For lead-generation agencies, email remains one of the most efficient and cost-effective tools for supplying their clients with a constant stream of business opportunities. However, even a carefully crafted email is a waste of resources if it doesn’t land in the intended inbox.
So, to say that optimal deliverability is important would be an understatement. If we bear in mind that inboxes are guarded by sophisticated algorithms and strict filters, understanding and adhering to the gold standards of email deliverability can mean a difference between securing a lead and ending up in the spam folder limbo.
In this post, we’ll talk about actionable tips that will increase your odds of getting your emails in front of your audience’s eyes and achieving your lead-generation objectives.
Email Deliverability Metrics
A deep dive into the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts requires a keen understanding of relevant metrics. These numbers don’t merely measure your campaign performance. They also provide insights into your audience’s behavior and show you what works and what doesn’t.
Let’s break down the essential email deliverability metrics and learn how they can help you reach your recipients’ inboxes.
1. Bounce rate
This metric tells you how many of your emails failed to reach the intended recipients and why. A high bounce rate can negatively impact your sender reputation and email deliverability, so you want to keep it as low as possible.
But not all bounces are equal. There are two types — hard and soft, and you should understand the difference between them so that you can diagnose and fix the issues causing your emails to bounce.
- A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email. This usually happens because the recipient’s address is invalid or their email server blocked emails from your domain. For instance, if you send an email to a fake address, a misspelled domain, or an inactive account, you will get a hard bounce. Hard bounces are bad for your sender reputation because they indicate that your data quality is bad or that your emails are perceived as spam.
- A soft bounce refers to a temporary issue with deliverability. In other words, it means that the email address is valid, but some problem prevents your email from being delivered at that moment. For example, if the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down, or the message is too large, you will get a soft bounce. Spam filters might be another reason why you get this error. Soft bounces are not as bad for you as hard ones because they may be sorted out.
The bottom line is that you should monitor your bounce rate regularly and take action to reduce it. A good rule of thumb is to keep your total bounce rate under 2%. You may need to review your email list hygiene, segmentation, and content strategies if it’s higher than that. This is the step you shouldn’t miss if you want to improve email deliverability.
2. Spam complaints
Spam complaints are a warning that your recipients are not happy with your emails and want to stop receiving them.
Every time someone flags your email as spam, it sends a negative signal to their email provider, which, in turn, reports each such incident to your email service provider (ESP). If these complaints start piling up, your sender score and deliverability are at risk, meaning that your future emails will be automatically directed to the spam folder or blacklisted altogether.
Spam complaints are different from unsubscribes, which happen when recipients opt out of your email list by clicking on a link in your email. Unsubscribes are not necessarily bad for your deliverability, as they won’t harm your sender reputation. It’s much better and safer to allow your recipients to unsubscribe than to wait for them to lose their patience and flag you as a spammer.
Therefore, reducing your spam complaint rate and keeping it below 0.1% is crucial, as it’s considered the acceptable industry standard. This means that for every 1,000 emails you send, you should receive no more than one spam complaint.
3. Open rate
An indicator of engagement, the open rate shows the percentage of recipients who opened your email. While it’s not directly a deliverability metric, it has a lot to do with how relevant and appealing your emails are to your audience — a factor determining whether your future campaigns will land in the inbox or spam folder.
Low open rates can signify that your emails are ignored, deleted, or marked as spam. This is a red flag telling you something’s not right with your email marketing.
4. Delivered rate
The delivered rate is a metric that measures the percentage of emails that were actually accepted by the ESP and ISP and delivered to recipients’ inboxes.
A consistently high delivery rate indicates a healthy sender reputation and good list hygiene. On the other hand, a low delivery rate clearly shows that your emails are being rejected or filtered by the recipients’ servers, which can affect your email marketing performance and prevent your messages from reaching their inboxes. Since your sender reputation is at stake, make sure to determine the cause and fix it ASAP.
5. Click-through rate
It’s not enough for your audience to simply open your emails. A successful email campaign is one with a high click-through (and ultimately conversion) rate.
Having a solid percentage of opens means that you’ve got your subject line and preview text right and that you managed to pique the interest of your recipients.
But, unless this interest sustains after they actually read your email, then your open rate is no more than a vanity metric. Plus, if this happens more than once, there’s a risk that your audience will stop opening your messages whatsoever. This will cause a ripple effect and erode your open and delivered rates, as well as your domain and sender reputation.
By closely monitoring and understanding these metrics, you can spot an issue before it snowballs into a major problem and fine-tune your email strategy accordingly. This will ensure that every email sent not only reaches its intended recipient but also resonates with them, leading to higher conversions and building more meaningful relationships.
Best Practices to Improve Email Deliverability
Now that we’ve established why you shouldn’t take email deliverability for granted and what the consequences of overlooking this critical metric are, it’s time to discuss some best practices that will help you avoid the worst-case scenario and make sure your emails reach your target audience.
Scrub your list regularly
List hygiene is an essential aspect responsible for good email deliverability.
