Getting Emails into the Inbox

Trouble-Shooting Email Deliverability

Sending newsletters out but no-ones getting them? In this article we take a look at different things that might be impacting your e-newsletters getting into the inbox of your subscribers.

Check the Numbers

• Is your open rate 30% or higher?
• Is your click-through rate 1% or higher?

If so, you’re doing alright and probably enough of your emails are getting into inboxes.

Individual Subscribers

If you are getting the above numbers, but have received complaints or comments from your subscribers that they are not receiving your emails, it’s likely they are landing in their updates or others folder. Many people are not aware they have these folders, here’s an article about the updates and others folder.

Increase Relevancy

Increasing relevancy will increase open rates and reduce unsubscribe rates. Doing this will help with your overall trustworthiness score which the email systems use to determine if an email is junk or legitimate. Therefore increasing relevancy increases deliverability.

Segmenting your subscribers and sending different emails to different segments nearly always makes the email more relevant.

Segment your audience based on their engagement, interests, location and connection with your product or service.

Engagement

Different ideas for segmenting your emails segmented by engagement include

• Send frequently engaged contacts a discount code for newly launched products.
• Send subscribers who haven’t opened or read an email for at least 6 months a non sales email. An education or information piece that re-engages with them on a different level.

Interests

If you have consistently recorded interests in your list you will be in a position to send emails based on this. Examples of emails segmented by interest include

• People who often purchase books for pre-schoolers being sent emails featuring children’s books and people who often purchase travel books being sent emails with travel related books.
• People who have signed up for mindfulness training receiving emails that pertain to this, while people who have signed up for Yoga classes receiving emails pertaining to this.

Role

If your subscriber list records the role or job of the person you may be able to segment on this. Examples of emails segmented by role include

• Sending the CEO and Managing Director short emails that summarise the key benefits of considering an improvement.
• Sending the administrative team emails that motivate them to contribute to the value of the organisation and make their work easier.

Location

Of all the segmentation options location is usually the easiest one to do, if the postcode, state or country has been recorded. Typical reasons to segment on location are

• An upcoming event is held in a city location so only subscribers living in that city are sent the email.
• The information is only relevant to that country so only subscribers living in that country are sent the email.

Increasing the relevancy can also be thought of as decreasing the irrelevancy. Lots of businesses and organisations send irrelevant emails. Think about reducing this. Targeted emails almost always get better engagement than generic bulk sends, so it’s worth putting in the effort to segment your list and send emails which are relevant to the recipients.

Frequency

How often are you sending marketing emails? If you are sending every week you might be sending too often. Scale this back to sending once a fortnight or once a month. Don’t send less than once every season (i.e. once every 3 months).

Getting the frequency right will increase open rates and therefore increases email deliverability.

Tone

If the tone of every email is a sales pitch – something that you want someone to purchase, attend, sign up for or make a booking – it’s too much. Certainly you want to promote your products and services in your emails, but not everyone and not every time. Mix it up. Sprinkle in a motivational quote, a helpful tip, a funny incident, a fabulous photo or a blooper here and there. These quotes, tips and photos need to be relevant to the services or products you are selling – don’t send random stuff just because it interests you – use topics that you are uniquely seen to have authority in or knowledge of and to speak on, given the business or organisation you are representing.

Getting the right tone will increase open rates and therefore increases email deliverability.

From Address

Ensure the email is coming from business or organisation name and not a personal name.

Authenticate You Domain

Authenticating your domain helps prevent your emails from bouncing or ending up in spam. Most bulk email providers (eg. MailChimp. Brevo, MailerLite) will provide a way in which you can authenticate your domain.

Here’s our article on how to authenticate your domain.

Get Permission

Send emails only to people who give you permission to email them. Do not send emails to recipients who don’t know who you are—otherwise, you’re at a high risk of receiving spam complaints, which can cause major deliverability issues. Do not buy email lists; they often contain outdated or irrelevant contacts, they risk damaging your brand reputation and diminishing the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Practice Good and Consistent Data Entry

As you collect subscriber’s names and details ensure you are accurately and consistently entering the data into the database.

Clean Your List

Good data entry aside, there’s nearly always a time (our recommendation is twice a year) to download your entire list and check it. Typical things to check for are

• Accurate first name so that when you merge the first name field in your email looks good
  • First name is in sentence case, that is the first letter is upper case followed by lower case letters
  • Remove any first names that are nonsensical
• State, regions, provinces and areas, countries are consistently recorded. For example, South Australia, where I live, can be entered
  • SA
  • S.A.
  • Sth Aust
  • South Australia
• Decide which one your list will use and use it 100% consistently so that you can segment on it

Once your list is cleaned, re-import it into your database.

Final Thoughts

Email deliverability is about adhering to best practices. It may seem a long and exhaustive list, but it’s more about habits and consistency.

Further Reading

MailChimp provide an excellent article on repairing your email reputation. Their article provided inspiration for this article and can be read in full here.

MailChimp Newsletter Course

Learn how to upload your list and create your e-newsletter in MailChimp. Especially suitable for business-to-business and not-for-profits.

Step-by-step videos with screenshots, examples, explanations and demonstrations.