A few weeks back we briefly touched on deliverability in the course of our EDM jargon article. Lucky for those interested in email marketing, we decided this topic was worthy of an article in and of itself. After all, what use is your carefully planned campaign if the emails never reach your audience?

As we mentioned in the previous article, nowadays we’re blessed with ESPs (Email Service Platforms) that take care of deliverability’s hardware aspects, we just need to focus on technique and strategy. So, come with us on another journey through the land of email marketing to learn the ancient art of avoiding the spam filter.

Originally email services used to filter spam based on specific words and phrases but nowadays there’s some significantly more complex monitoring involved in deiliverability. As a basic rule of thumb though: recipients opening or replying to your email frequently is a good sign. Conversely, if they delete your mail without opening it or, god forbid, mark it as spam the algorithm will take that as a negative. Unsubscribes and spam complaints can rapidly tank your reputation with email providers and see your mail relegated to the spam folder. So, what is best practice for ensuring deliverability?

Please don’t buy email lists

We’re all sick of advertising emails for products we have no interest in. It may seem like the fast track to a wide audience but its highly inefficient and ESPs will not stand by and see their reputation destroyed along with yours, they have far more money in this game. Suspicion that you’ve been up to no good could easily see your account suspended. Instead, build a list of contacts who are genuinely interested in what you provide by advertising your own opt-in mailing list with exclusive offers as incentives. Its slower, yes, but it results in an open rate around five times higher with far less chance of getting blacklisted.

Personalise your domain name

Most services will start you off on a generic, cookiecutter name “@example.com”. Taking the time to change this to something suiting your business aids deliverability as it suggests you aren’t a spam bot. Very few spam operations ever take the time to fiddle with such details.

Keep “From:” field recognisable and consistent

We’ve become a suspicious bunch thanks to decades of internet scammers. Turns out around two thirds of people base their decision to open an email on the “From:” field alone. Otherwise useful emails become far more suspect if the sender’s name isn’t recognised – would you know who “Neil Lindsay” was and why he was offering you “Fantastic Discounts!”?. Stick to using your company name as the sender and cut down on emails deleted unopened.

Warm up

As your sports coach always told you – make sure to warm up first. You can build trust in your campaign amongst email providers – and so boost deliverability – by beginning with a relatively low number of recipients and ramp it up if you get good results.

If you’ve started building your own list at the same time as the campaign the two will conveniently coincide. Make sure to keep this factor in mind for your next campaign though.

Engagement: get the right content to the right subscriber

Look into segmentation to ensure each of your emails is hitting up only that section of your client base that is likely to be interested in it.
To take eCommerce as an example, divvying up your subscribers via gender is usually a good shout – we don’t know that many women who would be interested in beard grooming products.

One great way of ensuring you have something to send out each week is hooking your autoresponder up to your RSS feed, that way it can send out your articles and keep interest in your business bubbling away.