How do you determine your deliverability?
There are many ways to optimize your email marketing campaigns. None of them is more important than ensuring high deliverability.
Only after you successfully reach the recipient’s mailbox, you can prompt him to take action. Whether you want them to download your ebook, schedule a meeting, or buy one of your products, your message won’t get them there if it’s stuck in the spam folder. Many email marketers are still unaware of how they are dealing with email reputation and other deliverability factors that affect the placement of their inbound messages.
Savvy email marketers will want to regularly check the health of their email, and many will even use tools to gain a consistent and consistent level of deliverability insight.
Some tools will give you an idea of where your mailbox is, through source list testing and other technologies, and this will give you some visibility and be a useful barometer. And there are tools provided by mailbox providers, and if you know what to look for, there is a treasure trove of data in your ESP analysis.
However, for most people, determining their deliverability with internal commands and resources is quite difficult. This is why most organizations tend to hire email deliverability experts to conduct email deliverability audits.
Find the right email deliverability partner
Email deliverability is tricky. This is why many large organizations have in-house professionals who make deliverability their core job. However, if email deliverability auditing seems overwhelming, or if you have too many steps to deal with, help is available.
A partner like Mailgun by Sinch provides tools to facilitate the audit process and continuously monitor deliverability. Our solutions include the InboxReady deliverability package. Plus, when you sign up for our shipping services, you can rely on dedicated experts to help you create a custom strategy.
Making email deliverability improvements
After completing an email deliverability audit, you should have a clear idea of the issues that need to be addressed. Here is a quick overview of the main steps:
1. Run email delivery tests to check for any obvious problems.
2. Find an overall email deliverability rate that should be around 95%.
3. Check how your email infrastructure is set up and consider any upgrades or enhancements.
4. Make sure you’ve authenticated your email and configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly.
5. Look at your sender reputation and check if you are on any blacklists.
6. Do list hygiene and make sure email addresses are verified.
7. Examine the contents of the email for things that could be interpreted as suspicious or spam.
Use the results of an email deliverability audit to create a list of actions and recommendations. Prioritize these issues and delegate responsibilities to the right people. For example, you can talk to the marketing department about changing the way you receive email. Or you can ask IT to update DNS records for authentication.
Some things, such as improving sender reputation, being blacklisted, or setting up authentication protocols, may take some time before you see results. Others, such as list building and spam, can be resolved immediately.
<strong>How to do an Email Deliverability Audit and optimize Your Email Warning?</strong><strong></strong>
This how-to article covers everything you need to know about email deliverability auditing.
What is an email deliverability audit?
An email deliverability audit is a path to check whether sent emails are delivered and measure how many of them reach your recipients’ inboxes.
The effectiveness of your email campaigns depends on the deliverability of the emails sent. You need to know if your emails are opened by potential customers or if they end up in spam. A low email open rate could mean that a large number of emails sent turn out to be spam and you need to get to work and do a proper email audit.
The key to high email deliverability is a good email sender reputation, which you should maintain and review regularly. If you notice that your emails have suddenly increased and your engagement metrics such as click-through rate and response rate have dropped, it’s time to check your email reputation. Even worse, if several potential customers reply to you and say they found your email in their spam folder, it’s time to check.
Why is an email audit important?
The time and effort you put into finding leads and creating a great email campaign are very valuable. It would be a shame to spend hours creating custom email content and brainstorming for a subject line only to have it all go to waste because your potential customers won’t see it in their inbox.
Conducting an audit can help you resolve some issues affecting your email deliverability. For example, let’s say you notice that your email reputation has gone down. This may be due to several issues. Checking email blacklists, dealing with spam complaints, and checking your email list for inactive recipients are just some of the problems you can find and fix with an email deliverability audit.
Common problems found and fixed by email auditing:
- Email acquisition issues
- Poor email list hygiene
- Cause of bounced emails
- Not following privacy policies
- Misaligned team strategy (e.g. sales and marketing)
- A high number of unopened emails
- Low click-through rate
How long will an email deliverability audit take?
