latest “Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks by Industry” report. In this article, it was revealed that the average open rate across all industries was 21.33%. If your open rates are consistently lower than this benchmark, it is likely you are experiencing some email deliverability issues. Read on to learn more about our top three ways to improve email deliverability, to prevent your emails from ending up in spam and damaging your business in the long run.
Scrub Your Email List Periodically
You may have heard of the term “lead decay,” which refers to the decrease in a lead’s interest over time. When a user subscribes to your email list initially, they may garner positive feedback and engagement for the first few months. However, over time, their interest may dwindle and they may stop opening and interacting with your emails. Although this may not seem like a major issue, these old leads are dragging down your overall open rate as your average open rate relies on a combination of both old and new leads. When this happens, email clients take notice and start flagging your emails as non-engaging. Therefore, it is essential to maintain a high open rate to ensure effective delivery.
The Solution: Maintain the Quality of Your Email List
Keep the quality of your email list high, even if that means sending emails to a smaller group in order to maintain high standards. One way to maintain a quality list is to scrub it every 6–9 months by removing subscribers who are no longer engaging with your emails. To do this, consider running a re-engagement campaign to win back your non-engaging leads. Look at your email list and segment out subscribers who have not opened your emails in the last 90 days but have been on your list for at least 30 days. Send them a simple email asking them if they want to stay subscribed and include a call to action such as “click here to stay subscribed.” After you have followed up and analyzed your results, remove all the emails that you didn’t hear back from. Remember, it’s better to have a smaller list of engaged subscribers than a larger list of unengaged ones.
Don’t Send the Same Email to Your Entire Mailing List
As humans, we have different behaviors, interests and preferences; therefore, sending out one generic email to a list of 10,000 subscribers will not resonate the same with every single person. Moreover, mass emails may even come off as impersonal and spam-like, especially if you are sending them out multiple times a week. In the long run this can even damage your brand’s reputation and credibility.
The Solution: Segment Your Mailing List
One common and popular strategy is segmenting your mailing list, which allows you to tailor your content to specific groups based on their unique characteristics. This will enhance the likelihood of your subscribers opening and engaging with your emails, resulting in more conversions. If you run an online clothing store, you can segment your list based on age, gender and the types of clothing that customers previously purchased. By investing time in understanding your subscribers and sending out personalized content, you will be able to improve your overall marketing efforts.
Filter Out Passive Prospects & Spam Accounts
Email clients have automatic protections in place that safeguard users from spam or junk. If an email client does not recognize your company’s email address, they can reject it by sending it to spam or, in Gmail’s case, the promotions tab. This is why many marketers implement double opt-in into their email marketing strategies, which adds an extra step to the email opt-in process, requiring a user to verify their email address and confirm interest after signing up. The use of double opt-in filters out passive prospects, bad emails and spam accounts so you can keep your mailing list clean and your engagement high.
The Solution: Use Double Opt-In
Integrating double opt-in is a simple strategy that can be done directly in your ecommerce platform, such as Shopify’s “Double Opt-In” feature. Once activated, the platform will require customers to confirm their subscription upon sign up. In turn, this will weed out all the bad emails, thus preventing spam filters.
On the other hand, when using double opt-in, it’s important to ensure that your good emails are following through with the sign-up process. Provide an incentive for your visitors and give them an apparent reason as to why they should complete the entire sign-up process. A double opt-in requires more effort and providing an incentive can encourage this action. You can offer a 10% off welcome code or a free gift with purchase, among other options. By using double opt-in, you will be one step closer to ensuring your email list is composed of engaged and interested users.
Conclusion
Email deliverability is a crucial component to the success of any online business. The three email deliverability hacks discussed in this article can help optimize your business’s email marketing performance and ensure your emails are landing in inboxes and avoiding spam filters. Furthermore, these strategies will help build a loyal subscriber base, potentially leading to higher conversions and revenue in the long run.
