Getting your message into someone’s inbox today may be more challenging than ever. The primary inbox, a secondary folder (like Google’s Social or Promotions tabs), the Spam folder, or no delivery at all are all options that can be quickly and accurately determined by email platforms and inbox providers for incoming messages. Obviously, you want your message to end up in the recipient’s primary inbox, or at the very least, their Promotions tab. If your campaign’s emails are ending up in too many recipients’ Spam folders, you might as well forget about getting any real traction out of it.

• It’s important to maintain a clean email list
• Make It Simple to Opt Out or Unsubscribe
• Supply content that are relevant

It’s important to maintain a clean email list

The deliverability of your campaign can be boosted with minimal effort by simply adhering to best practises in email hygiene. Email validation and verification are two of the most important concepts here. Sometimes, they are used synonymously. However, these terms usually refer to two slightly different methods of determining which email addresses on your mailing list should be deleted.

First, check that each address on your list conforms to the standard format for email addresses. Addresses with typos or formatting errors that prevent them from being delivered will be caught by this method. Once you’ve identified any such invalid email addresses, you should remove them immediately.

Second, an email address must be checked to make sure it is a working one. This process can help you identify and remove any fake, inactive, or obsolete email addresses from your list. A good illustration of this would be a former employee’s work email address one year after they have left that company.

Simply because these messages will never be delivered, eliminating them from your list will increase your deliverability rate. A sender’s reputation can be damaged, as explained by SparkPost, if they repeatedly send to a list containing many invalid or undeliverable email addresses, increasing the likelihood that future emails sent by that sender will be routed somewhere other than the inbox.

Those who have not responded in a significant amount of time should be removed or at the very least placed on a separate list for reengagement campaigns.

Make It Simple to Opt Out or Unsubscribe

A request to be removed from mailing lists is seen as the worst possible response by many email marketers. That isn’t necessarily the case, though. If your email recipients have opted out, they are much less likely to read or respond to anything you send them. The person may even report the message as spam.

Your sender reputation or sender score with inbox providers may take a hit if you regularly engage in any of the aforementioned negative behaviours, such as deleting emails without opening them, failing to respond to messages, or flagging them as spam. In order to quantify how they feel about mailers, email platforms use a metric called the sender score. These are the kinds of actions that email platforms keep tabs on and may factor into their algorithms when determining how to handle incoming email campaigns.

To avoid annoying your recipients, it’s best to provide a clear way for them to decline any further correspondence. In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act stipulates that you have no more than 10 business days from the time you receive an unsubscribe request to comply with it. You should probably just stop sending them out in the mail right away. What are the possibilities of getting them to respond to a final email campaign after they have unsubscribed? You could be sending a bad signal to email service providers if you send even a moderately sized message. This will keep you in good standing with the law and give your unsubscribers the best possible experience.

Supply content that are relevant

While technical processes like list cleansing and ensuring an effective opt-out process are important, they are not enough to guarantee long-term deliverability success. Consistent positive signals from your recipients’ actions (such as opening, clicking, etc.) with your email messages will benefit you both now (via a better response or sales from the current email campaign) and in the future when it comes to deliverability.

While email marketing software may punish senders whose messages are ignored or marked as spam, it may also reward those whose campaigns routinely receive high levels of user engagement. The more people who “like” your emails, the more likely they are to be delivered to the inbox. On a personal level, this is quite possible, as emails from senders with whom the recipient regularly communicates are more likely to be directed to the primary inbox. However, an inbox provider’s algorithms may extrapolate these signals across recipients, increasing the likelihood that your campaigns will be delivered to the inboxes of other recipients who have not yet shown that level of engagement.