So you’ve spent countless hours writing up the perfect email content. It’s funny, engaging, and it packs a punch – unfortunately, it’s also sitting in the spam folder among a plethora of unsavory company, all because you didn’t play by the rules when it comes to delivering your messages to the masses. To help get your email marketing dream scenario back on track and your content into the inbox of the customers that matter most, here are five essential tips that are sure to boost your email deliverability.Before putting any of the other tips in this post to use, you’ll need to ask nicely for permission to connect with these users. While the old days of email marketing were closer to a digital “wild west,” today’s industry is all about opt-ins and legal rulings regarding consumer contact. In fact, with the recent implementation of CASL and other regulatory legislature bearing down on brands that employ shady or outright “black hat” tactics, the experts at PureB2B suggest implementing a double opt-in campaign.This way, there will never be any questions associated with your brand’s intentions or practices. Additionally, this multilayered process helps refine your email contact list to only consumers that actually have interest in hearing your sales pitch, which in turn provides you with more accurate performance metrics once your campaign gets in motion.
Sanitize Your Lists
Speaking of email contact lists, the longer you utilize this marketing practice, the more likely it is that your audience will stop engaging. As time passes certain portions of your list will lose interest and stop opening your content. To combat the distortion this causes in your campaign results, Justin Zhu of Marketing Land suggests embracing the Pareto Principle.This concept claims that 80 percent of your profits come from the most active 20 percent of your customers, so you might as well “sanitize” your contact list. To do this, simply trim away the least responsive portions of your list and shift your optimization toward the people that show the most interest in your email content.
Consider IP Bonding
If you’re in the business of sending large amounts of emails during your marketing promotions, Zhu goes on to suggest IP bonding to help speed up the process, work around ISP connecting limitations, and diversify your IP reputations – the latter of which is important when it comes to avoiding an unwarranted trip to the spam folder. As part of this process, you’ll connect with your email service provider to acquire multiple dedicated IPs. From here, each IP will handle a section or parcel of the full message load, thereby easing the burden your current single IP address deals with and creating a faster, more efficient delivery process.
Think Long-term about Content
At first glance, this tip might seem a little out of place. After all, the content of your emails doesn’t directly impact the deliverability of your messages from a technical sense like IP bonding and adherence to CASL and other regulatory legislation. However, Tim Asimos of Yahoo’s Small Business Advisor blog makes an interesting point regarding the long-term orientation of your email content and its role in the deliverability process.Essentially, if you offer subpar or “spammy” content to your audience, don’t be surprised when these readers start to lodge a considerable amount of spam complaints via the built-in tools found on email service providers like Gmail. As these negative reviews build up, your deliverability performance metrics dip farther and farther into the red, creating a grim outlook that could spell the end of email marketing success for your brand moving forward.
Conduct an Email “Test Run”
Once you’ve spent some time refining your messages and tweaking all the variables to make the content just right, it’s time to send your perfect marketed email out – to yourself. As Graham Charlton of Econsultancy points out, the final step to boosting your deliverability lies in conducting a test run. The idea behind this is pretty straightforward. By giving the final product a once over and checking for any words that could trigger spam filters, as well as HTML coding that doesn’t quite translate to the inbox platform, you can ensure that your customers only see the best side of your brand when they click the open message button. When paired with the rest of what you’ve learned about maximizing deliverability, this final tip serves as the capstone to a powerful and well-implemented email marketing campaign.
