If you are like us and you love learning about Email Animals’ Kingdom, you most likely would love to get closer to thedeliverabilitus perfectus – one of the most rare and amazing species.
Let me take you on a short quest during which we will get closer to it.
Deliverabilitus perfectus loves when everything is smooth and clean and transparent.
Also,deliverbailitus perfectus likes a nice smell of good sender reputation, with proof of email identity secured by authentication.As it’s very shy and timid animal, it also likes smooth and predictable moves – consistent volumes and a nice smell of good sender reputation.
As it’s very shy and timid animal, it also likes smooth and predictable moves – consistent volumes and a nice smell of good sender reputation.
So after setting all of these, how can you verify that you are ready to meet it?
Let me tell you about two super important last preparations:
- Getting your email list clean – to make sure you are not sending to undeliverable or toxic email addresses
- Checking if you are ready for the standouts – testing and monitoring email deliverability to gain visibility, what’s the probability that your message will land in the inbox, and having a benchmark to compare to after the campaigns.
Email List Hygiene
Email hygiene is considered to be one of the most important aspects of a successful email marketing campaign. It involves cleaning out any inactive subscribers from future email campaigns and making sure that your list only includes active subscribers. Regular email hygiene will help you make sure that you are only sending emails to people who want to receive messages from you, which helps you avoid your messages from being marked as spam.
This is important as email service providers are getting smarter and more in tune with what their users actually want to receive in their inboxes. Because of this, having a clean email list has never been more important when it comes to making sure that your emails are actually delivered and opened. ESPs are paying more attention to the emails that you are sending and how they are being engaged with. ESPs do not only look out for spam signs and monitor spam complaints, but they will also calculate opens, clicks, inactivity, and unsubscribes to decide whether a message gets through to the inbox or is sent straight to spam.
Permission to send marketing emails does not mean that you are immune from the need to practice good email hygiene. It’s important to bear in mind that this consent will not last forever, so once a subscriber opts in to receive your content, you need to monitor and track their behavior over time to make sure that they are removed from your list if they become more of a liability than an asset due to losing interest.
Email Data Hygiene and Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation refers to how you are viewed as a sender by ESPs. To determine this, various factors are taken into account including engagement, spam complaints, bounce rate, open rate and more. Having too many emails marked as spam can damage your sender score significantly, making it harder for you to reach other subscribers or even seeing your address put on a block list.
The health of your email list matters just as much as the emails that you send. A clean list with good email list hygiene habits means that your emails are far less likely to be marked as spam, as ESPs will see that you are sending to engaged subscribers. This refers to any kind of engagement with your email including opens and clicks, recent opt-ins, recent purchases of products and services, replies, or adding you as a contact, all of which signify to ESPs that these subscribers want to hear from you.
Email Hygiene Best Practices
Email list management requires a clean list to be effective. With 5-10 percent of email signups containing spelling mistakes, domain errors, and syntax errors, a clean list is necessary to form the foundation of all personalized email marketing.
Cleaning Frequency
Ideally, you should always have a clean email list, which is not always easy to maintain considering that B2B email data decays at a rate of around 22% per year. Clean your email list based on the size of your company. It’s recommended that small and medium businesses clean their email lists around once per month using a tool that gets the best results. Larger companies may need to clean their email lists even more frequently.
Remove Undeliverable Email Addresses
With around 5-10% of email addresses being incorrect at the moment of capture and even 15-20% getting obsolete in one year (mostly due to people changing jobs) – it is crucial to remove undeliverable email addresses from your list.
It’s that important, because a lot of bounced back emails is an indication of poor email list hygiene, and Internet Service Providers use it as an indication of potential spammmers. That’s why Email Service Providers want to protect their infrastructure and your reputation so they will:
- Warn you if over 5% of emails bounce
- Block your account if 10% of emails bounce.
Off course, a good Email Service Provider will also give you ways / tools to manage the bounces – for example, automatically suppress email addresses that are hard bounced.
But if you don’t want surprises, or you don’t send emails on a regular basis – it’s good to make an email verification of your whole list or its parts.
Remove Toxic Email addresses
There are different types of toxic email addresses – to name a few:
- widely circulated or breached – those that are often on the sold email lists – thus receive a lot of unsolicited emails and are more likely to get irritated,
- complainers’ – addresses of the people who are known for reporting spam,
- litigators’ or spam traps – addresses belonging to the anti-spam organizations or individuals.
