The key to a strong email deliverability strategy lies in consistency, continuous improvement, and most importantly—engagement. Engagement trends have a huge impact on deliverability, so fostering an environment ripe for engagement is your best bet to ensure your emails always land in recipient inboxes.
Here are 4 top trends to keep in mind as you focus on how to improve email deliverability.
1—Foster Engagement to Improve Deliverability
Engagement and deliverability go hand-in-hand. Without engagement, it’ll be difficult to get better inbox delivery. And, if you can’t get your email into user’s inbox, engagement is difficult. So how can you ensure you’ve got the right plans in place to make an impact?
Here are 3 strategies to adopt for maximum deliverability with respect to email engagement:
- Focus on active recipients. It’s recommended you keep separate lists of recipients that are engaged versus unengaged. Use open and click data captured in the last 30, 60, or 90 days to identify your engaged audiences—the engagement time frame can depend on your business model, type of emails sent, and frequency.
- The active recipient list includes those that have recently engaged. These are contacts you should send your regular email campaigns to.
- For those that are unengaged, consider sending them through a re-engagement voyage and remove those from the list that have not opened an email in 6+ months.
- Target active and qualified contacts if you can query against a subscription status, purchase, or product sign up.
- Suppress anyone with a verification or opt-in date of 3+ years from email sends, unless they have opened an email in the last 3-6 months.
Microsoft and Google usually employ a 6-month rule. Meaning, if there are no opens in 6 months, they may accept an email, but it may land in the spam folder and it can degrade your email reputation. That’s why keeping your lists clean is critically important for better email deliverability.
Plus—and we can’t stress this enough—review your metrics often! It’s always a best practice to review email performance as it’s a strong indicator of how people are engaging and how emails are performing. This will allow you to make enhancements, test-and-learn, and address any issues that arise quickly. Omeda offers a variety of email reporting.
2—Less Can Be More—Frequency & Engagement
There is such a thing as over engagement, and it can end with list fatigue and spam complaints. Sending more emails doesn’t equal higher open rates. It’s important to review the average number of emails received by recipients to see if engagement has changed based on the frequency. Properly segmenting the audience and utilizing a fatigue calendar, like one that Omeda provides, can help during your email list creation process to ensure a healthy email cadence.
3—Create Benchmarks & Regularly Monitor Engagement Signals
Setting benchmarks against your email performance, consulting industry benchmark reports, and leveraging your email provider for recommendations will help you determine the health of your email strategy and deliverability. It’s important to continuously monitor your engagement statistics for positive and negative signals. Take immediate action if you see a trend that is diverging from your benchmark.
Negative Signals:
- Unsubscribes
- Complaint/Marked as Spam
- Bounces
Positive Signals:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Forwards
4—Identify Domain Issues & Act Fast
Continuous monitoring and improvement, coupled with a test-and-learn approach is critical to boost email deliverability. We recommend consulting Delivery by Receiving Domain Reports on a regular basis to quickly identify issues for inbox placement at each of your most dominant domains. A low or zero open & click rate is a strong indicator those emails are mostly likely being placed into the spam folder or did not deliver to the end recipient.
Unengaged subscribers are one of the top issues hurting sending reputation and correlated inbox placement. Best practices to improve include focusing on sending to active recipients, adjusting send frequency to optimize engagement, creating benchmarks and regularly monitor engagement signals — and identify any domain issues early.
