Your email delivery rate is one of the most important numbers in your email marketing toolbox. It doesn’t make sense to send emails that no one is getting, after all! If those emails land in your subscribers’ spam folders, you don’t have a chance to make a sale or build your relationship with them. Here are three tips that will help ensure your emails make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.
Email Marketing Platforms
Using a reputable email marketing service is the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of avoiding spam folders. Companies like Aweber, MailChimp and Get Response work hard at staying white listed with the big Internet Service Providers and email providers like Gmail.
Most autoresponder companies will require your emails to be compliant with CANSPAM and other email marketing laws to keep you out of hot water.
The most important step I see entrepreneurs skip is authenticating the domain they’re sending from. This improves your email delivery rate and helps prevent others from sending emails as you. It also shows your email as the “from” email when your subscribers receive it. Doing this is a little more techie, but it can definitely help your email delivery rate!
Don’t forget: In your welcome email, tell subscribers to add your sending email address to their address book and/or whitelist!
Set Expectations and Keep Them
Your chances of delivering to the inbox are higher when your subscribers regularly open your emails. The best way to ensure that – aside from providing great content – is to set expectations from the beginning. Let your subscribers know when and how often they can expect an email from you.
You can even use “foreshadowing” in your messages. For example, toward the end of your current email, mention that they can look for another email from you the same time next week.
Once you’ve set those expectations, do what you can to meet them. Yes, things happen every once in a while, but do your best to keep your promise and email when your readers expect it.
Doing this regularly will improve your open rates, and thus your overall email delivery rate.
Maintain Your List Health
It’s a good habit to clean up your list regularly. If subscribers haven’t been opening your emails for the past six months, odds are they are no longer interested in what you have to offer. Remember, the more people who open your emails, the higher your email delivery rates. Plus, if you’re paying for your marketing service a smaller, healthy list will help you keep your costs down for a greater ROI.
Check your email marketing service’s help files to see how you can remove anyone that hasn’t opened an email from you in the past six months. In MailChimp, it’s very easy to create a segment of people who haven’t opened the last x number of emails. You can then even send a “warning message” before removing them, just to be safe.
Following these tips, and keeping an eye on email deliverability in general, will make sure your emails are being received by your subscribers so you can offer them great content, and make more sales.
Need help authenticating your domain or cleaning up your email list?
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