Email Deliverability: A Must-Read Guide for E-commerce Businesses
According to a thought-provoking article on Shopify’s blog, email marketing campaigns can significantly impact customer reach provided your emails end up in the intended inboxes. Simply sending your emails doesn’t ensure email visibility, marked avoidance of the “Spam” folder, or a successful delivery. To keep engaged with your audience, you need to enhance and monitor email deliverability.
Bottom Line: Owning an e-commerce business entails shouldering many responsibilities. Reading this revised guide on email deliverability will provide you with invaluable insights, helping you devise an efficient email marketing strategy that ensures your emails reach the inbox rather than the spam folder.
Predicting the future is a tricky business, but its potential applications and advancements in the field of email deliverability seem promising. With the continual refinement of spam filters and advancements in AI, marketers may soon have more granular control over email delivery. Reductions in phishing spam, innovative techniques for list cleaning, and more personalized email-guidance could be just a few years down the line.
Understanding Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is a metric that gauges the arrival of marketing emails in subscriber inboxes successfully. While the term “email delivery” revolves around successfully delivered emails – the ones that didn’t bounce or reach spam – “email deliverability” determines if the email made it to the recipient’s inbox. Increasing your email deliverability minimizes the likelihood of your emails being dispatched to spam folders by email service providers, subsequently bolstering your marketing campaigns.
Factors Influencing Email Deliverability
Multiple factors can mediate your email deliverability. When strategizing your email marketing campaign, consider the following:
- Email sender reputation: Determined by elements like spam complaints and low open rates, your email sender reputation influences whether your emails end up in the spam folder.
- IP reputation: Relates to the server’s quality used for sending emails. An IP address associated with a high spam message volume will have a low IP reputation.
- Spam traps: Fake email addresses designed to identify scammers, often found in online email lists for renting or purchasing. Accidentally sending your emails to a spam trap can negatively impact your deliverability.
- Email list quality: A list populated with invalid email addresses can impact your sender reputation negatively.
- Email volume: A sudden spike in your email marketing campaigns can negatively impact your email deliverability.
- Open rate: The more often your emails are opened, the better your email deliverability. Conversely, a falling open rate can hamper your email deliverability.
- Bounce rate: This measures the frequency of unsuccessful email deliveries to recipients. Bounce rates can be soft – temporary issues, or hard – permanent troubles, like sending emails to invalid addresses.
- ISP Infrastructure: The quality of your internet service provider influences your email deliverability. Use a reliable ISP to send your marketing emails to avoid any technical issues.
Strategies for Boosting Email Deliverability
Authenticating your emails, maintaining high content quality, good email list hygiene, consistent email schedule, double opt-in process implementation, compelling subject lines, ensuring easy unsubscription, having a plain text version of your emails, and leveraging effective email tools are all valuable strategies for enhancing email deliverability.
Remember to regularly monitor your bounce rate, open rate, and spam complaint rate using software tools like Klaviyo for insights into your email performance. The ultimate goal should be achieving a good email deliverability rate (typically greater than 95%), ensuring that your beautifully crafted email campaign reaches the intended audience, escaping spam filters on the way.
If you have issues with these areas you can work on improving them yourself or hire a freelancer or agency to help you turn them around and improve results from your email marketing.
