How to Optimize Your Email Deliverability

Email marketing is an effective and powerful strategy to communicate with your customers and strengthen your relationships. But how effective is it if your emails aren't properly delivered?

About 20% of emails never reach the inbox (Return Path 2017). Before you can think about how to improve your email open rates, you need to consider if your emails are even reaching your customers. Here, we will cover different ways to optimize your email deliverability rate and ensure that your email reaches your customers' inboxes.

Email deliverability tip #1: Keep your email lists updated and clean.

Some people purchase email lists or collect emails from unreliable sources and neglect to update their email lists. Email addresses are abandoned and expired frequently, and sending a bunch of emails to expired email addresses will make you look suspicious to internet service providers.

Avoid buying email lists, as those people probably don’t want to receive your emails. Not only is this an ineffective method of email marketing, but these users may block you or flag you for spam, which will only make you look bad to internet service providers. And be sure to remove contacts that keep getting bounced emails.

Email deliverability tip #2: Avoid subject lines and content that trigger spam filters to maximize your email deliverability.

Emails won’t make it to your customers’ inboxes if they are flagged as spam. It can be tempting to use buzz words and to throw around numbers to try to capture your readers’ attention, but this will often trigger spam

Here are some things to avoid that will trigger email spam filters:

  • Subject lines in all caps
  • Overuse of exclamation points
  • Embedded videos
  • "No obligation"
  • Too many numbers
  • Inappropriate words
  • Keyword-stuffing

Email deliverability tip #3: Make sure to include alt text for your email images.

Many webmail systems block images from showing up, and will require someone to allow images to display before being able to see them. Including alternative text for images is good because it lets users know that you are not sending suspicious content, and people are more likely to allow the image to display if they can see what it is supposed to be.

This is also a good way to make sure that your content is accessible for people who may not be able to read your content or use screen readers.

Email deliverability tip #4: Be sure to send a test email to yourself or an employee.

You never know when there might be a technical issue, grammatical errors, or anything else that will lower your email deliverability rate. Always send a test email before sending it out on a mass scale, because once you send an email you can't take it back.

Campaigner8 lets you send test emails to make sure that everything is ready to go. We even let you A/B test different versions of your email campaign to see which one performs better before sending it out. We always make sure that you are sending the best version of your email.

Email deliverability tip #5: Have a strong and consistent brand image to maintain a strong reputation.

When you have a good reputation online, your emails are more likely to be delivered successfully as well as opened by your clients. While there are many ways to improve your brand equity, it all starts with having an outstanding website with strong brand imagery. Your email campaigns should be consistent with the image that you maintain on your website or at your storefront.