Intro
In email marketing, you might have heard of the term email deliverability. That basically means how many percent of the emails you sent out during your email marketing campaign actually gets delivered to your recipients. The higher your email deliverability, the better your email campaign return on investment (ROI) will be.
Setting your email deliverability benchmark
How you derive this number will depend on your desired ROI. Every email you send out during your campaign incurs a monetary cost. If the email ended up being bounced due to an email address that no longer exists then you would have wasted the cost of sending that email. On the other hand, if your email gets delivered successfully into your audience’ inbox, they can read it and your goals would have been achieved. Your goals being to get your recipients to open and read your emails.
If you don’t wish think too much about your benchmark, a good starting point would be to set your deliverability benchmark at 80%. As you keep performing email marketing campaigns, you can see your actual deliverability rate and the accompanying costs of sending them. You can then choose to adjust your benchmark according to those factors. Once you are comfortable with your benchmark number, then try to achieve that for every marketing campaign.
How to ensure you hit the benchmark regularly
Now that you have set a benchmark number, you need to practice some techniques to ensure that you can hit it on a regular basis. Try the following best practices for a good deliverability rate.
- Build your mailing list via double opt-in even if it takes longer
- Have an unsubscribe link in every email that you send out
- Respect your subscribers’ wishes if they choose to unsubscribe
- Regularly check if your mail server domain or IP is in any anti-spam blacklist
- Make sure your email subject and content don’t contain any spammy keywords
- Clean your email list with MailboxValidator to remove stale/non-existent emails
What happens if your deliverability rate drops dramatically?
In reality, you may not always hit your deliverability benchmark due to factors that are not within your control. However, a huge drop may indicate that something is very wrong. That’s why it’s very important to clean your mailing list to remove any unreachable emails. If you keep emailing email addresses that are no longer active, the email provider may choose to put you in an anti-spam blacklist. Hence the need to regularly check the blacklists as mentioned above.
When your deliverability rate drops, that means your email marketing campaign has been a failure. You have wasted monetary cost during the sending of the emails. In addition to that, you’ve lost the opportunity to let your readers know about your upcoming sale or promotion that you’re having. That means potential income has gone down the drain.
Conclusion
Keep following the best practices laid out above and you’ll soon find your deliverability rate going up. When that happens, you’ll also find more and more people reading your emails and hopefully clicking on your Call-To-Actions (CTAs) to visit your website. More web visitors in turn means higher sales conversion which will boost your sales revenue.
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