Go for it—send all the sales emails you want. Just remember that if your email deliverability is poor, those emails make no impact on your company’s business growth. In retrospect, poor email deliverability can do more harm to your sales development than good.
Luckily, there are ways you can approach your email marketing efforts to validate sender reputation and get them in a prospect’s inbox rather than their spam folder. Throughout this blog, we’ll highlight the following topics:
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is how sales and marketing experts measure how effectively their outbound email marketing campaigns reach prospect inboxes. Essentially, that means avoiding being flagged and directed into spam, junk, or promotion folders.
How To Measure Email Deliverability Rates
While there’s no direct guidebook on how to get the highest email deliverability rates, there are some ways you can measure email deliverability. Many teams measure deliverability based on trial and error, making adjustments to the email marketing approach they have in place. A few of the most common email marketing statistics sales and marketing teams analyze to increase email deliverability rates include:
- Bounce rates: The percentage of emails that don’t make it to a prospect’s domain
- Inbox placement rates: The percentage of emails that land in the prospect’s inbox
- Reply rates: The percentage of emails that get a response from prospects
- Open rates: The percentage of emails that prospects open
Ways To Improve Email Deliverability
There may not be a surefire way of guaranteeing high email deliverability, but there are some tips you can follow to avoid spam filters and junk folders. To improve email deliverability, it’s essential that you:
Set Up Your Reports and Records Correctly
First things first, it’s important to make sure your DNS reports and DKIM and SPF records are set up correctly. If they aren’t set up properly, you risk your sales emails getting sent immediately to the junk folder rather than a prospect’s inbox. Or worse, not getting delivered at all and bouncing back everytime. This can negatively impact your email deliverability and puts you at risk of being blacklisted, which means you have to reconfigure your whole email marketing approach.
Clean Your Prospect Email List
To improve email deliverability rates, you need to regularly clean your prospect email list. If too many prospect email addresses bounce back, you risk your outbound marketing efforts being flagged as spam. This shows the email domain that you’re not putting in conscious effort with the emails you’re sending, so it appears like you’re sending emails that contain little to no value to the intended email recipient.
Write Insightful Content
Like any other sales or marketing approach, you must write insightful email content that reflects the prospect’s wants, needs, and pain points. This is what makes crafting buyer personas in email marketing such a crucial component of this lead generation tactic. When content is targeted to a specific buyer persona within your target market, you increase the likelihood of a prospect opening or responding to an email or scheduling a sales appointment with one of your sales or account executives.
Present a Clear Unsubscribe Option
Email service providers want to give their users the best experience possible. So, while you want to keep a prospect in your email list as long as possible, you also need to give your prospect a clear option to unsubscribe from your sales and marketing campaigns. If it’s not clear for email recipients how they can unsubscribe, this can negatively impact email delivery rates because the email service will flag your emails as spam and send them directly to the junk folder for not only this recipient but also other email recipients that use their email services.
Use an Email Marketing Platform That Tracks Performance
An email marketing platform that tracks campaign performance is essential for increasing email deliverability rates. With an advanced email marketing platform, your sales and marketing experts have the opportunity to measure the “good” of your email campaigns, such as open rates, reply rates, share rates, etc. It also lets you see what messaging, timing, and industry works best with your email marketing content, empowering you to further accelerate your email sales and marketing efforts.
Invest in a Marketing Operations Department
Last but not least, if you want to boost your email deliverability rates, you must hire a marketing operations department to take responsibility for overseeing your company’s email campaigns. With a marketing operation specialist or department at hand, your email copywriters and email list building team can spend more time writing personalized content and making customized contact lists to secure more sales.
Things To Avoid To Ensure Email Deliverability
Now that you have a good understanding of everything you SHOULD do to improve email deliverability let’s consider some things you should avoid. Here’s a list of our favorite things to avoid to ensure average (or ideally, above average) email deliverability rates:
Avoid Oversending From a Single Domain
To ensure email deliverability, it’s crucial that you don’t oversend from one email domain. As a best practice, you should be under 250 total emails a day per sender, at the absolute max. When you exceed this limit, you increase the risk of getting flagged, requiring you to get a whole new domain, which can be a costly and time-consuming process.
Avoid Using Your Company Domain Email Address
Relating to the point above, while you may not want to send from a single domain, you also want to avoid using your company domain address. If you use your company domain email address for email marketing efforts, you risk flagging your core domain as spam. Therefore, no matter if an email goes to a prospect or an existing customer, the email sent will directly go to the junk folder, making it difficult to send customers important information when they need it most.
Avoid Sending Broad Email Content
While email content shouldn’t be overly personalized to the point where it’s almost creepy, it also shouldn’t be so broad that it doesn’t relate to a single prospect in your email list. Sending generalized email content risks turning away prospects before they even get a chance to learn about your business. Here’s an example of personalized vs. generalized email copy:
Personalized:
Generalized:
See how much more impactful and targeted the personalized email is? This empowers the reader to feel important and that you’ve crafted an offer that aligns directly with their business.
Avoid Spam Trap Words in Your Subject Lines and Content
Believe it or not, certain words used in subject lines and email copy can trigger the content as spam before a prospect even gets the opportunity to look at your email. As you write content, it’s essential to avoid these words so you can improve email deliverability rates and initially end up in a prospect’s inbox.
For a complete list of the most common spam trigger words and phrases, check out HubSpot’s extensive list of spam words here.
Key Takeaways
Improving email deliverability and avoiding spam filters is a tricky game. While there may be no direct way to boost email deliverability rates directly, there are some practices you can implement and avoid to reduce the risk of your sales and marketing assets ending up in the junk folder. Luckily, Sapper Consulting is here to guide you in the right direction.
Sapper helps small to medium-sized businesses build successful email campaigns that grow clientele through appointment setting. Our expertise and extensive list of sales tools and technologies empower companies to better understand what market messages resonate with most, increasing the likelihood they’ll end up in a prospect’s inbox. When you’re ready to boost email deliverability and further engage potential buyers in your target market, contact the email lead generation experts at Sapper!
