When email marketers discover they have deliverability issues, they wonder why their open and click-through rates have dropped. Why are my emails Spam? Why are my emails being blocked? What went wrong, etc.? When faced with such questions, we always recommend answering two:
- To whom do you email?
- How do you email?
Honest answers will reveal the root cause of your deliverability issues.
Who Do You Email? Choosing Your Targeted Market
The list you send usually determines your sender reputation and Inbox rate. Email marketing has evolved beyond simple ‘Send’ and ‘Forget’ campaigns. ISP email filters use many signals to decide whether an email is Inbox or Spam. User engagement, bounce emails, user complaints, and spam trap hits are examples. They help ISP build sender reputation.
Engaged Segmentation
Email service providers provide useful metrics like open, click-through, unsubscribe, and complaint rates. All of these metrics should be analyzed before creating an email campaign.
With user engagement, we look at how long a subscriber has been on the list and when they last clicked a message. What’s the point? Remember that user engagement is a factor in email placement. The more recipients interact, the better the sender’s reputation.
That said, you should consider different approaches for various subscriber segments. Subscribing but never opening or not opening for a long time should be treated differently than subscribing but recently opening.
Depending on your sending frequency, you may want to segment based on the last 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. In the chosen time frame, the most active group responded to your emails. Their chances of buying again are high. Send them content that complements their purchases or downloads.
Consider creating separate campaigns for subscribers who opened the previous message and those who did not.
Send an active group a re-engagement campaign. Non-re-engaging subscribers should be treated as unsubscribed and removed from your database.
Email marketers frequently send the same campaign to all subscribers or segment them based on criteria other than email-like customer behavior. But if you really want to improve or maintain your reputation, you need to track who opens and engages with emails the most, and build your email program around different subscriber segments.
Spam by Users
Data collected by mailbox providers like Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services can also help determine if you’re targeting the right people (SNDS).
Google Postmaster Tools shows IP and domain reputation data. Keep track of your reputation’s ups and downs, and match them up with your email campaigns. You should also monitor user-reported spam. Notate the days when it is higher than normal and consider the cause. Did you send nonsense? Was it sent too quickly? Did you send to a dormant
Microsoft’s SNDS work with dedicated IP addresses. Sign up with SNDS to get reports on your IP’s email traffic. Filtered messages, complaint rate, and spam trap hits are important. This data helps you understand why your deliverability to Outlook and Hotmail subscribers is declining.
Identifying your target audience is the first step to resolving deliverability issues. Everyone isn’t right. Although you want to send to everyone, it isn’t prudent to do so.
You use recent opens and clicks to create engagement-based segments. The best audience is from 0 to 6 months. Your strongest audience will be those who have engaged in the last 14 or 30 days, but that is a small segment compared to the volume most email marketers want to send.
Focus on the key email metrics: opens, clicks, spam complaints, and unsubscribes to avoid being overwhelmed by data. You may be sending emails in circles trying to solve a problem that could be solved by simply addressing who you are sending to or the ISP you are using.
How Do You Email? Sending Infrastructure Setup
Email marketers usually have no issues setting up their domains and IP addresses. If you’re concerned about sender reputation, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Isolating Reputations
If you still want to email an unconfirmed or unengaged list, use a subdomain. You keep your brand and establish a separate reputation for the subdomain.
The same method should be used to separate mail streams based on email type. For marketing emails, set up a subdomain under your primary domain. Separate mail streams by subdomain to protect the primary domain’s reputation and ensure delivery of important transactional emails to Inbox.