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Better email ROI starts with optimized email deliverability. Discover Bird’s tips for better deliverability and find out how Inbox Tracker can help.
Businesses have been emailing their customers since before Google was born. Times change, marketing evolves, but the influence and value of email endures.
Whether you’re a B2C or B2B company, you’re committing marketing malpractice by not investing in a strong email program. But sending email is only part of the recipe for strong customer engagement. Businesses also need to make sure those emails are optimized for deliverability.
Too often, email deliverability issues get overlooked — and businesses end up paying a heavy price. According to Tony Patti, Deliverability Services Director at Bird, poor deliverability can easily cost businesses between 20% and 30% of their email-generated revenue.
“Whatever the average revenue per email may be, you can multiply it by the number of undelivered emails to estimate your losses,” Tony says. “If people don’t see your email, they don’t click through, and they don’t buy.”
With the right tools, tips, and support, your business can optimize deliverability rates to realize the full revenue potential of your email marketing strategy.
Consider this guide your crash course in modern email deliverability. With an assist from Tony Patti’s expert insights!
What is email deliverability?
Bird’s two golden rules for building a deliverability strategy
Optimized email deliverability requires a detail-oriented approach to tracking and managing moving parts and variables.
We’ve got plenty of granular tactics and best practices to help you refine your email deliverability. Before we dive into those recommendations, though, you need to make sure the cornerstones of high deliverability are in place.
Here are two rules every email program must follow:
1. Collect confirmed opt-ins (and make it easy to unsubscribe)
A strong email list consists of recipients who want to receive your company’s emails. Efforts to trick consumers into joining your email list can backfire in disastrous ways:
At best, your email read rates will plummet. At worst, your messages will generate high spam complaint rates that could land your business on a dreaded spam blocklist.
The best approach is to be straightforward when collecting email opt-ins. The gold standard is the confirmed opt-in, which requires the customer to confirm their opt-in twice: first when submitting their email to your business and again when clicking an email hyperlink to confirm their subscription.
Prospects and customers who subscribe via confirmed opt-in are less likely to mark your emails as spam and more likely to convert.
Along with the confirmed opt-in collection, you also need to feature one-click unsubscribe links on all of your outgoing emails. If ISPs detect a missing opt-out link or button in your message, it could reduce email deliverability and cause lasting damage to your email reputation.
2. Only send emails your customers want to receive
Email subscribers can’t be taken for granted. Once a customer or prospect has opted in, your business must continue to reinforce the value of its email program by delivering the content your audience wants.
Email marketers have many different options for delivering this value. Here are a few strategies to consider:
Be consistent with your email frequency. If consumers are signing up for a weekly newsletter, don’t use that list to blast them with three emails every day. Be clear about the type of email content and the email frequency they can expect, and stick to these parameters.
Personalize your email content. Even with the impending death of third-party cookies, there are many ways to create personalized experiences through email. Apparel retailer Land’s End is one of many retail brands that use the consumer’s past shopping and browsing history to deliver personalized recommendations.
Use multiple lists to segment your audience and allow for customized experiences. For example, allow customers to choose one (or many) preferences on email sign-up forms, then use that information to create segmented email audiences focused on promotions, product releases, in-person events, and other topics.
5 best practices for optimizing your deliverability infrastructure
Once you’ve developed a basic infrastructure for supporting email deliverability, you can begin taking steps to optimize your emails for consistent inbox placement.
The following five best practices can help you score some quick wins as you optimize your strategy:
1. Eliminate formatting errors from email HTML
Simple HTML formatting errors can wreak havoc on your email experience, messing up your email layout and readability. If the mistakes are severe or pervasive, this could increase the risk of recipients marking the message as spam.
Outside of the user experience, though, ISPs may take action against emails containing HTML formatting errors, including sending them to spam or blocking the emails from delivery. But these errors are easy to fix when you use a tool designed to check for them. Google’s Schema Markup Validator is one option, along with HTML Email Check.
You can prevent HTML errors on future emails by building HTML validation into your email workflows, ensuring that any errors are caught before you hit send.
2. Create an email authentication record to verify your sender ID
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols are used by ISPs to validate sender identities and improve deliverability for trusted emails. These protocols use encryption and certificates to allow quality emails into customer inboxes while filtering out spam, malware, and other unwanted email.
It’s easy to set up an email authentication record, and doing so will benefit all emails sent from your domain. Check out Google’s guide on creating an authentication record for step-by-step instructions.
3. Choose between a shared IP pool or a dedicated IP address
The IP address you use to send emails can have a significant impact on email deliverability — for better and for worse. A bad IP reputation can make it much harder to achieve high deliverability rates, while a good IP reputation can give your email campaigns an inside track to success.
Your business has two options when setting up an IP address: a shared IP pool and a dedicated IP address. Each comes with pros and cons.
A shared IP pool bundles many different low-volume email senders into a single address at a much lower cost than setting up your own private IP address.
Shared pools also come with a built-in reputation, which can be the best feature of this arrangement or its biggest downside:
If the pool’s reputation is strong, you’ll enjoy a low-cost, high-performing foundation for sending email.
If the pool has a bad reputation, though, it could torpedo your email deliverability.
The advantage of a dedicated IP address is that you control your own destiny: if you follow the best practices of sending email, you’ll cultivate a strong reputation. But these dedicated IPs are much more expensive, and they often aren’t a practical option until you’re sending hundreds of thousands of emails every month.
If you opt for a shared IP pool, do your homework and vet the pool’s reputation — and its manager — before signing on.
4. Manage your email sending volumes
Erratic sending volumes are a common characteristic of spam email. Email marketers must be mindful of this when planning out sending cadences from their domain and subdomains.
“Don’t send 50,000 emails on Monday, take two weeks off, and then send five million,” says Tony.
Consistent sending volumes will put ISPs at ease and improve your inboxing rate. This careful approach to sending volumes is even more important when warming up your address to build a stronger reputation for your dedicated IP.
5. Do not use “no-reply@” email addresses
A “no-reply” email is a one-way message that doesn’t open the lines of communication between email senders and their customers. Emails sent from this type of address threaten deliverability because spam filters are more likely to frown upon this type of message and it creates a terrible user experience.
“The mail is basically useless,” Tony says. “It will either result in being deleted or in someone getting frustrated and marking it as spam.”
Years ago, Tony says, the National Geographic Society got rid of the no-reply email. Instead, when you click reply on one of their emails, your message goes straight into the company’s customer service queue.
“That small change improves the user experience, which in turn improves deliverability,” Tony says.
Supercharge your email deliverability strategy with Bird’s Inbox Tracker
Set a new standard for email performance
Even as SMS, social media, and other messaging channels have risen to prominence, the value of email messaging has endured — and there’s no sign of that changing in the future.
“The truth is, email messaging is not going to go away,” Tony says. “It’s cost-effective, and the ROI is fantastic. There’s not very much we can’t do with email — and we’re still inventing new ways to use it.”
What will change in the next few years is the role of deliverability in determining email ROI. As ISPs continue to develop their deliverability requirements, email marketers will have to decide whether they’re going to prioritize their deliverability or risk punishment from ISPs.
“It’s going to become a question of, ‘Do you want to get your mail delivered or not?’” Tony says.
Protect your email ROI by prioritizing deliverability. Better yet, let Bird’s Inbox Tracker do the heavy lifting for you — and reap the benefits of maximizing your email revenue generation.
Ready to get started? Request a demo from Bird today.
