Email Deliverability for Newcomers

The term email deliverability is simply used to describe the success of an individual getting the emails he or she sends delivered to the right recipient and at the right time. It is not automatic that the moment you send your email, it will be delivered to the intended receiver(s). You may have heard people talking about how they intend to improve the delivery of their emails. This generally means ensuring that more emails get to the intended people.

This is a common thing in email marketing and those who are not familiar with this technique may think that the moment you send a mail it is automatic that it gets to the recipients. Given the fact that emails in marketing are sent to many people, most of them do not get to open them and follow the link provided by the marketer so as to get the more information. A good number of people (like 10%) do not bother opening a marketing email. This is where the term deliverability comes in. As a marketer, it is important to improve your email delivery because if you do not do so, it means you have failed in using this form of marketing.

There are two basic reasons why the emails you send do not get to the intended destination. One of them is the bouncing of emails. Due to technical reasons, you may send an email to a person and it comes back to you as a “return back to sender” message. This can be caused by things like the nonexistence of a recipient or if you type the email address of the receiver wrongly. People do change their emails from time to time due to job changes or other personal reasons. Whichever the reason, bounced emails are costly to a marketer.

The other reason for this is the issue of spams. Most businesses or individuals have softwares and applications that are aimed towards blocking emails that are viewed to be spams. Internet Service Providers (IPS) too tend to block spams. This is a challenge to marketers aiming to use this technique of marketing and to add salt to injury, most anti-spam applications are not so effective, as they cannot differentiate a genuine email from real spams plus, they use different approaches in dealing with spams, meaning a spam to one application is not to the other.

There are a number of things you can do to improve your email deliverability. One of them is to get the authorization of the receiver to send them emails. You need to confirm that the person you are about to send marketing emails to, actually asked for them. There are a number of methods you can use to do that before you list their contacts. Also, request your target audience to give you their “real” addresses and not free ones.

The other thing is to maintain list hygiene. Check your contact list and remove those contacts that you send emails to but keep on bouncing. It they bounce for like 4 times in a month, chances are they are not reliable subscribers. Also ensure that the message is in right format and the content is well organized with text, images, website URL and attachments if any so that they are not easily blocked by ISPs.