Eight Ways to Improve Your Marketing Email’s Deliverability, Part I

One of the most common mistakes made by business owners and companies making their first forays into online marketing is to give up on email marketing too quickly because of less-than-stellar results. There are a great many factors that go into successful email marketing, and if the appropriate time and care is taken, email marketing can be a very powerful marketing tool for any growing business.

One of the first keys to successful email marketing is deliverability, i.e. the number of emails that are successfully delivered to recipients’ Inboxes. (For more online marketing terminology, please visit our Glossary here.)

Below we have outlined four ways to improve your email’s deliverability:

Test your messages first via seed emails

The use of seed emails is extremely important to testing deliverability. These email addresses should be from various email service providers (ESP’s) so that you are able to monitor which messages make it to inboxes. SPAM filters these days are more and more selective, but using seed emails to test will allow you to determine which messages, code structures, etc… have the highest deliverability rate.

Use an email template that you know works

This seems obvious, right? Yes, but it requires testing, which is something many first time email marketers are not expecting. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as putting together an ad and hitting “Send.” This step falls right in line with the seed email addresses, and taking the time to perform this testing will pay dividends in your email marketing efforts down the road.

Make sure your list is clean

Another apparent no-brainer, but the list cleaning process is often overlooked. It is extremely important, not just for optimal email deliverability in the short term, but also to maintain IP reputation. So, of course, old and outdated addresses which are no longer deliverable must be removed, but also be sure to maintain an updated suppression list as well as a list of individuals who tend to complain.

Make sure your IP’s are clean

As addressed above, this is essential. As an IP’s reputation is damaged, your deliverability suffer will suffer. List hygiene and a current suppression list will go a long way toward ensuring clean IP’s. Additionally, removing opt-out’s immediately and addressing complaints promptly will contribute to a good emailing reputation.

For more tips on improving email deliverability, keep an eye on ThriveMG.com!