6 Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing

A successful email program takes a lot more than simply drafting content and sending emails to your customers. With huge numbers of emails being sent and received each day, it’s important to know that your emails are actually reaching their intended audiences and not getting trapped in spam filters. Focusing on email deliverability is essential to your email campaign’s success.

Here are 6 things to keep in mind as you use email marketing to reach your customers.

1. Check your sender score. If you suspect that your emails are not reaching your customers, or maybe you’re just curious, you can check you sender score. Sender score is a value that is assigned to every outgoing mail server. Scores can range from 1-100. The higher the number, the better your score. The score takes into consideration unsubscribes, spam reports and other factors that quantify your sender reputation.
   Visit this website to check your sender score: https://www.senderscore.org/
2. Keep unsubscribes low. One of the ways to limit the number of people who unsubscribe to your email marketing is to make sure the customer knows what they are signing up for at the start. If the customer knows exactly what they are going to be receiving when they sign up, there is a greater chance they will want to view and engage with your content.Controlling email frequency and volume is also beneficial to keeping customers subscribed and engaged. An overwhelming amount of email at sporadic times is not what anybody wants. Make sure your emails are timely and meaningful for the best results.
3. Use a double opt-in or confirmed opt-in. A double opt-in is an additional step to confirm a user wants your emails, after they have agreed to give you theirs. A single opt-in adds the user’s email to your mailing list after they have provided it without asking them to confirm. Single opt-in emails are popular because the process is simple and can help you quickly grow your email list. But single opt-in options increase email deliverability issues since people may change their mind quickly after you begin marketing to them. By using a double opt-in to confirm customers into your email marketing, you eliminate a large percent of spam complaints, spambots and unwanted sign-ups.
4. Purge your list of non-existent users. Sending emails consistently to non-existent users increases your email bounce rate which can negatively affect your sender score. Your bounce rate refers to how often your emails cannot reach the intended recipient and therefore get “bounced” back to you. If your bounce rate becomes too high, some email providers will mark you as a spammer and block your emails from being seen by every customer using their platform. To counter this, remove invalid email addresses from your email lists on a regular basis. This is very important to reducing your bounce rate and increasing the chances that your emails will make it through to intended inboxes.
5. Use recognizable branding in subject lines. To make it clear who the email is from and that it is not spam, use your brand name in the “from” line. It is also important to send emails from the same domain as your own, and avoid using others or free ones (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) to inspire confidence in your business with your customers. Subject lines are another key ingredient to inform your customers that the email is not spam and is worth reading. Email subjects must match the content of the email and be free of errors. Using excessive symbols, certain words such as “free,” special characters or capital letters tend to give the email a spam-like look and can affect customer open rates.
6. Design emails with consideration of spam filters. Many a well-intended email ends up in a spam box. The content in your emails is a large part of determining whether your email will end up where it should. Take special care while composing the email to avoid things like all caps when not necessary, misleading subject lines or content and broken links. Use images sparingly, as an image-heavy email might be mistaken for spam. An easy way to ensure your emails do not end up as spam is to ask the customers on your mailing list to add you to their address book, which will let your emails bypass the spam filter.

There is no cover-all solution to create the perfect email marketing campaign. Experimenting with different tactics and following the tips above can help optimize your business emails for better deliverability.