Email Deliverability Predictions

Digitization and advancements in communication technology have led to modern marketing techniques. Irrespective of the numerous internet marketing channels today, email marketing maintains its reputation as one of the best ways to reach clients and prospects. 

Learning how to maximize email deliverability is a game-changer that can boost conversions for your business. In this piece, you will see an industry expert’s insight on the most efficient strategies for improving email deliverability. You will also learn how to predict email deliverability. First, you need to understand what it means and why it matters.

What is Email Deliverability?

In the email industry, deliverability is the ability of your email to reach your intended target audience. It refers to how efficiently your email scales through spam folders and filters for accurate delivery. You cannot say that your marketing strategy is successful if only a small percentage of messages reach the inbox. However, you can implement proven techniques to boost email deliverability for a successful campaign.

Difference Between Email Delivery and Deliverability 

An average person may think email delivery and deliverability mean the same thing. However, this is not the case. Delivery is a general term to describe an email reaching destination mail servers. It doesn’t matter if it entered the recipient’s inbox, spam folder, or blocked list, as long as it reaches the receiver’s email service provider.

On the other hand, email deliverability is a more specific term that refers to inbox delivery that is visible and accessible to the recipient. You cannot say your attempt was successful if you only got emails into the mail server but not the inbox. Some professional marketing tools can help you determine your email deliverability so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Factors Contributing to Large Email Sizes

The first of these factors, and probably the most natural one, is large images. High-resolution images and graphics can significantly increase the size of your emails. While visuals are essential for engaging content, it’s crucial to find a balance between aesthetics and email size.

Sending attachments in emails is common, but certain file formats, like PDFs or large spreadsheets, can bloat the email size. Failing to optimize attachments can lead to unnecessarily large emails.

Complex HTML and CSS coding can add extra weight to your emails, slowing down their rendering and potentially leading to compatibility issues across various email clients and devices. It’s essential to keep your coding clean and concise to avoid unnecessary bulk, ensuring that your emails load quickly and display consistently, regardless of the recipient’s chosen platform.

Long content can also result in larger emails. Readers often prefer concise and to-the-point messages, so it’s essential to trim the content and follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. This ensures your email body is readable and easy to remember.

Tips for Optimizing Email Sending

Now that we’ve identified the most common reasons for oversized emails, let’s move on to tips for optimizing your email sending:

Reducing the email size:

• Image optimization: compress images and use image formats that are web-friendly. Tools like Canva and online image compressors can help you reduce image size without compromising quality.
• Properly formatting attachments: if you need to send attachments, make sure they are appropriately formatted and optimized. Consider hosting large files externally and providing download links instead.
• Minimizing HTML/CSS: simplify your email’s HTML and CSS coding. Remove unnecessary elements and inline styles wherever possible.

Best practices for content:

• Concise and relevant content: keep your content short and to the point. Remove any redundant or verbose language that adds unnecessary length to your emails.
• Using hyperlinks: instead of embedding long URLs, use descriptive anchor text for hyperlinks. This not only saves space but also improves the overall user experience making the email appear cleaner.
• Avoiding duplicate content: repeating the same content in multiple sections of your email can increase its size. Make sure your emails are streamlined and don’t contain unnecessary redundancies.

Optimizing for mobile devices:

• Responsive Design: create emails with responsive designs that adapt to various screen sizes. This ensures a seamless experience for mobile users.
• Mobile-friendly images and buttons: optimize images and buttons for touchscreens, making it easy for mobile users to interact with your emails.

Why is Email Deliverability Important?

The importance of email deliverability cannot be overstated. Businesses host these marketing campaigns to generate leads and engage their existing clients. When your emails have low deliverability, your target audience will not see your email message. Subsequently, your lead generation and conversion rates will be low.

Other metrics for measuring marketing campaigns, like click-through rate and sales, will be low if the mail open rate is low. Beyond that, your brand reputation may be affected, and you will be giving competitors a chance to keep your target market engaged. 

The first step to maximizing your marketing campaign is promoting brand visibility. When more people see your emails, it will be easier to establish a relationship with your subscribers and keep them loyal to your brand. The first step is knowing how to calculate your deliverability.

How to Test Email Deliverability

You can use analytics tools to calculate performance and deliverability during email marketing campaigns. These specialized tools will help you quantify your email deliverability rate. It shows you the total number of emails that successfully cross spam filters and land in subscribers inboxes out of all the emails you sent. The percentage is a division of both figures. Failed deliveries, bounced emails, and emails to blocked receiving servers are subtracted from successfully sent emails.

During email deliverability testing, you can use the data to simulate scenarios and predict how recipients interact with your emails. It also gives you a clear picture of your email bounce rate and other factors that reflect performance from active subscribers.

