Every marketer sends email marketing campaigns to the audience to compel them to take an action. In the campaign, they ask the recipient to take an action on the CTA to start using the service, or new feature, make a purchase or register for some event.
When you design your email so well with the perfect colors, call to action, layout, readable message body, and email accessibility, but it doesn’t land in the mailbox it will be of no use.
People feel less bothered about opening up the junk folder and reading the message. While sending your email campaign, you need to be active to understand both technical and marketing perspectives for the success of your efforts.
Along with it, you need to run an email deliverability audit to increase the open rate. The open rate you email is directly proportional to the matter if it lands in the inbox of the audience.
In this article, we shall discuss everything about email deliverability audits and their importance. Keep reading!
Table of Contents
- What is email deliverability?
- What is an email deliverability audit?
- Importance of email deliverability audit
- How to perform an email deliverability audit?
- Define your goals
- Create a checklist
- Select your tools carefully
- Run your email deliverability test
- Fix the issues
- Implement the solutions
- Email deliverability best practices
- Sender behavior
- Email content
- Evaluate your email service provider
- Check your sender reputation
- Configure DKIM
- How to improve sender reputation?
- Conclusion
What Is Email Deliverability?
All marketing experts are convinced that good email deliverability is the fundamental element of successful email marketing campaigns. Here is another important point you must keep in mind email delivery and email deliverability are not the same.
The former is linked with the send you your email, whereas, the latter is subjected to placing the emails right in the inbox to remain in front of the eyes of the users as soon as they open the mailbox.
You can ask a question why email deliverability is important? That is a million-dollar question. If your emails are not delivered, believe it or not, they will not be read.
What Is an Email Deliverability Audit?
Email deliverability audit is to measure the number of emails landed in the recipient’s mailbox. When conducting this audit, the purpose revolves around matter to analyze every element that can impact email deliverability.
Email deliverability audit determines where the emails are getting delivered, measures the deliverability rates, and finds the facts that could be decreasing the deliverability rate.
Being a marketer, you must be mindful of the insights and the way to run the audit to gather the maximum outreach of your email campaign. The reason behind this is that the audit actually tells whether the emails are reaching your targeted audience or not.
If you find a low open rate of your emails, it means that a significant number of emails are ending up in the junk folder, hence an email deliverability audit is required. You must build your email-sending reputation, and keep a check on it to maintain it. If the sending reputation is good, it will help you increase your email deliverability rate.
Below are the factors that can be checked if the deliverability rates are low:
- Bad sender reputation
- Poor email infrastructure
- Spam signals in the email content
- Failed email authentication
- Getting placed on the email block list
A comprehensive email deliverability audit is required to deal with the above-mentioned issues to make the campaigns successful.
Importance of Email Deliverability Audit
Being a marketer, you might sit at the table for several hours to find the right audience for your email campaign, designing the perfect copy, but not getting enough results. To figure out this problem, you have to revisit your strategy again.
Did you find any issues? We are here to tell you. You have missed an important step which is maintaining high email deliverability. Without keeping this optimal, you will not be able to see the results, rather your efforts will be gone to vain.
Running an audit for better deliverability is actually helpful because you can find the issues that don’t let create a winning situation for you.
For example, if you run an email deliverability audit and find the email reputation is poor, your email list is unhygienic, sending emails to bounced addresses or inactive users, these could be some of the issues for the poor performance of your email deliverability.
Here are some of the problems that should be found and fixed while auditing:
- Unhygienic email list
- Low click-through rate
- A massive number of unopened emails
- Ignoring privacy policy
- Bounced emails and their causes
- Inappropriate team alignment
How to Perform an Email Deliverability Audit?
In order to do the email deliverability audit, you need to follow a simple process followed by various experts.
Here is a process to perform the audit:
Define Your Goals
While running the audit, you must be aware of your goals, or at least define your goals before you proceed. It will help you stay focused and it will also be result oriented in various ways.
For example, do you know about the issues and look for solutions to fix them? Are you curious about the reliability of your sending infrastructure? Or do you facing low open rate issues and want to improve them? These are just some examples, and you can add your goals the way you think.
Create a Checklist
While defining your goals, you need to create a checklist that would be helpful in the future. A well-defined checklist will help you not miss anything important.
For that purpose, you can make a spreadsheet where you add data and results coming out of the process against the points you have already created.
Select Your Tools Carefully
Your goals and checklist will help you brainstorm well about the selection of your perfect tools for the task. You have to understand what aspects need to be tested, i.e., sending domain authentication, IP reputation, spam checking, email body content, list validation, block list, etc.
