Key challenges and opportunities to improve email deliverability

There are many articles that talk about improving results in email marketing, but they rarely talk about improve email deliverability, at least not clearly.

As you may already know, email marketing represents a huge market, worth over 9 billion dollars, with an extremely attractive ROI of around 40 dollars for every 1 dollar invested, on average.

And, of course, with these extremely positive results, the market has new competitors all the time, so achieving these excellent results becomes more challenging. If we include the exponential increase in spam messages in this equation, the challenge becomes even greater.

That’s why deliverability (or inbox placement) has become a key issue in email marketing. It’s about your ability to overcome anti-spam systems and convince the algorithms of email service providers (ESPs) to deliver your messages with quality and, eventually, with priority over others, instead of blocking your content or sending your messages to the spam folder.

However, a scenario that is challenging for some may represent a golden opportunity for others. In practice, it’s about being strong where your competitors are weak. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this post. What chances arise from the challenges posed by email deliverability.

Let’s improve email deliverability: knowledge

Knowing about deliverability is the fundamental step for anyone who wants to improve email deliverability.

Understanding how deliverability is the result of a series of practices that are analyzed by email providers’ algorithms and how each of these practices should be managed is the foundation that will support successful actions in the future.

Reputation: the result of a process and several aspects

Sender reputation is the result of a series of good practices that should be adopted when sending email marketing campaigns in order to improve email deliverability.

The better these aspects are managed, the better the reputation and, consequently, the deliverability.

The most important aspects for building a good reputation as a sender:

• Configure email authentication properly: SPF, DKIM and DMARC are essential for email marketing security and prevent messages from being blocked by providers.
• Manage the daily volume of emails sent: providers can cause email delivery problems for those who exceed the expected daily sending limits for a domain or IP address.
• Eliminate the incidence of hard bounces: the existence of invalid emails on mailing lists is responsible for serious performance problems in email marketing campaigns, either through blockages or reduced conversion rates.
• Prevent spamtraps: the adoption of questionable practices in the construction and management of email contact lists can lead to the existence of spamtraps (honeypots) in the lists, which lead to blacklists.
• Plan every part of the content: every element of the email, such as the sender, subject line and all the content (text, hyperlinks, images) is analyzed and evaluated by email providers and anti-spam tools, looking for items that compromise user security or are signs of spam.
• Reduce the occurrence of complaints: when someone clicks on the “mark as spam” option in your webmails, it signals to the email providers that that email (in the form of its sender) is uninteresting or unreasonable, leading to reputation penalties.
• Increasing good engagement exponentially: this aspect, of positive interactions from recipients in terms of opens and clicks, greatly stimulates the algorithm of ESPs (email providers) to deliver more messages to the inbox.

Improve email deliverability: overcoming the main challenges

In order to improve email deliverability and achieve success with your campaigns, you need to pay attention to all the aspects we mentioned earlier and overcome each of the challenges associated with them.

Technical challenges:

There are some technical challenges to be aware of when sending bulk emails. This is the most fundamental aspect, as technical failures can lead to the inability to send or even deliver emails.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC

We have already mentioned its relevance. It’s important to know that email marketing platforms now have ways of making these settings automatically. However, depending on the sending structure, it is necessary to carry out these settings properly with your IT team.

Find reliable tools

To achieve the best results, you need to find the right tools for you.

Free tools won’t always offer the best features, but they are a good starting point for those just starting out. The most important thing is to rely on a professional platform and avoid amateurish sending through your own means.

Here, the challenge lies in being able to evaluate and find the ideal tool.

Automate processes

Another challenge to overcome: the workload. To carry out good email marketing campaigns, you also need to carry out several, well-segmented campaigns, as well as investing in transactional emails.

That’s why having well-planned and integrated automation is a powerful aid to managing email relationships, especially trigger-based campaigns.

Among the types of automations we can mention are welcome messages for new subscribers, lead nurturing campaigns that segment contacts based on their interactions and behaviors, abandoned cart reminders to recover lost sales, re-engagement emails for inactive contacts and post-purchase thank yous to build customer loyalty.

Automations not only save time and resources, but also personalize the customer experience, increase the conversion rate and keep contacts engaged with the brand.

Challenges of growing and building mailing lists:

To improve email deliverability, you need to be able to deliver emails. So you need emails! Lists of email addresses are perhaps the most fundamental aspect of email marketing. This is because, without lists, there would be no one to send messages to and, therefore, email marketing would no longer exist.

So it’s natural that a large part of marketers’ efforts are focused on email lists, whether it’s capturing or managing these contacts, nurturing this information, segmentation, etc.

However, because of their importance, there are many related challenges, of a technical or behavioral nature. Let’s take a look at the 3 main challenges.

Pressure from the board and sales

Marketing advocates relationships with leads and customers. For this reason, the aim of an email action is not always to convert into sales. Emails can be content or transactional. Also, not every email campaign is aimed at everyone. This is the principle of segmentation.

However, marketers will have to deal with pressure from the sales department and management, who are fully focused on increasing sales.

This pressure can translate into two concrete problems: the insistent sending of sales campaigns, ignoring the principle of relationship, and to all contacts, ignoring the principle of segmentation and correct targeting of messages and offers.

As a result, there can be an increase in unsubscribes (opt-outs) and spam complaints (compaints) due to the excess of emails sent and the lack of purpose in the messages.

It is therefore important to educate internal teams about the importance of relationships and maintaining leads in order to achieve sustainable conversions.

