Best Practices For Protecting Your Email Reputation

What is email deliverability and why is it important?

Your email deliverability rate (or acceptance rate) is a composite metric measuring the number of emails reaching recipients’ mailboxes in relation to the amount of emails sent.

In simpler terms, it’s a business’s ability to make campaign emails land in the right place (i.e. your intended recipients’ inboxes).

Email marketing is still considered the cheapest method of advertising and the preferred way SMBs (small and medium businesses) communicate with their clients.

1. Narrow down your audiences

List segmentation means dividing a general subscriber group/audience into a set of more focused groups based on specific criteria.

List segmentation is one of the best ways to boost a client’s email deliverability overall.

Categorizing your recipient lists based on the types of prospects will make your emails more relevant and is a key part of any email strategy. The more targeted and relevant your emails are to your subscribers, the more engaged they’ll be.

This in turn will eventually lead to higher open, click-through and click-to-open rates. The end result, might also help with lowering your bounce and unsubscribe rates as well.

2. Use an easy-to-spot unsubscribe button

Unsubscribe buttons are mandatory in all bulk emails to stay compliant with CAN-SPAM rules.

By providing an easy-to-spot unsubscribe link to your readers, could also lead to an improved email deliverability journey.

It also helps you filter out subscribers who don’t want to receive your emails and may send your emails to spam. In making it easy for them to unsubscribe easily, you avoid is an important step to take to prevent damaging your relationship.

3. Test before you send

Ensure that your emails are optimized for all ESP servers (i.e. ensure that your readers will see the final result as intended).

Make sure that you’re using the correct salutations, i.e.., you don’t want to send out emails with: “Hey there %FIRSTNAME%” (this is a great way to lose credibility quickly).

A/B testing is a simple and excellent tool in your deliverability toolkit.

A more comprehensive way to test out your campaign beforehand would be to have a test list that contains test email addresses of different ESPs through which a sender can know all about the vulnerabilities of their email content towards different ESPs.

You can also use third-party tools like GlockApps and Mail Tester.