Even with the best practices in place, some toxic email addresses can get onto your list.
It could be that a malicious agent planted them on your list, or maybe a healthy email address became toxic over time (started to receive a lot of spam or was turned by the ISP into a spam trap).
It’s important to, at least be aware of the toxicity of your list, and how it will be perceived by your Email Service Provider. Usually, it is wise to remove some or all toxic email addresses, depending on the risk you can afford. Of course, if you do know that an owner of a toxic email address wants to receive a message from you – you don’t have to remove it from your list.
(For example, we do have some customers that are known as security litigators, but we are sure that they want to hear from us, so we are keeping their email addresses on our list, obviously.)
The easiest and the most successful way to check the toxicity is to use a tool that has access to the same database of toxic email addresses that your Email Service Provider has… and it happens that Bouncer has it covered ;)
With Bouncer, it’s as easy as uploading your file, waiting a minute or two, and getting the results so that you can make informative decisions.
Remove Unengaged Subscribers
While it can be tough to remove the data of people that you worked hard to get, it’s always best to clean your email list of people who have never engaged with your business. Even if you have a list of contacts that are accurate and complete, email hygiene should take things further by removing any contacts that just aren’t interested. There are always going to be subscribers who have never opened an email from you and probably never will; continuing to send messages to them is only going to increase the risk of damaging your sender score over time.
What is email deliverability?
Now let’s move to email deliverability and its testing and monitoring.
Email deliverability is all about where your email ends up when it does make it through to its recipients’ mailboxes.
When you debate, design, and create a beautiful email to push promotion, bolster brand confidence, or promote sales, you need that message to land under your customers’ noses. That way, they can read them, be wowed by the content, and hit up your calls to action.
What happens if your email doesn’t land in their inbox but in their spam folder, or even worse – is blocked and rejected? You fail. Your message doesn’t get read and has no way of doing its intended job.
In many instances, email deliverability is also known as inbox placement. That’s what we’re aiming for; landing in the inbox, where it can make an impact. Not in the spam, where it gets thrown out with the rubbish.
Why you should monitor your email deliverability rate?
So, the deliverability rate is the percentage of your emails that land in the inbox, not just make it through to the server.
For your messages to have the best chance of conversion, it’s imperative to know how many make it through to your customers’ inboxes instead of going straight to spam. You should be monitoring your data for the relevant statistics and signs of success and failure.
More over, you should keep your hand on your deliverability pulse so that you can react quickly in case things start to go wrong. It’s much easier to fix small issues and improve than recover from disaster.
How often should you monitor email deliverability?
Regularly and consistently. Admittedly, that’s not always practical, but wherever you can, keep an eye on the figures that count and look for the reasons behind anomalies.
Fixing problems before they happen has less impact on your rates, and in turn, your sender scores—meaning more messages end up exactly where they’re meant.
Regular monitoring at the best rate you can, delivers the information you’ll use to see if there are problems; to look for trends or sudden drops that should set off alarm bells. How you analyze email deliverability revolves around a set of best practices in each of the key areas.
So, how do you check email deliverability?
Real-time email deliverability monitoring
Tracking through your delivery software
Your delivery software should be your best friend once you’ve sent out your campaign. There are so many data points to glean from; they can also help segment subscribers and campaigns for optimum results.
Open and click rates are primary goals, but keeping your spam rates as low as possible is key to deliverability.
Inbox monitoring or seed list testing
A common method of testing email performance with the most popular services is to set up email accounts with each of them and market to them yourself. This delivers an email deliverability test that provides real-time results as soon as you send it.
You’ll track the email using reporting tools as with any other campaign, but also, you have a chance to see how they operate as they land in each mailbox (given some mail providers segment your mail automatically into tabs or folders).
Another way to do that is by using a tool designed to test and monitor deliverability – like Deliverability Kit from Bouncer.
Auch tool will help you design your tests, generate test mailboxes, and present the results of the tests in an easy-to-understand way.
Moreover, it will let you monitor if your domains and IPs got listed on blocklists.
Conclusion
Deliverabilitus perfectus likes cleanliness – it likes when the list of the recipients is clean – so there are no undeliverable or toxic email addresses and only engaged users.
It’s always good to check if you are ready for the meeting with this unique creature – so I highly recommend testing and monitoring your deliverability on a regular basis.
With those two last checks, your chances of meetingdeliverabilitus perfectus will improve tremendously.