It depends on factors such as the size of your team and the issues that arise. Small teams can get through the fastest email deliverability audit process in a couple of days. Larger sales and marketing teams may need a couple of weeks to resolve more complex issues.
All team members must participate in creating, developing, and sending emails. This way, everyone will be in the know and the audit process will be easier to manage.
How to do an audit of your email sending reputation?
If your team sends out a lot of more complex emails to different email lists, you should consider hiring an expert to guide you through the process. Smaller teams are better off doing internal email reputation audits. This should be tedious, but relatively easy and likely to be cheaper. If you choose option number two, read on to find out what you need to know.
Here’s how to perform a thorough email deliverability check in 4 steps:
Technical Setup – Setting up your domain and email behind the scenes.
Email Reputation – Check your email reputation by viewing your bounce rate and spam complaints.
Email deliverability. Emails you send end up in your Inbox or end up in your Spam folder.
Email Content Quality: View content that directly impacts the performance of your email campaigns, as well as open, click, and response rates.
Understanding List Fatigue and List Churn
The email list is slowly but steadily dying if no action is taken from time to time. Most companies lose fifty percent of their subscribers each year. Everyone uses their click-through, conversion, and open rates to measure the success of their email program. But they can’t measure the size and quality of their email list. The Email List Threshold is a new metric to consider along with the old ones to keep your list growing.
The email list rate threshold determines the email list churn rate that must be overcome for the list to grow. Gives the exact number of new subscribers that need to be attracted to replace the old ones who left the list. Other barriers that need to be addressed are staff turnover and fatigue.
List bounce is the percentage of subscribers who bounced off a list during a given period. This is measured either monthly or annually. Of these, only three percent are people who unsubscribed from the mailing list. Another thirty percent are email addresses that are lost every year due to hard bounces. Subscribers may enter their email address incorrectly when registering, or email addresses may be invalid, resulting in bounced emails. The rest of the percentage is made up of people who reported spam complaints. Even the largest legitimate permission providers receive spam complaints.
List bounce rate can be calculated monthly by looking at email performance reports. The number of lost subscribers per year can be calculated by adding the number of spam complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes. The total must then be divided by the current size of the train to find the critical speed of the train. The calculation of the list threshold rate is very important for the annual planning and revenue forecasting process. If this metric isn’t factored in, you have to explain a lot to your boss if you fail to meet your required lineup growth goal. The list bounce rate can be improved by reducing the number of spam complaints and bounce rates.
List fatigue deals with mailing list subscribers who have gone into hibernation and become inactive for quite some time. These people didn’t unsubscribe but stopped reading emails and interactions. Therefore, the unsubscribe rate cannot give a clear indication of how readers feel about a company’s emails. The most common cause of list fatigue is irrelevant offers, emails, and newsletters that are not in the reader’s interest.
To determine list fatigue, you need to calculate the percentage of inactive subscribers. People who haven’t clicked or opened a single email within a certain period of time should be counted. Typically, thirty to fifty percent of an email list becomes inactive each year. There can be many reasons why these people receive your emails but don’t unsubscribe. The main reason is that your mail may go straight to your bulk mail folder or your unsubscribe link is not working. So there may be a fifty percent chance that forty percent are inactive and the other ten percent are busy, on vacation, or simply not motivated enough by the subject or content of the email. You can conduct small surveys to understand the changing needs of subscribers.
These dormant subscribers need to be reactivated from time to time by giving them spicy stuff like special offers, different perspectives on the newsletter, interactive tools, etc. On the one hand, old subscribers need to be revived and new ones need to be added from time to time. . Otherwise, the list gets shorter and shorter. Resources need to be obtained and plans developed to obtain growth rates for the target list. The proportion of inactive subscribers should also be reduced and slowed down.
Tips on Reducing Number of Email Bounces
Reducing and managing email bounce has never been more important for an email marketer. Managing frequent email bounces reduces the cost of sending emails and increases conversions and transactions. This is the mark of a good mail program.
