Making Money On-line: 5 Things Email Marketers Can Do Right Now To Improve Their Deliverability

Friday 3 March 2017

5 Things Email Marketers Can Do Right Now To Improve Their Deliverability

In my role here at Oracle running Global Deliverability, I have many chances to talk to customers and prospects at all points on the deliverability life cycle. I speak with prospects coming from the depths of deliverability despair, who are desperately searching for a coherent strategy to improve inbox placement.

I work with our existing Oracle clients, who are generally looking to go to the next level, or examine a specific event. They are interesting conversations, and the thread that ties all of them together, is the desire to improve. Today, I wanted to try and bring some of the most common issues/resolutions together if you are looking for a jump start to deliverability success.

Here are five things that you can do today to improve your deliverability metrics, and push more mail to the actual inbox.

1. Stop Mailing to 9+ Month Inactives

This one is a quick way to see real results. Look, if someone hasn’t engaged with your email in 9 months, it’s a pretty safe bet they aren’t going to do it now. ISP’s turn some of these addresses into honeypots, and it’s an easy way to see who takes care of their list. Sending to these addresses is a very dangerous proposition, yet many marketers just don’t want to give them up. We understand they can be large numbers of addresses, but all they are doing is dragging down your deliverability.

2. Pay Close Attention to New Subscribers

The first three months of a new subscriber are the most critical. Did you send them a welcome message that explained how to interact with your product or site? Do they understand how to change their subscription without unsubscribing or complaining? Did you manage to get them engaged early? If you don’t see engagement in the first three months, the chances of later engagement is reduced drastically. Be sure and send a welcome message (or a series of them) to educate your customers about your product and how you to plan to communicate with them.

3. Check Out Your Sign-up Process

We talk over and over again about how important explicit permission is for your program. People don’t like to be tricked, and deliverability numbers bear this out. Programs that gather explicit permission as a whole, are more successful. By gathering explicit permission, you can eliminate the confused complaints and the person who banishes you to a junk folder, only to sit there and deflate your deliverability reputation in silent.

4. Stop What’s Not Working

This one seems simple, but you would be surprised at how many times this is overlooked. Senders have a campaign they simply “must” send out, even though the stats are awful. We understand that there may be certain campaigns that are unavoidable, but look carefully at your stats, and stop doing the same thing over and over again. Everyone has a couple of campaigns that perform better than the others, and you can learn from those. Take the good and improve on the bad.

5. Understand Your Partner Reputation

Who you hang out with reflects on who you are. You’ve heard that from childhood, but it still applies today. We’ve already established that domain reputation is important, but it isn’t only your own domain reputation that matters. When you partner with another company in email, ISP’s also look up their reputation and it is a part of your deliverability. Think about the company you keep before you include them in your marketing.

If you follow these five steps, you will see an improvement in your deliverability. What are you waiting for, get moving right now!

But Wait There Is Indeed More

Download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers to learn even more on how to achieve email deliverability that really delivers.