After selecting the tool according to your preferences, then you’ll need to use them to assess the metrics. Various free and paid online tools are available to run the email deliverability audit, select one that suits your goals.
Run Your Email Deliverability Test
After doing the above process, now is the time to run a deliverability audit. Keep an eye on the results, and keep noting them according to your checklist.
Here you will learn the issues and further understand what to do next to resolve these issues. The tools that you have already selected will tell you about the results, either good or bad.
Fix the Issues
Now, the results are in your hands, you are aware of the issues that need fixation. At this point, you can ask how to start fixing the issues. Don’t worry! Start with the most important issues first that are acting like a stumbling block and halting the process of your progress.
After coming across the most important issues, now is the time to deal with the easy morsel, the least important issues, and easily resolvable.
Implement the Solutions
From setting a goal to finding and fixing the problem, now is the time to implement the solutions once and for all. The process of problem-solving will give you the confidence to send your email campaigns more effectively to attain the required results.
A good email deliverability strategy will work like cool the burn and be helpful in your landing in the mailbox for more open rate, leading to more sales.
Email Deliverability Best Practices
Email deliverability experts analyze the results and give several recommendations to improve the results.
Here are the five most important factors responsible for great deliverability:
- Sender behavior
- Email content
- Evaluate your email service provider
- Check your sender reputation
- Configure DKIM
Sender Behavior
As a sender, you must adopt active behavior and keep your eyes open. First of all, have the email campaign data with you, and eliminate all the inactive and bounced email addresses from the email list.
Send your email only to those who feel engaged with your content. If you will keep sending emails to these users, it will ultimately affect your email deliverability. Further, mention an unsubscribe link so that the users may have a good unsubscribe experience.
Otherwise, they will mark you as spam your sender reputation will be highly compromised. Keep your list clean of inactive users, and do not send too many messages.
Email Content
If you will overload your email with several elements, there are many chances that it will alert the spam filter, ending your message in the junk folder. You have to come up with a balanced approach with the design, content, and sending frequency.
For that reason, do not add too many images, or too much text rather, go with a 70:30 text-to-image ratio. Reduce file size and keep it between 15 KB to 100 KB. Further, do not add too many images, as it will alert the spam filter for considering it spammy.
Evaluate Your Email Service Provider
While sending the email campaign, send a test or preview email to your mailing address to see where the email ends. If you are receiving the email in the mailbox, click on the three dots in your Gmail, and click Show Original.
If you find SPF, and DKIM listed as Passed, you can proceed further with your email campaign. On the contrary, if the email ends up in the spam folder, revisit everything before you hit the send button for your email campaign.
Check Your Sender Reputation
A strong email sender reputation is one of the primary requisites for successful email deliverability. Building a sender reputation takes significant time, but it can easily be spoiled just with a few poor campaigns.
Although building a sender reputation is time taking but it is not impossible. All you need to do is to sending relevant and engaging content to the audience.
When you send relevant content, it compels the user to take an interest to increase the open and click-through rate, resulting in an increasing reputation. A higher sending score is always better for email deliverability.
Configure DKIM
DomainKeys Identified Mail or DKIM is primarily an email authentication standard that tells that an email is actually sent by you. It comes with a DKIM signature to prevent the email from being tempered.
How to Improve the Sender Reputation?
The sender reputation can be improved when you send relevant information to the users. User engagement counts upon certain elements, including, CTR, open, and replies to your emails.
Keep yourself away from being marked as spam, and for that, add a visible unsubscribe link in your email. What happens if you don’t add an unsubscribe link to the email? The users who are not willing to receive emails from you will mark you as spam if the unsubscribed link will not be found in the email.
Keep inactive users away from your list, and send your message to those who actually want to hear from you. Frequent cleanliness of your email is recommended to get the results of your choice. It means that quality is more important than quality in email marketing. Never hesitate to remove the uninterested from the list.
Conclusion
Email is one of the finest ways of communication. When we see the large benefits of email marketing, at the same time we see that spam filters are becoming more sophisticated and do not allow suspicious emails to land in the mailbox.
While designing your email campaign, make sure it is according to the standards which will be responsible for the perfect deliverability. Whenever you find an issue in getting low open, and click-through rates, immediately run an email deliverability audit to ensure that the emails are being delivered to the users’ mailboxes.
Follow the above-mentioned email deliverability practices, and never forget to use a reliable email marketing automation tool, such as Mumara to design and send your email marketing campaigns.
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