Making Sure Your Emails Get Delivered Is a Constant Battle
There’s no debate — staying in touch with clients via email is a critical part of your business. Whether it’s sending out your newsletter, digital products or even simple notifications, email holds the relationship between you and your customer together. But actually getting those emails delivered to your clients can be an uphill battle.
It’s disheartening to spend hours crafting the perfect email only for it to land in your clients’ spam folders instead of their inboxes. With email abuse on the rise, providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail had to take measures to avoid cluttering their customers’ mailboxes with unwanted, irrelevant emails, so they became stricter on spam-like behavior. While we’re grateful that they’re cracking down on the true spammers, in some cases, legitimate businesses can get caught in the crossfire between spammers and spam filters.
You might even be struggling to clean up your business’s reputation if you’ve already run into some challenges with delivery. Having your IP address blacklisted by email service providers is a frustrating problem. If you’re not fluent in email delivery terminology and tactics, it can feel impossible to reverse. How are you supposed to send your list the emails they opted in for if you’re being flagged as a spammer? Why did you get marked with this poor reputation?
Everyone’s Fighting to Get Into the Inbox.
All entrepreneurs go through this at one point or another in the lifecycle of their business. ReturnPath reported that even if you follow proper protocol, you may only see an average of 88% delivery rate to the recipient’s email address. This doesn’t even include whether or not it reaches the inbox — just whether it is delivered successfully.
Why are email delivery problems so common? It’s because the email delivery world is constantly changing. Since the first spam email was sent in 1978, individuals and email companies alike have had to adjust their tactics to combat ever-increasing amounts of spam. What was acceptable one year may not be acceptable the next. This leads to lots of outdated information floating around the web about getting your email safely in the inbox of your contacts. Keeping up with all the updates, such as blacklists, reputation management, spam-trigger words, sender authentication and what works best any given year can be tedious for those who want to send email the right way. How are you supposed to know which laws apply in other countries, like CASL in Canada, or how to check your IP reputation? It can feel overwhelming to keep track of so many things.
Using a sample size of over 357 million emails, ReturnPath says it best: “Spam tactics continue to evolve, and mailbox providers are forced to constantly refine their filtering technology to keep unwanted mail out of the inbox. In this ever-changing landscape, even the best senders struggle … with one out of every five emails failing to land in the inbox, brands are missing out on a full 20% of their opportunities.” This is, of course, if you do nothing or don’t know about the best practices involved to begin with.
How Do I Know If I’m Following All the Right Delivery Rules?
You can’t possibly know what you don’t know, so that’s where we step in. We’ve done the research for you, so you can stop wasting time tediously searching the web. There’s an overwhelming amount of information online — some of which may be severely outdated — and it can take hours to sort through everything.
By focusing on building trust with your list and establishing a solid sender reputation for your IP, you can get your email delivery rates as high as 98%. You can begin to actively work on building the trust and reputation you need to deliver your emails — even if you already have a bad sending reputation.
Start Seeing a Boost in Email Open Rates
Getting more people to trust you based on your reputation will increase not only your open rate, but also your click rate. You’ll no longer need to feel like your efforts spent crafting those perfect marking emails are worthless. When you start using a checklist of all the right delivery rules, you’ll:
- Eliminate the guesswork behind what triggers a spam filter and how to prevent it
- Have fewer missed opportunities thanks to successfully delivered emails
- Get the confidence that you’re sending out emails that will actually land in the inbox
- Have more time and freedom to focus on expanding your business, rather than exhausting yourself researching for the latest information on email deliverability guidelines
- Rest easier, reassured that your messages are properly formatted, making it easier for the ISPs to realize they’re not spam
- Form stronger relationships with your prospects and clients whom you’re able to stay in close contact with
If you’re looking to optimize your email delivery performance and want to find out what you can do, check out the Email Delivery Checklist to start improving your inbox placement.
