Email deliverability is the pillar of successful email marketing. All parts of email marketing, including building an email list, creating a template, designing attractive offers and creating perfect landing pages, rely heavily on optimised deliverability.
What is email marketing deliverability, and why does it matter?
Deliverability controls how many of your contacts get your emails, and it's the foundation for successful email marketing. Your contacts must first have full access to your emails for your strategy to gain traction. Otherwise, it won't matter how perfect your content is.
Deliverability takes more than building an audience to be effective. Best practices for improved email deliverability include:
- Warming up your new IP address by sending emails in small batches at first
- Monitoring your email sender's reputation by analysing your sender score
- Keeping your email list clean to lower your bounce rates, disengage inactive subscribers, and lower spam complaints
- Striving for engagement by optimising your subject lines and sending relevant, timely, and personalised content
- Watching your analytics to keep an eye out for complications
- Planning for continuous, incremental improvement
Importance of email delivery testing
Subscribers following your marketing content only need a few seconds to decide whether or not to read your email. Small mistakes can ruin days of hard work if you go for email delivery testing before hitting send.
Below are five reasons you must test your email deliverability before sending out marketing content:
1. Your email may be marked as spam and won't reach your listed inboxes
One of the biggest risks for your marketing emails is having them flagged by anti-spam filters. Anti-spam filters often flag content for trivial reasons that you could promptly identify and eliminate earlier. Flagging ruins your current campaign and hurts your sender's reputation. Balancing graphics and text are examples of essential factors you should look out for by running timely email delivery tests.
2. Without testing email deliverability, you can't know how your email appears on different devices
Research shows that 50% of email subscribers read their emails on mobile devices. This explains why email marketing requires testing to see how your content will display on common types of devices, and if there are any noticeable differences. For example, large images that may load easily on a desktop computer may take a lot longer to load on mobile devices, which can be frustrating for the person viewing your content.
3. You can't be sure of your list's requirements without testing
You can never know for sure which sender name and subject line will resonate with your subscribers without email delivery testing. It’s a good idea to A/B test different calls to action or intriguing questions in the subject line.
Even with regular monitoring of your subscriber's expectations, it's very difficult to predict the best fit for every email without testing.
4. It helps you to perfect your timing
Sending email marketing campaigns requires proper timing. Many of your subscribers may be in a particular time zone, while others may be more likely to read your emails on particular days of the week.
5. Without email delivery testing, you could accidentally attach bad links
Emails with broken, incorrect, or untracked links are 100% avoidable with email testing. With the primary purpose of email campaigns being to drive customers to your website, bad links are a costly mistake. They can lead to potential lost sales and frustrated subscribers.
There is no quick fix to achieving a high level of email deliverability, and this article only scratches at the surface of some of the things you can do. Take measured steps and apply best current practices and you will see a rise in the proportion of emails getting through.
Download our guide to gain a new perspective on email marketing.
