Just like water coming from the tap, many email marketers take getting into the inbox for granted. A marketer sends an email campaign and it reaches the designated recipients, right? Deliverability only becomes an issue for these senders, when the emails don’t arrive at their destination anymore. So what is email deliverability really about?
Real Deliverability means following email sender best practices
Deliverability is really all about being the best sender you can be. Real deliverability is making sure you are employing email sender best practices, which will give your email messages the biggest chance to reach your subscriber’s inboxes.
Ignoring sender / deliverability best practices can heavily cripple your other efforts. Reaching your email marketing goals, increasing open rates, click rates, customer loyalty or conversions becomes pretty hard if your email doesn’t reach the inbox. Your perfectly written, designed and targeted email can just as easily end up in the spam box, where chances of survival are very slim.
Clear opt-in permission
One of the biggest topics in this respect is getting clear opt-in permission. If you want to increase the chance of reaching the inbox, make sure that you are a welcome guest in the inbox of the recipient. That means they have given you crystal clear opt-in permission to send. It makes sense both ROI-wise as well as when looking at the legal aspects of email marketing.
By making sure your customers have given their opt-in and want to receive emails from your brand, you are most likely in compliance with the current (and future) laws. This goes far beyond CAN-SPAM, but it will ensure you won’t run into surprises dealing with international legislation.
Direct and in-direct effects to deliverability
An clear opt-in permission strategy has direct effect on deliverability in another way too. Permission best practices very often aligns with better data quality – the start of which is to clean your list of bad data and make sure that no bad subscriptions (that could bounce or directly lead to spam complaints) come in. Added to that, recipients who actively opted-in, most of the time are also more engaged, opening more of your emails (and converting).
Better email delivery with sender best practices
Per definition, the email delivery metrics the ISPs use to determine if your email ends up in the inbox or spam box, will be relatively good if you use sender best practices and clear permission. At least you won’t look like a very heavy duty spammer, because negative metrics like bounce and complaint rates will be lower and positive metrics like opens will be higher.
What deliverability is really about
So what does deliverability boil down to? For starters, it is asking for permission. Second it is sending email that people really want to receive. By adhering to deliverability and sender best practices you can make sure that you are a welcome guest in the recipients inbox, and you might end up with the email delivery rates to prove it.
Image via Flickr
“A clear opt-in permission strategy means better data quality”
