20 Things to Ensure Your Emails Reach Your Contacts

How to increase your email deliverability rates?

Running a Online Business involves lots of work like build a Website, maintain it regularly and most important, build some quality content. If all things go well and your online presence get noticed, you need to keep track on sales, be active on social media accounts and top of all, curate your contact information list and send countless of emails daily.

Since each one of these emails is vital to your business’s revenue, you need them to reach their recipient successfully. Now, let’s face the fact, “One out of six of those email never reaches their target”. Well known email certification service, Return path claims that 20% of your daily emails have a chance of being lost in the endless void of the Internet. I am sure that, this may sound scary to each Email Marketer. Because this lost Email could be an order confirmation or a customer service email.

Fear not; Deliverability rates are not that hard to improve. I’ll share with you 20 simple techniques to increase your email deliverability rates and keep them healthy. Just in time for the holiday rush.

1. Use Double Opt-In

When you use double opt-in, your recipients will get a confirmation email in their inbox. They will not be subscribed until they click the link in that email. Deliverability rates of Email address lists those who use double opt-in are generally higher and the unsubscribe rates are lower. There is a catch: You will get 20% fewer subscribers on the front end. A small price to pay compared to the long term rewards. Hence, change your single opt-in list to double opt-in list.

2. Keep your List up to Date

Besides the obvious advantages of having a clean list, there is a thing to watch out for called “Hard Bounce”. A hard bounce is when you send an email to the closed or nonexistent account. If you hard bounce too often, Email service providers like Google may hold back the delivery of all your emails. To decrease the bounce back ratio use professional email validation services like QuickEmailVerification.

3. Check for Soft Bounces

A Soft bounce occurs when you send an email to a temporarily unavailable mailbox. To prevent soft Bounces, you should remove Email addresses that send back more than 4 soft bounces; It will be good for email deliverability.

4. Do not Over-Mail

Over-mailing is not one to blame for poor deliverability rates, but if you tend to send more than one mail per day then you are probably trying too hard. When you send more emails, you are most likely to receive fewer responses. Hold your horses and keep your Emails under reasonable rate. If you want people to respond to your emails, don’t leave them unread in their inbox.

5. Remove Inactive Subscribers

Remove those contacts who do not even open your emails. It will improve the deliverability rates for the people who are actually clicking on those links. Pick a time frame you feel comfortable with, half a year of inactivity for example, and purge those emails from your list.

6. Avoid Spam Traps

When an email address has not been used for quite a time, it is usually used by ISPs as a spam trap. A spam trap flags any emails sent to them as spam emails. If you keep sending Emails to spam traps, your Sender Score is guaranteed to drop. To avoid spam traps, refrain from buying an email list and keep your list updated.

7. Polish your Sender Name

Make sure the “from” field shows your company or brand name. Each recipient notices two things whenever receive new email; Name of the Sender and Subject of the Email. You would probably ignore emails sent from mailbox “thisismyfreemail@thefreemail.com”.

8. Polish your Subject Line

As we said, receiving new email, everyone notices name of the sender and subject line. Hence, you should be concise, truthful, and clear about what you write in that subject line. Don’t write anything additional or irrelevant in subject line. Honesty and precision go a long way.

9. Make sure you have a Consistent IP Address

Ask your ISP to assign you a static IP address so that you can have consistent IP address to run your marketing campaign.

10. No Attachments

Do you want to share something with your recipients? Just include a link to the file. Do not send attachments directly.

11. Do not use SpamLike Words

We all had our share of spam mails. You know them, you hate them: They are all flashy and colorful and filled up with capitalized words such as “FREE”, “SALE”, and “DONTYOUDARELOSETHISOFFER”. Search Google for a list of spamlike words and make sure that your email body does not contain them.

12. Link to Videos

We all love videos and they actually increase the time a reader will spend on your email. Since videos are high on data they can cause deliverability issues. Instead, take a snapshot of video and use it as a link to another page where the video is set to play automatically.

13. Size matters

Keep your emails to be as elegant and light as possible. Reduce the size of your images and keep the email under 40kb. The increased deliverability and extra response time are definitely worth it.

14. Check Your Spam Score

There are lots of free spam tools out there. You may even find one in your email interface. Go through the process and check your SpamAssassin score. Any score of less than 5.0 ensures a healthy deliverability rate.

15. Do not use your Personal Email Account

While you are mass-emailing, make sure you use a professional email service provider such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. Most of them have free trials. Try them all if you wish, but definitely use one.

16. Do not use Purchased Lists

It is better polishing your mailing list than losing your credibility due to hard bounces. Instead of damaging your reputation, use an email verification service like http://quickemailverification.com. It is simple and works miracles to your deliverability rates.

17. Be professional about Unsubscribes

Needless to say, you need to be a professional to be treated as such. When someone wants to unsubscribe, be a gentleman and immediately take him out of the list. Sending emails to someone after unsubscribing could damage your reputation.

18. Ask about your provider’s Sender Score

If it is high, they would be delighted to let you know. If it is not, it is time to search for a new provider. Visit https://www.senderscore.org to know more about SenderScore and how it can affect your deliverability rates.

19. Use Advanced Anti-Spam Technology

Ask your email service provider if they use DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). You do not need to know how these work. Just use them.

20. Be sure your ISP complies to CANSPAM

Bear with me for a few more technical details. Since it is illegal to not comply to CANSPAM, make sure that your provider is part of the main industry initiatives like EEC, MAAWG, ESPC, feedback loop programs, etc. If it is, then you can be sure that your email provider is in good terms with the major ISPs and anti-spam organizations. This is important.

Conclusion

The prime objective of any serious email marketer is to reach the largest audience percentage possible. The potential return on investment increases with each mail delivered successfully. Therefore, email deliverability is of the utmost importance. Clean your lists regularly. Be thorough. Be professional. Be successful.