6 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

You work hard designing, writing and optimizing emails. Emails that your subscribers will love to have in their inbox. But what if they don't even reach their inbox? All that wasted effort (and sales) because your emails aren't being delivered.

Deliverability problems are usually due to issues related to your identification, reputation, or content. Addressing the problems is a critical step to ensure your emails reach their recipients. If your email deliverability rates are below 99 percent, it's time to take action. With the right changes and regular upkeep, your CBD marketing emails will be warmly welcomed into your recipients inbox.

Set Up a Proper Email Infrastructure

While there are various components involved in your email infrastructure, the source IP address and sending domain are the two most important. Your source IP address allows email service providers to identify you. They evaluate the source IP address to determine if you're a spammer. If large amounts of spam emails have been sent from that address, your current and future emails will likely be sent to the spam folder also.

You can choose from a shared or dedicated source IP address. A shared IP address is typically more affordable and easier to set up. However, because you share an IP address, you also share a reputation score. That means your score can go up and down depending on the actions of others.

Fortunately, the top email marketing service providers understand the importance of maintaining reputable IP addresses, so they ban senders who start to bring the scores down. If you're using a shared IP address from a reputable company, you shouldn't have a problem. Also, the company will monitor it for you, so you won't have to worry.

If you don't like sharing, you can get a dedicated IP address. Then, you can build a reputation score based on your email marketing history. Since the IP address belongs to you, you need to monitor it to ensure you have a good reputation score. You can use a tool like Sender Score to find out how your IP address rates.

Your email sending domain is the other essential component of your sending infrastructure. When you sign up with an email service provider, you'll probably be placed on a shared domain, meaning your emails will be sent from the same shared root domain that others use. Your brand is still clearly identifiable, but your sending domain includes the name of your ESP at the end. 

Switching to a dedicated sending domain will give you more control over your business’s branding and sending reputation. And in certain cases it can improve your deliverability rate. It does take more time and effort to set up and properly warm the domain, but can be worth it when you consider the benefits.

Warm Your IP Address and Maintain Consistency

Regardless whether you use a shared or dedicated IP address, you need to warm it up. IP warming is the process of slowly sending emails to segmented lists. Set a schedule and increase the volume as the weeks and months pass. By slowly warming your sending infrastructure, you teach email servers to trust you. Spammers don't take the time to warm IP addresses, so you'll look legitimate from the beginning.

When you finish warming your IP, be consistent with the volume you send. Significant drops or spikes can harm your sender reputation. You can make slight changes to the volume you send as you pick up or drop subscribers or have a major announcement, but don't make extreme changes.

Send to Contacts Who Engage with Your Emails

Email service providers can't analyze purchase history. Gmail doesn't know if one of your email subscribers purchased something from your company, so purchase history doesn't improve your engagement rate. Instead, email service providers analyze how people interact with your emails. If people on your list open and click on your emails, they are engaged. Create a segment with your engaged users and send them messages. When you send messages to subscribers who have opened or clicked at least one email in the last 30, 60, or 90 days, you'll lower the number of messages that go to spam folders.

Send High-Quality, Relevant Content

You can increase the likelihood of your emails landing in inboxes by sending high-quality, relevant content. First, use best practices when writing your subject line to avoid getting flagged. All-CAPS or special characters are a surefire way to end up in a spam folder. Also, be careful with exclamation points since spammers tend to overuse them.

Make sure your content is relevant to your subscribers. When you send relevant content, your readers are less likely to report your messages as spam. Also, relevant emails have higher engagement rates. That, in turn, can improve your deliverability across the board.

Avoid sending emails with all images, as that's a common spam tactic. Spammers also tend to make grammatical errors, so proofread your emails before sending them.

Finally, be mindful when including links in your emails. You likely want to send people to your website to take action. That's fine, but avoid using too many links and don't use a URL shortener since that can cause your emails to get caught in the spam filter.

Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

Some marketers make the mistake of thinking that the main goal is to have a big list of subscribers. In reality, your goal should be to have a large list of active subscribers. If people don't want to engage with your emails or be on your list, you should let them go without any effort. That means you need to make it easy to unsubscribe from your list. If it's too hard to unsubscribe, people will report your email as spam, so their email service provider will automatically move your messages to the spam folder. That will hurt your sender score.

Get Help with Email Marketing

Ensuring that your emails make it into inboxes is hard work. You have to follow best practices at all times, or you'll end up with a bad sender reputation, making it difficult to reach your subscribers. Fortunately, you don't have to handle your email marketing yourself. Reach out for help so your emails will get in front of your subscribers instead of ending up buried in spam folders.