7 Factors To Focus On To Improve Email Deliverability

Have you ever sent an email only to find out later that your recipient never saw it? It happens to the best of us - but it really doesn’t happen to the very best of email marketers. That’s because they know how to maneuver around this and increase their chances of landing in the recipient’s Priority Inbox.

GoCustomer can definitely help you improve email deliverability, but before that, here is how you can help yourself - by paying attention to these 7 email marketing email deliverability factors. 

Also Read: How and Why to Protect your Email Sender Reputation

Improve email deliverability by focusing on these factors

1. The number of emails you send 

Mail providers do keep a check on the number of emails that a particular email domain sends and the open rate. If you are sending emails too frequently or to too many people, you are more likely to experience email deliverability difficulties and harm your email reputation. 

Your sending patterns should be predictable to improve email deliverability. If you send too many emails all of a sudden, you are likely to be considered spam and increase your spam score.

However, email cadence varies from business to business. 

Seventh Sense quotes an example where an insurance company was able to increase its revenue by 45% with a higher email frequency while an e-commerce store dropped 30% with a weekly newsletter. It makes sense to send emails according to your customer lifecycle - sending less to disengaged customers. 

2. The quality of your URLs

You need to be cautious about what you include in your emails to improve email deliverability.  Although the exact words are maybe not scanned by email providers, the code is. 

Additionally, the URLs are also scanned and if you are linking to poor-quality websites, your email is likely to have issues making it to the Priority Inbox. 

It is also advisable not to use URL shortens in emails but simply hyperlink text where needed with the full URL. Shortening URLs in emails is a technique that spammers use in order to mask their activities. Therefore, it isn’t a very safe practice if you want to ensure your email sender reputation is safe and you are not regarded as spam. 

3. The email bounce rate 

We have previously spoken about why it is a bad idea to purchase email lists and another reason for this is that they may have many email addresses that are not in use, causing emails to bounce back. 

You may think that an email bouncing back is just annoying - and there is nothing more to it. That is not the case. Rockcontent mentions that your email sender reputation and deliverability can be compromised if your bounce rate is over 2%. 

How do you calculate bounce rate? 

Number of bounced emails/ Number of emails sent ✕ 100 

Therefore, you need to weed out email addresses not in use and ensure you properly type in email addresses when creating your email list. The more emails that are properly delivered, the better your bounce rate - and more you improve email deliverability.

4. Being marked as SPAM

If you are marked as SPAM by over 0.1% of your audience, your email deliverability takes a hit. It’s as simple as that. If the people you are sending an email to don’t want to receive it, there is something you are doing wrong. 

This can be a number of things including sending people who haven’t expressed any interest in your business or opted-in in any way emails. You may also be sending emails too frequently or not including an unsubscribe button to give people a choice about whether they want to receive your emails or not.

Ensure your content is interesting, to the point, and relevant so that your recipients do not mark your emails as SPAM. 

5. Sending from different sender names

Your email deliverability also depends on how often your emails are opened and how recipients respond to your messages. However, Zapier mentions that if you keep using different sender names, your recipients won’t really recognize your emails in their inbox or be able to anticipate the next one. 

They advise sticking to one sender name: your brand name, or the name of one focal person. Do not keep switching the sender name as that leads to confusion. 

6. An old unrevised email list

Your email list is not a one-time creation that you just keep sending to. You need to clean it up from time to time to improve email deliverability. Remove email addresses of subscribers that are not engaging with your emails at all and never open them as they are bringing down your deliverability score. 

Also, check to make sure all of your email addresses are in use as people change email domains, company names, and jobs frequently which leads to an email address becoming inactive. Sending emails to such email addresses increases your bounce rate and then affects deliverability. 

7. A weak sender reputation

You may have a cold email domain or may not have established your email sender reputation yet, which is why your email deliverability score is low. You can use customer acquisition platform such as GoCustomer to warm-up your domain and improve your sender reputation before you send emails. This will help to improve email deliverability. 

If your sender reputation has taken a hit because you were not careful about any of the above factors or others, you can still improve it with the help of GoCustomer to increase your chances of landing in your recipient’s inbox. 

All of these factors can affect your email deliverability score and you want to have a high score because you want your recipients to see your message (and engage with it!). Be careful about these factors and you will be able to be where your audience is - in their inbox!