How to Increase Email Deliverability and Email Marketing ROI

For an email to succeed, it must reach the inbox. Expert email marketers know that landing in the inbox requires strategy and attention to detail. But with the tips below, you can create the perfect conditions to increase your chances of success. Let’s talk about the steps you can take to boost your email deliverability and increase your email marketing revenue.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is the rate at which your emails arrive in the inbox. It’s not to be confused with email delivery which is the metric which gauges if emails land anywhere at all. Email deliverability is what counts.

Read on to find out how to increase email deliverability so that you can forge connections with your subscribers – and boost ROI.

Start with a real list

As far as shortcuts in email marketing, I’m sorry to say that there aren’t any. Some email marketers believe they can get results by purchasing a database of emails. First of all, this can get you in real legal trouble. Second of all, it’s not likely that you’ll get a good number of those emails to your desired location: the inbox.

If you want to increase your email deliverability, one of the most essential pieces of the puzzle is your email list. It’s as vital to a painter as his brush. First, you need to have a real email list made of email addresses that you’ve gathered organically.

Aside from that, here are two cornerstone concepts of healthy email list building:

Ask for permission

Avoid adding anyone to your email list without their explicit permission. Emailing anybody without getting their consent first can result in low engagement and even spam complaints. Both affect your email deliverability.

Set up double opt-in

Setting up double opt-in is a great way to create a slight barrier for anyone wanting to sign up. Why would you want to add a step and make your subscribers work to subscribe? That small amount of required effort will weed out the marginally interested from what should make up your base. It also helps reduce the number of problematic email addresses. Fake or damaging emails are one of the biggest obstacles to success with your email deliverability, which we will discuss in more detail.

Keep a fairly strict sending schedule

So many email marketers have a distorted idea about what their email marketing should be. They look at their emails as something that serves them. They send out emails and in exchange, they get a good return on their investment and effort. Emails are a means to get more.

Of course, your emails can’t entirely be a charity, but the primary objective is to serve the readers and keep them informed. It’s your job to entertain them or provide them with your specialty.

A part of serving your readers is to send emails in a timely fashion. Your emails should come out like clockwork and not only when you have something you’d like to sell them. Keep a schedule and your email deliverability will beat everyone who sends emails sporadically. It’s truly what separates the email pros from the rank amateurs.

To save time and make your life easier, consider the available technology that streamlines your email creation workflow. With the right tools, you’ll be able to create your emails faster and show up in your subscribers’ inboxes consistently.

Regularly remove emails from your email list

One of the most counterintuitive approaches to improving your email deliverability is to remove emails from your list regularly. You may wonder why this is so. If your content is awesome, why would you want to remove people from your list?

The first problem with this assumption is that some of the emails that end up on a list are not connected to a real human being. They’re fake. For instance, spam traps don’t belong to people but to anti-spam organizations that use them to lure spammers and block them. They spell disaster for your list. Not all spam traps can be detected, but advanced email scrubbing services will help you weed out many of them. If you’ve never used an email checker, start with a free email validation service.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other problematic email types that don’t belong on your email list. Some will use disposable emails to take advantage of some promotions you’re doing. They don’t want to give you their actual email. Those disposable emails will bounce. Any bounces will hurt your deliverability.

There are also role-based emails, such as office@ or admin@. They have minuscule marketing potential, but their potentially detrimental effects are great. Cull role-based emails from your list. You should also scrutinize most catch-all email addresses. Catch-all emails are associated with a domain that’s set up to accept any incoming email, even to addresses that don’t exist.

Removing inferior email addresses should be a regular part of your email program. Use your email validation service to bulk verify your list every other month at a minimum. It will do wonders for your email deliverability. You can also set up an email validation API on all of your forms. By checking emails in real-time, the email validation API will prevent fake and harmful contacts from getting on your list from the get-go.

Send emails that people want to open

The best way you can increase your email deliverability is when you create emails that a lot of people want to open. That sends a message to all of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that you’re not a spammer and that people are looking for your emails. If they don’t deliver your emails to the inbox, people will be upset or disappointed. Sending emails that people want to open is the cornerstone of email marketing and also the ultimate challenge.

If your emails are useful to people, but these other factors (timeliness, email validation, and having high-quality contacts) are neglected, you won’t succeed. Why? Because email marketing relies on your covering all of the bases.

For example, inattention to scheduling will result in deliverability problems even if you’re doing a great job of validating your list and sending great content. All of these elements of email success, from good subject lines to using an email checker rely on one another.

The question you should always ask yourself when you’re creating an email is whether any feature serves your reader or doesn’t. That’s the time to get in the head of your readers.

• What do they want?
• What will exceed their expectations?

When you know the answer, set out to deliver on it. Your email deliverability is counting on you to check all of the boxes and make a newsletter your subscribers cannot miss.