The list must be cleared on time. The cleanup process can be done manually or by using the List Cleanup Service, which can check for misformatted addresses, typos, and invalid domains. Most businesses turn over two to three percent of email addresses per month. Here you can use the change email address service or ECOA service to solve this problem. Many of the ECOA companies are reported to receive at least a million email address changes every month.
Email addresses need to be verified regularly. You can do this by sending automatic response confirmation to customers when they sign up, subscribe, or make a purchase. If the message comes back, you can try correcting the email address. This problem can be solved by including a second line of the email address in the subscription form, which can confirm the correct email address entered.
One of the main steps to follow is to simplify the renewal process by including the website account and the subscription management link in the email messages. Customers should be encouraged to update information. They may be asked to verify or update information during a shopping cart transaction. If there have been no transactions for some time, telephone or direct mail can be used to update the information. Individuals who have incorrect email addresses and whose phone numbers or mailing addresses are on file with the company can be contacted to have their email addresses corrected.
Major domains like Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. can be used to track bounce and open rates. If one is different from the others or there is a sudden change, this can be attributed to blacklisting or filtering. So it’s also a good idea to check the major blacklists and spam databases for your business name or email service provider. If the name is blacklisted, the bounce message will not be received, even if the message was not delivered. Monitoring and understanding spam filters help you respond more effectively to spam complaints. Please read the spam filter terms and conditions carefully. Very often addresses marked as spam are added maliciously. These flags should be removed. Email providers also handle bounces. Only understanding them can solve the problem. The basis on which soft and hard bounces will be pronounced must be learned and subsequently processed accordingly.
Due to financial problems, mergers, and other announcements, a large list of ISP users decide to switch to another ISP or email account. Such members in the subscriber list should receive an email asking for a domain name. They should be asked if they would like to update their email and other information. It’s good practice to pre-test emails before sending them to the entire list of subscribers. The test can be done on yourself, on company employees, and a trusted group of current readers. Try to include all the major email services used by the majority of your subscriber list.
If all other attempts fail, it’s best to remove or suppress duplicate bouncers. To do this, a proper bounce and bounce management strategy must be developed according to the email program. Hard failures should go straight to the reset list, as they cannot be delivered forever.
The Biggest Email Brand Killers
One of the biggest mistakes one can make is using email as the electronic version of direct marketing tools such as mail, directories, radio, television, newspaper inserts, and even brochures. A world-class brand builder can become a brand killer in no time if treated with ignorance, carelessness, and laziness. The ability to kill a brand largely depends on the relationship of email with recipients. Relationships are more personal due to the intimate relationship between people and their computers. And because of this intimacy, the name of the company evokes both positive and negative feelings. No email is as annoying as spam, and spam penalties are getting tougher. An avalanche of spam complaints can affect your email program to the point of shutting it down.
E-mail is gradually becoming a personal means of communication. The recipient must be responsible, he must be able to decide who he should receive email from, what type of email he wants to receive and when he can stop receiving these emails. An email program that doesn’t include all of these amenities will do serious damage to your company or brand.
The first thing to focus on is eliminating abusive permission practices. If this is not corrected, no subsequent actions will make up for the losses. Simply put, it’s completely wrong to send a commercial email to someone you haven’t permitted to do so. Sometimes a person simply signs up for an email when registering on a website due to the rush. Therefore, the registration page must display a privacy policy that states that registration also includes consent to receive emails. And despite this, there is a high probability of receiving large complaints due to an incomprehensible subscription process. Some companies send emails to a person who has downloaded a white paper or brochure from a website. Better if the checkbox is not checked beforehand. The job of checking the box should be left to the visitor.
Despite taking these precautions, it sometimes happens that the recipient immediately clicks the report spam button when they no longer want to receive emails. This happens when the recipient does not trust the unsubscribe process. The first reason for the loss of trust is sending a message in the wrong format: text or HTML. Readers sign up by trusting the company, and when your email program doesn’t live up to their trust, the company has to pay for it. It is very important to give the reader the choice between text or HTML format. Typically, techies prefer text messages only, while teens prefer HTML messages.