Mailing list sales market

For the same reason – seeking urgency in sales – professionals can strive to increase their sales exponentially and non-organically by buying email lists.

Although there are many offers of this kind on the Internet, you need to understand that, as well as being inappropriate and fruitless (recipients won’t buy from you just because you’ve sent them emails with no prior connection), it is also illegal and violates numerous data protection laws.

Give preference to growing email lists organically and legally, through registration forms and producing quality content.

Increase the sending volume

However, even if your organic growth strategies are a success, be very careful with the exponential increase in the number of emails sent every day. There are limits imposed by email providers.

For this reason, always observe warm-up techniques, making small additions to your sending volumes, following the behavior of the providers.

Managing old mailing lists

Another difficulty that digital marketing managers encounter is related to old mailing lists. In many cases, you don’t know where they come from or how long they’ve been in use.

This exposes them to the risk of having many emails invalidated due to inactivity, as well as recycled spamtraps. We therefore recommend using email verification tools before sending any new email campaigns.

Layout and content challenges:

When we talk about layout and content in email marketing, we are referring to balancing aesthetics and functionality, as well as offering content that is well targeted, so as not to appear generic or invasive, leading to a consistent and effective experience for the user.

Interesting, functional and spam-free content

Anti-spam filters analyze all the content of emails sent, in text and source code such as hyperlinks, images, etc.

So try to offer content with relevant and useful information, personalizing messages according to users’ interests and behaviours. Avoid terms that could trigger spam filters.

Remember the importance of the subject line: 7 out of 10 recipients will decide at this stage whether to open the email. So make the subject line direct, transparent and captivating.

Make sure that the body of the message has clear call-to-actions and that the content is well targeted to the chosen segment of contacts.

Lighter and more renderable layouts

The layout of an email, like the content, has a dual purpose: to be pleasant and stimulating for the recipient and technically suitable for correct rendering on most devices, from PCs to smartphones.

Therefore, for lighter layouts, bet on optimized images. The lighter they are, the less time they take to load and the less chance there is of errors.

Avoid all-image layouts. Balance the use of text and images.

Dark mode

Many software and online platforms are adopting the possibility of activating dark mode, which is a setting that uses dark colors for the background and lighter ones for the text, reducing screen brightness and improving readability in low-light environments.

It should be remembered that certain elements in an email can be damaged in dark mode, such as images without transparency or with white backgrounds.

Use adaptive design practices, using transparent backgrounds and adopting colors that offer good contrast so that they become clear and attractive, as well as defining specific colors for text and links so that they are readable in both modes.

For a complete guide to dark mode design, we suggest reading this article by Litmus.

Challenges for engagement:

So all the technical and behavioral challenges have been overcome, right? Almost all of them. You now have everything you need to succeed with deliverability. But we can always do better to improve email deliverability!

In addition to everything being well organized and configured, the more you demonstrate to email providers that your messages are relevant and interesting, the greater the chances of getting even more space in the inbox. That’s why engagement is so important.

Increasing competition for attention

Since engagement is so important, it’s only natural that everyone who does email marketing is looking for it. After all, without engagement there’s no conversion either.

As more and more companies look for inbox placement, then many messages will also compete for the recipients’ attention. But not all messages will be read, so it’s essential to ensure that engagement is as optimal as possible.

Pay attention to the quality of the subject line and use tricks to attract recipients’ attention, such as emojis.

Improve email deliverability: monitoring properly

You may have noticed that there are many aspects to observe in order to improve email deliverability and make email marketing a success.

You need to monitor and optimize every aspect, from authentications, list building, eliminating hard bounces and spamtraps, building excellent content and getting engagement, in order to overcome all the challenges and get maximum conversions.

This is an ongoing job that requires attention to detail.

Manual monitoring

You can monitor these aspects of deliverability manually, making use of available resources.

For example, to see if your domain and sending IPs are on blacklists, you can use services such as Blacklistalert.org.

SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) is a free tool from Microsoft to monitor the reputation of your sending IPs, as well as other information from emails sent to Microsoft emails (such as Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live.com) about delivery rates, spam and sending errors. Similar services can be obtained for Gmail with “Postmaster Tools” and also for Yahoo with “Yahoo Mail Feedback Loop”. These services help senders to improve their sending practices and ensure a higher email delivery rate.

To check SPF, DKIM and DMARC settings, there are free online tools that check that everything is properly configured.

MX Domain checks can be carried out using online tools such as MX Toolbox.

And these are just a few examples.

Automatic monitoring

As you can see, manual monitoring is possible, but it requires a certain amount of dedication. And we don’t always have that kind of time available. But improving email deliverability necessarily requires this dedication.

Therefore, to meet the need for more intelligent and proactive monitoring, there are currently a number of deliverability analysis services.

Among the advantages are the centralization of all the information in a single panel, avoiding having to access several URLs. This way, the data can also be analyzed together. Alerts can also be set up by email and other methods, allowing corrective action to be taken immediately.

If you need more information on which service you should choose, we recommend reading this SafetyMails post.

Conclusion

Improving email deliverability is very important for achieving results in email marketing. It directly influences the ability to deliver messages to the recipients’ inbox.

Technical and content challenges need to be overcome, such as correctly configuring SPF, DKIM and DMARC, layout and user engagement. These steps are essential for achieving high delivery and conversion rates.

So adopt good practices and use appropriate tools to monitor and optimize every aspect of the campaign, turning these challenges into opportunities and ensuring effective and successful communication with your target audience.

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