Email deliverability: what is it and how to improve it?

Email marketing is a process of sending emails to people who have given their consent to receive them, usually in exchange for something. This exchange can be about a brand's product or service, quality information or exclusive promotions, among others. Within this digital marketing practice, deliverability is defined as the percentage of emails that manage to land in the recipient's inbox.

To improve deliverability, marketers should ensure that all their email campaigns comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. They should also take care that their email content does not include detectable spam words or misleading subject lines. Email service providers such as the HubSpot platform offer various tools to create emails and subsequently measure their deliverability rate. The deliverability rate depends on a number of factors. These can vary depending on the objectives of the campaign, but special attention should be paid to the content, sender, sending frequency and email software.

why is email deliverability useful?

• To know the impact of your campaign: By tracking email deliverability, the company can find out which people opened their emails and at what time. This information is valuable for the marketing team, for example, to know which actions are having the greatest impact on subscribers and which factors increase their interaction.
• Define the status of your customers: Deliverability tracking is also useful to know if a potential customer is ready to make a purchase or not, i.e. if they are sufficiently nurtured by the marketing team. This can be found out by knowing their interaction with the emails by the open rate.
• Evaluate content: Monitoring the deliverability of email marketing serves to make improvements internally, i.e. it allows the company to question whether the content it is offering to users is sufficiently interesting or useful.
• Identify errors: The evaluation of the deliverability of emails allows to track campaigns. This information reveals the cancellation rate. The marketing department should investigate what is the reason for the abandonment and cancellations. Thus, it can optimise it for future actions.

How to improve deliverability in 5 steps

1. Obtain consent

In email marketing, consent is used to grant verifiable permissions to send emails. To accept, recipients must take an action. This is usually by filling out a form or selecting a checkbox. Consent must be freely given. To build a long-term relationship of trust with customers, the following actions are recommended:

• Do not send mailings to purchased lists: Buying a contact list may seem like a quick option, but it has several drawbacks. On the one hand, you will share contacts with competing companies in the market. On the other hand, you will not get permission to send messages to the contacts so your deliverability rate will decrease.
• Enforce GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation guarantees the user's permission to consent. It gives trust in the brand and is indispensable in any digital marketing strategy.

2. Create contact lists

A contact list functions as a database to gather all the information about a company's contacts. It is recommended to have a contact list to be able to filter contact information and analyse how they came to the company and what their interests are.

Before sending an email, the marketing team should ask the following questions about the subscribers:

• what is their origin?
• what action was used to get them on the contact list?
• how often do they interact with the brand?
• what stage of the buyer's journey are they in?

3. Detail what your communication will look like

Email marketing providers such as HubSpot should describe the Acceptable Use Policy to provide confidence to subscribers. The contact should know how the company has obtained their consent, what use will be made of their data and how they will communicate with the brand, i.e. explain the content you will send, its frequency, who you are and why you will send it.

4. Create quality content

The content of your emails must meet the expectations of subscribers. Creating quality content is essential to capture the user's attention and build customer loyalty. Performance metrics will help to identify which content is successful among your contacts. Quality content must be:

• Original.
• Relevant.
• Useful.
• Shareable.
• Clear.

5. Analyse interactions

After sending emails, it is key to analyse metrics. Exploring subscriber interaction, open or click-through rates will help you to understand your campaign performance and deliverability.

what is the ideal frequency to send emails?

To engage the target audience and build trust it is important to send the email at the right time. This may vary depending on the objective of the company or the contact. In general, it is recommended to wait an average of 7-8 days to send an email. Always take into account the relevance of the message and the needs of the user.

5 tips to optimise email deliverability

1. Take care of segmentation

Segmentation is used to divide customers from the database into small groups based on their interests, tastes, needs or stage in the sales funnel. To improve the email delivery rate is key to pay attention to the segments. This will help not to resend emails or schedule shipments to segments that do not correspond to such marketing action.

2. Clean up your contact list

Keeping the database up to date will help to stop communicating with those contacts who are no longer interested in the brand or have fulfilled all their needs with the company.

3. Pay attention to content language

Modifying the language of the content depending on the action you want to take will ensure a higher open rate. In other words, you cannot use the same language for a welcome email as for a loyalty email.

4. Personalise your content

User-centred content will have a higher open rate. You can personalise the sending of emails through the subscriber information stored in the database.

5. Offer internal information about the brand

To improve email delivery, the information offered should be exclusive and of high quality. Rewarding subscribers with exclusive offers, additional information or promotions will serve to improve the customer-company relationship.