The State of Email Deliverability: 11 Pro Tips for Inbox Success

Deliverability is the most critical aspect of email marketing. Messages that fail to reach the recipient’s primary inbox can end up in the spam folder, bounce back to the sender due to invalid addresses, get blocked by the recipient's email provider, or end up in a promotional tab. All of these inbox fails can lead to frustrated customers and prospects, missed opportunities, lower campaign engagement and ROI, loss of brand credibility and trust, and so much more.

The cost of undelivered emails for U.S. businesses has reached $59.5+ billion annually, according to a recent Mailtrap study. Another study reports that emails see an average deliverability rate of 83.1%, meaning one in six emails never makes it to the inbox. The silver lining is that the majority of email marketers are putting in the hard work needed to get deliverability right, even as new challenges emerge.

Here are 11 strategies we use to drive successful deliverability across our clients’ email  acquisition campaigns:

1. Achieve a positive sender reputation by meeting Internet service provider (ISP) guidelines. ISPs keep track of blacklisted IP addresses and will block those they deem suspicious to protect their users from spam. To prevent any impact on the reputation of your main or root domain, which would hit your business hard, we recommend using a subdomain for email campaigns.

 

2. Choose your platform wisely. As noted in our recent blog, sending  “cold” acquisition emails through a CRM platform is not only potentially against the platform's policy, but it can also result in significant deliverability issues and lower open rates. Acquisition email platforms are ideal for “cold” or third-party data campaigns because they have different standards for white-listing, reputation management, and IP address cleanliness. 

 

3. Use a warm-up process. We recommend “warming up” contacts by sending the first “cold” email through an email prospecting transmission platform. We do this for our clients at OMI using our co-developed platform. From there, we can transfer any contacts that open or click the initial email to a client’s CRM platform for ongoing outreach, such as sequenced nurture emails and automated follow-ups.

 

4. Abide by basic authentication policies such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC to boost your domain reputation and gain easier access – via ISPs -- to the intended inbox. Update for 2024: DMARC adoption has become more critical than ever this year due to new mandates by Google and Yahoo for large email senders, according to Dark Reading. 

 

5. Adhere to applicable laws, such as CAN-SPAM in the U.S., CASL in Canada, and GDPR in the European Union.

 

6. Encourage recipients to reply to your messages. This sends a positive signal to ISPs because it demonstrates that your prospects and customers are interested in what you have to say. Don’t use a "no reply" address.

 

7. Include safe-sender links in your messages, such as a clear link guiding your audiences to add your company's "from" address to safe sender lists or address books.

 

8. Don’t use attachments. Emails with attachments are more heavily scrutinized by SPAM filters.

 

9. Keep file sizes low. Emails over 100KB will likely be blocked.

 

10. Use a proper image-to-text ratio for your content. An 80% text/20% image ratio is viewed as a good standard to follow.

 

11. Maintain email list hygiene. Promptly delete unsubscribes from your database and remove spam traps and bounced addresses frequently. Keep contacts updated and ensure the data is error-free.

 

Email list hygiene is such a persistent challenge that many brands turn to experts to keep their marketing data clean. We offer data cleansing at OMI and it’s one of our most popular services. Additionally, as a third-party data provider, we are hyper-focused on email data quality and understand its importance for fueling effective customer acquisition campaigns. Our B2B2C contact data file, which contains 145 million contacts with email addresses and manager, director- and professional-level and above titles, features a 30-day 95% email validity guarantee.

 

Email Deliverability: A Case Study Example

Recently our team executed an email acquisition campaign for a Fortune 500 client – a leading telecom provider. After experiencing lower than expected cold email delivery rates and prospect conversions using their own CRM platform, the provider came to us in need of a solution for improving ROI across their acquisition campaigns.

We proposed and executed a 90-day email transmission and campaign management pilot campaign consisting of 250k contacts three times per month for three months, with 250k additional unique contacts used for the second and third months. Of the 750k records in the campaign, approximately 40% were sourced from OMI data and the balance came from other data vendors. Using two platforms to deliver the emails, we were able to transfer contacts that engaged with the content to the client’s CRM platform.

Key campaign outcomes included:

• An average deliverability rate of 92.66% by the third wave – very high for an acquisition campaign.
• Nearly 56,000 contacts delivered to the client’s CRM platform, driving strong sales and setting the stage for future opportunities for upselling.
• The first and second campaign wave realized 150 sales, resulting in $500k in Lifetime Value (LTV) and achieving an ROI of 25 to 1 based on the transmission costs.
• Total LTV ROI for the campaign reached $1MM, with half of the revenue attributed to direct mail (with one piece sent by the client) and the other half attributed to OMI’s three email transmissions.

For the complete case study, go here. Reach out to our team today to let us know how we can support you in optimizing your email or omni-channel campaigns.