Email Bounce Rate Explained 

A high bounce rate is one of the foremost things email senders want to minimize during email campaigns. Bounce rate refers to when a sent email fails to reach the recipient and is sent back to you. It is usually followed by an error message explaining why the email was returned. The two types of bounce that affect deliverability are:

• Hard Bounce 
• Soft Bounce 

Hard bounce describes when the email returns because the email address no longer exists or your email has been blocked from that server. The reasons are usually permanent or impossible to rectify from your end. On the other hand, a soft bounce is when the email returns because the receiver’s mailbox is full or their server is offline. Irrespective of the cause of the bounce, there will be negative repercussions for your campaign. 

The best way to reduce the bounce rate is to ensure your email subscription list is relevant and current. Before hosting any campaign at regular intervals, go through your email subscription list and eliminate inactive emails. You can use the insight from your analytics tool to determine which email addresses have the highest open rate and deliverability. Also, avoid forceful subscriptions and allow readers to unsubscribe from your email campaigns at any time.

What Factors Affect Email Deliverability?

Multiple factors can influence inbox deliverability, and inexperienced marketers often need to pay more attention to these variables. However, the sender’s reputation is the primary element determining whether an email is spam or inbox quality.

Companies are encouraged to use high-quality tools to maintain a spotless email sender reputation. Internet service providers (ISPs) examine your domain name, IP reputation, domain authority, email authentication, and email frequency when determining whether or not to forward your message to the inbox.

A company that sends too many emails daily from one IP address and gets frequent spam complaints is more likely to be marked as spam. This is why you should use a reliable sender policy framework. However, subscribers who engage with your email are more likely to receive it as a primary email in their inbox than those who do not.

You must also send all brand-related emails from one reliable email domain and IP address. Recipients get notified by spam filters when the email they receive originates from outside your organization’s email provider. They may trash it even if it ends up on the receiving server. 

How you craft your email matters when it comes to deliverability; you must maintain a consistent and professional voice in every email if you want to avoid spam traps. Your subject line should be precise and accurate. Avoid spam trigger words like cash, cash bonus, credit, and similar when writing your subject line. Spam traps use different algorithms to identify legitimate emails and protect clients from unwanted messages and possible data breaches.

Best Strategies to Improve Email Deliverability

Your organization must develop and revise its email marketing strategies to maintain a high deliverability rate. While the method may vary across organizations, below are some age-long systems you should try:

Authenticate Your Messages 

You can boost email credibility with email authentication protocols like BIMI, DMARC, SPF, and DKIM. These protocols are beneficial to both the sender and the email recipient. It ensures that only legitimate emails get to the receiver’s mailbox. Bad actors will be unable to manipulate the email in transit. Your clients will always get domainkeys identified mail if you use domain based message authentication. 

Collect Quality Email Addresses

Quality is more important than quantity when building an email list. Your emails are less likely to end up in the spam folder when sent to clients and prospective clients’ relevant addresses. Don’t buy rental emails to boost your subscription list.

These rental email lists usually have a lot of outdated addresses. Using them will only increase your bounce rate. It also helps to implement double-opt in protocols to prevent spam subscriptions. Double opt in is when a subscriber receives a second link to confirm email subscription after they make the initial request.

Review Your List

Even if your mailing list is made up of people who deliberately subscribed, you still need to review it at intervals. Email Industries experts recommend checking subscription lists at least once a month. Remove all inactive subscribers and email addresses that bounce. Also, remove subscribers who make spam complaints and send your messages to the spam filter from your list.

Maintain Professional Sender Reputation

As stated above, your sender reputation is one of the most important factors that influence mail deliverability. Apart from having a good domain reputation, there are other steps you can take to maintain a spotless reputation. Use high-quality email management software. The right email management tools allow you to stay ahead by automatically attending to requests from your unsubscribe link. 

Send Professional And Relevant Content 

Write brand marketing emails with the utmost care. Start the email content by saluting the recipients with their names. Using first names is one of the best ways to engage email recipients. Personalize the email body to meet the needs of the reader. You can find out your prospects’ interests by analyzing customer behavior with your analytics tool. Even when writing a sales pitch, don’t make it look like a direct sales pitch. Also, test and optimize your emails for all devices. 

Invest in Email Deliverability Tools

Many software tools can help you monitor, analyze, and enhance your mail deliverability. You can use these tools to write, send, and manage your list. They provide real-time insights on sender score, open rate, and bounce rate. You will also need spam folder filters for email optimization. 

Alternatively, you can outsource the entire marketing campaign to experienced professionals like Email Industries. Our email marketers can immediately identify deliverability issues and solve them. Allow us to fix your reputation and manage your email subscription list effectively.

Ensuring Email Deliverability

The cost of running an ongoing email campaign is significant. You must do everything possible to ensure your emails reach the correct sender address at the right time. By outsourcing your email campaign to a reliable email marketing company like Email Industries, you can rest assured that you will get the most value.

Book a discovery call with us now to learn how we can help you with your email deliverability and elevate your presence.