Deliverability is one of the biggest issues for any email marketer. Whether you’re an entrepreneur running a one-person company or a Fortune 500 team, you want to make sure that your email campaigns end up in your customer’s inbox.
The definition of email deliverability is just how well your emails get delivered to a recipient’s inbox. Most email service providers (ESPs) boast statistics like 98% deliverabity, which means you can be pretty sure that when you send an email, a recipient will get it.
But sometimes, it seems like, no matter what you do, your emails get marked as spam. But why is that? At Email Evolution Conference 2015, insiders from Outlook, Gmail, Comcast and AOL discussed what possibly gets email marketers marked as spam.
Surprisingly, the experts at the conference said that opens and clicks don’t have a big impact on how they judge an email marketer’s reputation. So even if you’re getting low open rates, there’s not that big a risk of ending up in the junk folder.
There was one big thing above all that the webmail providers agreed was more important:
User Behavior: The Ultimate Spam Test
Across the board, the consensus was that the metrics webmail providers used to mark email campaigns as spam are a lot different than what marketers think about when it comes to success.
Rather than opens and clicks, webmail providers like Gmail look at replies, deletes, complaints and breaches. That means that if your emails keep getting deleted by recipients without even being opened, providers will see that as a red flag.
AOL’s experts reiterated that most deliverability issues were in response to recipient actions and preferences.
So, the next time you’re wondering why your emails aren’t appearing in your subscriber’s inbox, you should think about what you’re sending and what potential user actions could be contributing to the problem.
Even if the email isn’t reported as spam, thousands of deletes could amount to the same thing in a webmail provider’s eyes.
Opt-Ins, Transactions, and Reputation
If anything can be gleaned from this insight, it’s that you have to triple-check that all of the subscribers on your list have opted-in and confirmed that they want to be on your email list. This is also why purchasing email lists can be such a bad idea: all it takes is a few bad rounds and your IP could be blacklisted going forward.
One of the most interesting tips from EEC was that transactional emails should be separated from marketing emails. Customers are much more likely to value transactional emails and confirmation orders – especially if the email content is contextually relevant whenever it’s opened – while they might only open marketing emails once and a while.
By keeping transactional and marketing email IPs separate, you can help ensure that order confirmations and receipts never get put in the spam folder.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to the reputation of your IP. Repeatedly emailing people that don’t want to hear from your brand is more likely to get all of your emails marked as spam in the future.
Checking in with customers periodically to see if they still want to be included on your email list, seeing if their preferences have changed, and always asking for permission before emailing are the best ways to make sure your emails don’t get marked as spam – by the customer and by the webmail provider.
The more personalized your emails, the less likely customers are to delete them right away. We recently wrote an eBook, Email Personalization 2.0), that covers how brands successfully personalized email content.
In Email Personalization 2.0, you’ll learn:
– How brands like Airbnb, The Knot, ESPN and others are using email marketing personalization
– What kinds of customer data can be used to create better user experiences
– The different functions and features of email marketing personalization
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