With all that hype about email marketing and its benefits towards your marketing campaigns, you might have mastered the art of creating the best email messages. Maybe you are also investing a good amount of money to make the most of your email communications. But are your emails getting placement at the preferable location of your receiver’s email address?
After being accepted by the recipient’s ISP, your email messages should reach their inbox to get the real benefit of your email marketing campaign. Email deliverability helps you identify whether the email has reached the inbox, spam folder or any other folder. To make your emails reach the inbox of your consumers, you need to make sure that the email identification, reputation, and content are on point.
When you send an email, you need to maintain a certain set of protocols to establish your identity, such as Domain-Based Message Authentication, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Conformance (DMARC), and Reporting. By following these protocols, you can maintain the right identity needed for the best deliverability.
After that, you need to increase your reputation score, to maintain trustworthiness. The ISP assigns the email sender reputation scores based on positive subscriber behavior, how engaging their emails are, and if they are being marked as trustworthy senders. Before sending an email, you need to make sure that your reputation is high and reliable by sending only personalized, useful and relevant emails to targeted audiences in order to ensure the deliverability of your emails. You need to make sure that you do not use email spam trigger words such as, “100% free” or “100% satisfied,” “Best Price,” “Free consultation,” “Lowest price,” phrases and words similar to these.
Apart from these, marketers should also check on using too many exclamation marks, shortened URLs, and odd email formatting which will raise suspicion and impede email deliverability.
But how will you create a relevant email for the right deliverability? You need to think from the subscribers’ perspective and optimize email messages based on what they mostly care about and need from your email messages. Well, you should create very personalized email content, that addresses the needs and problems of every customer. Also, don’t forget to add the subscribers’ first names in the email along with elements, information, offers, and links.
Once you understand how to improve your email deliverability, you need to realize the email deliverability mistakes that you need to avoid during the holiday season. The three most common email deliverability mistakes that marketers need to avoid at any cost during the holiday season are:
Escalating overnight email sent volume
If you had been sending emails niche, small and targeted list of active subscribers, and suddenly decided to send emails to every contact in your email list, the ISPs of recipients will assume this rampant increase in email volume to be a suspicious activity and start marking emails as spam. Targeting a large volume of contacts overnight, without following any planned and gradual targeting strategies negatively impact the email sender’s reputation.
Targeting inactive subscribers
Targeting inactive subscribers who did not engage with your email messages for the last six months or from last holiday season, can cause high bounce rates and create email spam traps. As the receivers do not open your emails for a long time, it lowers your email open and clicks rates, while increasing unsubscribe rate. Thus your emails get marked as spam automatically, leading to email deliverability issues and damage the sender’s reputation score.
Rapid increase of email frequency
Many organizations target customers and prospects with weekly sales newsletters, that they often increase up to 3 newsletters per week or even worse, daily to achieve their holiday sales target. This makes the subscribers face “inbox noise,” leading them to unsubscribe from your email list or marking emails as spam which prevents your future emails from reaching their inboxes.
To avoid making email marketing mistakes during the holiday season, marketers need to focus on the quality of their emails, rather than the quantity. Remember that you need to create relevant, attention-grabbing, and valuable content to attract and engage your customers during this time to increase your email deliverability rate.