The content of the letter must exactly match the requested information. If a subscriber has requested sales announcements, please do not send them company news. Similarly, the frequency of letters should be taken into account. If a weekly newsletter is requested, please do not send biweekly newsletters. Random exceptions, such as sales or newsletters, can be used with caution. Customers complain a lot about the flood of emails during the holiday season. Better to focus on quality than quantity.
The content of the letter must exactly match the requested information. If a subscriber has requested sales announcements, please do not send them company news. In the same way, the frequency of cards must be taken into account. If a weekly newsletter is requested, do not send newsletters every other week. Random exceptions such as sales or newsletters can be used with caution. Customers complain a lot about the flood of emails during the holiday season. Better to focus on quality than quantity.
Testing Emails Effectively
The big picture of email that many marketers overlook is that not only is it cheap and fast, but it also provides a way to know what works and what doesn’t. It’s affordable and offers the subscriber more information than direct mail, and response times are reduced from weeks to hours.
However, very few marketers take the time and effort to test their email newsletters and emails. Many of them wonder if it’s worth the effort. If the order button is moved from the bottom of the page to the top, where it is most visible, the click-through rate will increase by fifty percent. With results like these, it’s worth the effort. With hundreds and millions of dollars involved in email marketing, money cannot be wasted.
The only way to find out about offers and topics that work for your audience is to try them out. Tests can be done on preferences, emotional triggers, reactions to subject lines, whether they like short or long format, and whether they like text or HTML formatting. Valuable information about the audience can be obtained by testing variables.
The basics of email can be started the same way you can format the simplest parts of an email. Most emails are not readable due to incorrect HTML code. Emails should be tested in various types of email applications such as Yahoo or Outlook. In this case, a sharp change in the overall response speed can be observed. Testing must be under control. Sometimes marketers get so overwhelmed that they check all emails at once. If two completely different versions of the same email are sent to different groups, you won’t be able to tell what worked and what didn’t. Therefore, it is necessary to select only one item to test at a time and then observe the audience’s response to that particular variable before testing another variable.
Timing is also important when sending test emails. When sending several test emails, you should take into account the time of sending. It remains to be seen if emails can be sent at the same time, same season, etc. This also includes testing more than one variable at the same time. According to research, Wednesday is the best day to get answers. Other statistics say that at least thirty to fifty answers are required to make the right decision. Some of these answers may be confusing, but almost ninety percent of them will be accurate. The list of elements can be broken down into a smaller list and centered on a single list.
Learning doesn’t just mean getting graded. This means that we must receive grades or results and learn from them. If something is wrong in the email, a fix should be sought. When email marketing efforts are put to the test, the purpose of this testing procedure is to test one or more elements or variables, the results should be analyzed and the lessons learned applied. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and money to try. And when the results are ready, the seller must know how to apply the newfound knowledge.
Strategies for Email Marketing
Any marketing, in order to be successful, requires a certain strategy. Therefore, email marketing also involves the use of some strategies. The biggest benefit of using email as a marketing strategy is personalization and segmentation. These benefits are also the least used email marketing feature by most companies. It is very important to make corporate emails as clear and relevant as possible for each recipient because this particular email competes with the rest of the emails in the recipient’s inbox. Emails can be made relevant by customizing topics, articles, offers, product displays, and emails that are sent based on the actions of the recipient.
Before embarking on an email marketing strategy, it is best to submit a pre-campaign test to identify issues before implementing the strategy. Test results can be tracked by testing filtering, blacklisting, and ISP filtering. Test messages should be sent to different email clients and platforms. An email sender can authenticate by adding an SPF code to a DNS record. Each platform and email client has different preview panes and different image blocking policies. To deal with this, emails need to be redesigned to be easy to read and display correctly. The top of the letter should contain as much information as possible. Creativity should also be boosted by playing with HTML colors and fonts. Images should be less trusted as there is a greater chance they will be blocked by email clients or ISPs.
Everything becomes obsolete with time. What worked a few months ago may not work today. Variables such as design, format, copy style, theme, offers, content types, personalization, product categories, etc. need to be constantly tested.