The point is to maintain a high-quality email list by keeping it clean and valid. This means that you should only send emails to people who have given you explicit permission to do so and who are interested in your content and engaged.
Regularly removing inactive subscribers or those who have not opened or clicked on your emails over a specific period of time is another way of keeping your list sparkling. Let’s not forget that people change positions, jobs, and email addresses, thus making your list obsolete and rendering your emails undeliverable. Because of this, it’s crucial to perform a list verification process. By checking your contacts and ensuring their email addresses are valid and accurate, you can minimize the risk of hard bounces, spam complaints, and low engagement rates, ultimately boosting your delivery rate.
Authenticate your email
With all the cyber threats, phishing scams, and spam, it’s only logical that ISPs and ESPs are constantly on high alert. To convince them you’re not a cybercriminal or spammer, you should verify your digital identity and legitimacy as a sender. So, authenticating your email isn’t only about ensuring high delivery rates but also establishing trust.
This can be done by using authentication protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).
These protocols help you prove that you are the owner of your domain and that your emails are not spoofed or altered by third parties. They also help you prevent phishing and spoofing attacks, which can harm your reputation and deliverability. Â
If you aren’t tech-savvy and need help understanding and implementing all these protocols, check out our help article, in which you’ll find detailed instructions on how to configure your DNS. However, since Autoklose sends emails using your ESP servers, there’s no need to mention Autoklose in any of those records.
Create relevant, high-quality content
The quality of your email content also plays a vital role in helping you improve email deliverability. You should always send relevant and spam-free content that adds value to your recipients and resonates with them. To achieve this, you first need to get to know your audience, understand their pain points, and offer them helpful solutions.
The next step is segmenting your audience and tailoring content to each individual group based on their needs and preferences.
Although we’re talking about email marketing and outreach, it doesn’t mean your every message should be promotional and push your agenda. Instead of that, it’s much better to focus on the content that will educate your audience without asking for anything in return.
Finally, using the right tone, an easy-to-read structure, a clear and compelling subject line, and a descriptive preheader text are also the ingredients that will improve your deliverability rate. To avoid triggering spam filters, you shouldn’t include spam words and phrases in your emails’ subject lines and body. But, since the list of these words is exhaustive, you can easily end up in the spam folder even though your message is relevant and valuable to your recipients. So, before hitting the send button, check your campaign for spam. Autoklose Email Editor feature comes with a built-in spam checker that will highlight any suspicious words and help you eliminate them from your copy.
Personalize your campaigns
When you’re automating your email campaigns, it’s easy to fall into the trap of sacrificing personalization and sending the same generic message to all your recipients. Needless to say, this is a huge faux pas that can singlehandedly demolish all your email marketing efforts and ruin your deliverability and sender reputation in the process.
So, if you don’t want to channel the uniform written style of the Nigerian Prince, then you should personalize your messages and make sure they match your recipients’ needs, preferences, and behavior of each recipient. This tactic can help you increase your email engagement, loyalty, and conversions, as well as reduce your unsubscribe and spam rates.
Start by collecting recipient data, such as their name, location, industry, company size, job title, pain points, goals, education level, and interests. You can generate this data from various sources, such as sign-up forms, your website analytics, your CRM system, your email service provider, or third-party tools. Then use this data to segment your email list into different groups based on common characteristics or criteria. Feed all this data to your email outreach platform and insert dynamic fields or variables into your email — {{first_name}}, {{company_name}}, or {{industry}}. The platform will automatically populate all these fields with corresponding data points.
Autoklose allows you to go well beyond name, title, or industry personalization. With the Decision Tree feature, you can create dynamic campaigns in which every email takes the individual recipient’s behavior and previous actions into account. So, if a campaign starts with the same initial email, follow-ups will differ based on how each recipient reacted (or failed to take action). Let’s say someone opens the initial email and downloads the e-book you sent and another person doesn’t click on your message. The next follow-up will reflect these two entirely different situations, making your campaign less generic and robotic.
Get your email frequency and timing right
The frequency of your emails can also affect your email deliverability, so find the right balance between sending too many or too few emails to avoid annoying your recipients and yet staying top of mind.
You should also send your emails at optimal times when your recipients are most likely to open them based on their behavior and preferences.
Autoklose can help you schedule and automate your email campaigns based on the best time for each segment. Our Sending Schedules feature takes things to the next level as it allows you to pick the day(s) of the week and the exact time(s) when you want to send emails and follow-ups for different segments. This way, it’s possible to achieve a high level of granularity and reflect the preferences of your recipients.
In Conclusion
With all the spam swirling around in the digital email world, spam filters that have become increasingly harsh, and email recipients whose expectations have skyrocketed, reaching the email inboxes of your audience equals finding the Holy Grail.
So, if your lead-generation agency relies on email marketing, you should understand the risks of mass outreach and learn how to avoid them. The tips we discussed can be a great point of reference and a step in the right direction.
