Poor Email Deliverability Costing You More

Than You Realize Most businesses keep an eye on open rates, click-through rates and conversions but often neglect one essential metric – email deliverability.

Poor deliverability leads to numerous consequences: it compromises their success in reaching recipients; causes lost business relationships and has serious ramifications for business reputation and relationships;

Reduced revenue due to undeliverable promotional emails; reduced customer engagement; diminished brand trust; higher marketing expenses with decreased return;

What can be done about rising spam complaints and domain blacklisting? Our conversation with 10 email marketing experts revealed specific, tailored approaches they use to optimize inbox placement for businesses.

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1. Reputation Management Is Essential To High Deliverability

“Your sender reputation is everything; by disregarding it, potential revenue could be wasted. — Chris Lang of Email Smart Lab

Chris notes that most businesses focus on optimizing content while neglecting sender reputation, suggesting the following solutions for such businesses.

Utilizing Google Postmaster Tools to monitor domain health; keeping spam complaints under 0.1% in order to prevent red flags; gradually increasing volume for new domains without raising suspicion; are just three basic practices you need in place in order to start each campaign off on an equal playing field. By disregarding them, every campaign starts off at an unfair disadvantage.

2. Rectify Blocklist Issues before They Undermine Your Campaigns

“You may already be on an advertising blacklist without realizing it” — Heather Morgan of SalesFolk.

Heather advises businesses that blacklists could potentially compromise deliveryability to:

“Marketers tend to look into blacklists only after encountering issues,” Heather notes, so by that point it may already be too late.

3. Leveraging Segmentation to Decrease Spam Complaints

“Don’t send the same email out to everyone – this will kill deliverability!”– Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.

Dela suggests advanced segmentation techniques:

Engagement-Based Sending – Prioritize sending frequent emails to active users while decreasing frequency for inactive ones, but reduce frequency for those that have stopped engaging for 182 days (sunsetting policies). Utilise Engagement-Based Sending as well as Behavior Segmentation when users download whitepapers: target educational follow up emails instead of promotions

Reduce spam complaints – which is one of the primary reasons emails land in junk folders – with this approach.

Social Media Scheduling Tools provide marketers with another effective method for increasing outreach and improving engagement rates by helping align email with social campaigns. Businesses can integrate posts and promotions across platforms into an omnichannel experience to keep subscribers engaged before, during, and after email campaigns; thus helping reduce email fatigue while reinforcing brand messaging for increased deliverability of email communications.

4. AI Can Predict Deliverability Issues

“AI-driven email monitoring can save your reputation before problems emerge” Matt West, Deliverability Engineer of Mailgun.

Matt highlights that AI tools like Validity’s Everest and Mailgun’s Deliverability Monitoring help identify inbox placement issues before they arise.

These tools analyze bounce patterns and spam traps; ISP filtering trends; domain reputation shifts; with AI’s predictive capabilities marketers can proactively address deliverability problems instead of waiting until too late to react.

5. Testing Before Sending Campaigns

“Testing before sending is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to prevent costly errors from being made” — Jen Capstraw, President of Women of Email.

Jen cautions marketers not to assume their emails reach inboxes when many may end up as spam or promotions instead.

She suggests using GlockApps or Litmus seed lists to test deliverability before embarking on large campaigns, then adjust subject lines and sender names accordingly according to test results. A single test could prevent an entire campaign from failing.

Scott Allen of Allen Law Firm in Monterey, California notes that poor email deliverability can have legal ramifications that go far beyond simple marketing concerns: it could even have serious repercussions for their legal proceedings.

businesses that fail to properly test their email campaigns risk inadvertently violating consumer protection laws and incurring legal disputes or regulatory fines as well. Ensuring messages reach the appropriate recipients while adhering to privacy legislation is just as vital to increasing conversions.”

6. Why Your Authentication Set-up Is Likely Incorrect

“Without proper authentication, emails sent without this verification become basically junk mail.

— Scott Cohen, Vice President of Deliverability at Braze

Scott frequently witnesses businesses making fatal authentication errors, such as:

He recommends running domain checks with Google Postmaster and MXToolBox in order to detect misconfigurations that make emails look fake, such as having no SPF/DKIM records that render emails appear as counterfeit; incorrect DMARC policies which cause blocked messages; using shared IPs which come with bad reputations and using shared IPs without SPF records/DKIM/DMARC policies that produce blocked messages; as well as shared IPs which have their own bad rep.

Leads Navi is an email targeting solution designed to identify and deepen understanding of website visitors. Businesses using Leads Navi can learn which companies visit their site, access key contact details of visiting companies and receive recommendations of similar prospects who might also visit. Integrating Leads Navi with email outreach strategies ensures their messages reach engaged decision makers rather than cold leads–improving deliverability while increasing ROI.

7. IP Warming for High Volume Senders

“Dumping thousands of emails onto an unprotected IP is the surest way to be blacklisted.” This statement came from Brian Minick, COO at ZeroBounce.

Brian suggests taking these steps if switching ESPs or switching sending domains:

Sending small batches (1,000-5,000 emails/day), initially targeting highly engaged recipients before gradually increasing send volume over weeks rather than days will demonstrate to ISPs that your sender account is legitimatly operating and not acting like spambot. “This shows them you’re legitimate sender rather than spam bot”, as per Dr. Paul Wiser of Newark NJ.

8. Hidden Spam Traps That Ruin Reputations

“Spam traps don’t just impact deliverability – they may blacklist your domain.” Laura Atkins, Co-Founder of Word to the Wise

Spam traps are inactive email accounts used by ISPs to detect spammers. Laura suggests:

9. Removing emails that have no engagement for 12 months

Utilising double opt-in to prevent fake sign-ups Conducting real-time email validation to block low-quality addresses 9 The Perfect Frequency for Maximum Engagement “Having too many emails may actually reduce engagement.

Jeanne Jennings of Email Optimization Shop.

Jeanne discovered that sending daily emails to disengaged users actually decreases their inbox placement.

Instead, she suggests: For high-engagement users: Three emails every week is ideal and two to four per month or an re-engagement campaign would suffice – this way your list stays healthy without overstretched subscribers! This strategy keeps subscribers happy without overwhelming you with email blasts.

10. Prevent “Graymail” and Deliverability Decay

“If people ignore your emails, ISPs may as well.” — Chad S. White of Oracle CX Marketing Research.

Low engagement will affect deliverability; Chad warns about so-called graymail where engagement levels remain below threshold and result in ineffective deliverability.

Emails that land but remain ignored tell ISPs to downgrade future sends, leading over time to lower inbox placement rates and inbox rate decrease. To combat this trend, regularly prune unengaged users from lists while simultaneously optimizing content to attract clicks.

Conclusion: Poor Email Deliverability Is Too High to Ignore

Lackluster email deliverability doesn’t just lead to missed messages–it also results in:

Retargeted users who never saw your initial email, can cost money in terms of lost revenues from promotions that go undelivered and wasted ad spend to reach those users, while lower domain reputation can have devastating results on all future campaigns. With 10 expert-approved strategies that ensure emails reach where they should–your customer inbox instead of spam! – we hope these 10 strategies can ensure emails arrive where they belong: in their inbox instead.

Also Read: Ten Reasons Why Small Businesses Need Social Media Presence