Pay special attention to email early on because most opt-out requests come in the first two months after a subscriber registers. A well-organized program should be designed to immediately attract a subscriber. A welcome message should be sent instantly, followed by an email with the latest offers and promotions. You can also send an email with the best of the previous newsletters as well as exclusive newbie deals. Trust can be built by specifying things like frequency, offer, content type, and privacy policy in advance. In addition to focusing on newbies, it is also important to take care of regular subscribers. Over time, almost fifty percent of the email list becomes inactive. This happens when subscribers do not open corporate emails for a long time. These subscribers should be waking up trying new topics, new email formats, and sending out the best newsletters or great deals. Short surveys can be conducted to learn about customer requirements and identify potential trends.
Instead of focusing on metrics like clicks and open rates, marketers should focus on end goals like email revenue, conversion rates, timeliness of desired action, etc. Focus on the style and type of articles that like subscribers. The search option also helps a lot in attracting customers.
The most important task is to create a working email marketing plan that actually has specific goals, action steps, and success metrics. The plan must include sufficient resources and budget. The program needs to be improved frequently through continuous testing and analysis, increased segmentation and personalization, and incorporation of the latest technologies.
Spicing up the Snippet Text
A snippet is the top line of an email that is displayed separately from the subject line. Typically, the first line of a text or HTML message is displayed in the incoming fragment. This is a small but very important part of the email message that helps tip the scales in the seller’s favor as readers skim through their messages, find the most important ones, and delete the rest. Therefore, it is more important to improve the snippet in order to optimize the email and make your message stand out from the rest.
Different service providers have different types of display panels. Yahoo displays the snippet in a popup text box when the cursor hovers over the subject line. Gmail displays the snippet in the shaded portion after displaying the truncated subject line. In Outlook, a small amount of text is shown in the automatic preview.
increSome marketers give an invitation to join their list of subscribers in the snippet itself. Even though the service is valid, it should not be listed on the first line. Instead, it should be used to create interest, value, and excitement in your email. A well-formed snippet helps the reader, especially those on the run, decide whether to read the letter right away or delete it. In addition to the subject line, there are more words available in the snippet or top line of your email to increase brand awareness. This top line allows the reader to make a quick decision when they are in the middle of sorting incoming messages. Some preview panes block images by default, which increases the importance of the top row.
According to the survey, some of the common top lines are “View email with image” and “If you’re having trouble viewing this email, click here.” At first glance, there is nothing wrong with the message. But according to other statistics, the required number of people do not follow the link to go to the web version of the email. And none of the above sentences convey the offer or purpose of the email, leaving the reader to rely solely on the subject line as a clue. Another common drawback is that it doesn’t even include the company name or brand. Here’s another great opportunity to stand out is lost here.
The key to maintaining interest in a snippet is to create a new one every time, even if it takes a few extra minutes to complete, but its value can be seen in a better open rate. So the magic word here is to rejuvenate the top line, even if the same sentence is repeated. Your email to the seller should have an offer on the top line, such as free shipping, a holiday discount, or an offer to try our new product. News posts should have a snippet title, such as a fancy tidbit, top story, or company announcement, followed by a link to the web version. If the email is a confirmation of a transaction, you must indicate the action and, if necessary, thank you. If an order confirmation or thank you page is to be included in the transaction confirmation email, a link to that page must be included, but otherwise the links may be omitted and templates may be used instead of you.
It’s important to review the snippet before sending an email with the updated top row. It may appear differently in different desktop and web email clients such as Yahoo, Gmail, etc. and across platforms such as PC, mobile devices, Macintosh, etc. Tests should always be done. Divide the reviewer group, which may include trusted collaborators and longtime readers, into two groups. Send the first group their standard email and the other group their corrected email. Look at the opinions of both and choose the one with the best comments. Always check the click-through rate of a snippet to see how much attention it is getting.
The bottom line is that not a single line of an email should be wasted. The goal should be the whole thing and no meaningless text.
