Email marketing remains extremely relevant to associations and their digital strategies. This is because successful email campaign drives more conversions than any other marketing channel.
According to the 2023 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, email remains one of the best channels for acquiring new members, and the channel most likely to generate the most membership renewals and reinstated lapsed members.
However, with so many businesses embracing the power of email marketing, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep email open rates high. Even if you’re following the best email marketing practices, and have mastered the art of email subject lines, it can only take your emails so far.
Associations first need to ensure that their emails are being delivered to the primary folder. This means going back and taking a look at the most basic level of your email campaigns – email deliverability!
So, want to prevent your emails from going to spam? Here’s how!
Contents
Firstly, what is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is a measure of how well your email system delivers emails to subscribers’ inboxes.
Not only is it important for emails to be delivered, but it also needs to land in the right folder.
We all know that Gmail and Outlook have sub-folders to filter emails, such as Junk/Spam, Other, Social and Promotional folders.
With emails being moved to the junk folder, your association needs to ensure that its emails are getting delivered, and more importantly – getting into your members’ primary folders!
This is why improving your email deliverability is paramount. The better your email performs, the better chance you’ll land in the primary folder.
In other words, it’d be a shame to spend significant time and effort creating your email campaigns only to have them arrive in the Promotion folder and never get noticed.
Key factors for email deliverability
If you’ve been receiving complaints from your members that your emails are landing in their Junk or Promotion folders, it’s time to put some hard work into improving your email deliverability. But what really matters for your deliverability?
Below, we’ve listed a few factors that you should consider. See which ones apply to your association!
Domain and IP reputation
Domain and IP reputation is a lot like the reputation we build as people. It’s affected by what you’ve done in the past and who you’re associated with.
ESPs look at the behaviour of your sending IP address (the unique identifier that defines the location for your emails) to determine whether your IP is trustworthy or not.
Factors such as sending volume, quality of contacts, and quality of content, help ESPs evaluate IP reputation.
While ESPs may largely influence an IP reputation, your domain reputation is not dependent on your ESP.
Domain reputation is based on the overall health of your sending domain. This means that your brand plays an important role in upholding a good reputation, and it is your responsibility to keep your domain reputation intact.
ESPs can only interpret your domain’s overall health built upon your email practices, data, and engagement, and will use certain algorithms to measure this health on a scale of 0 to 100.
Most importantly, your domain reputation will remain the same no matter what – even when changing IPs or ESPs. So be careful!
Like any good reputation, positive domain and IP reputations are valuable assets to your email deliverability and must be protected.
The worst thing that may happen to an IP or domain reputation is that it becomes blacklisted.
An email blacklist is a database with email addresses, IP addresses, and domain names that are known to send spam. Dozens of internet service providers may blacklist your account.
Reasons for being blacklisted:
- Hacked account – check your online security!
- Dirty mail list
- Unusual email behaviour – sending emails more often or to more subscribers than usual
- Too many complaints – when people mark your email as spam
- Unavailable (or difficult to see) unsubscribe link
- Complicated unsubscribe form – people may find it easier to press the spam button instead!
Subscriber behaviour
The way your subscribers behave and interact with your email campaigns is also a key factor to your email deliverability. But it can largely affect your domain and IP reputation too.
Here are some subscriber behaviours that send positive and negative triggers to ESPs, which are a good indication of your reputation:
Hard bounces
Hard bounce rates are one of the key factors to pay attention to as a high rate will negatively affect your email deliverability.
Hard bounces are emails that have been returned to the sender because there is a permanent reason that they can’t be delivered, such as an invalid or non-existing recipient’s email address.
ESPs record these instances and if they detect you’re sending to a lot of addresses that are bouncing, they may start marking your emails as junk or spam.
It is therefore crucial that your association monitors its hard bounce rate and cleans its email list to remove invalid addresses. You may even want to use a paid service to clean all hard bounces in your database.
Email content and the quality of the HTML code
Your email subject line, content and HTML code quality also have an impact on your email deliverability as ESPs use these factors when filtering emails.
When subscribers are engaged with your email content, and your HTML code is written correctly, it naturally increases your positive email deliverability metrics.
On the other hand, spammy or misleading content and using an outdated or unresponsive HTML code are key reasons why associations’ emails are delivered to junk folders.
Best practices for improving your email deliverability
Now that you know what email deliverability is and the key factors that affect it, it’s time for your association to improve wherever you can.
Here are some of the best deliverability practices to follow:
1. Contact Base Hygiene
Clean your email list
We can’t emphasise enough the importance of regularly cleaning your email list.
Building a clean audience for your email campaigns is the most effective way to keep your database free of unwanted contacts, which can taint the reputation of your IP and decrease email deliverability.
And as important as it is for your audience to grow, quality should always supersede quantity. You want to ensure that your email list is made of people who are engaged and interested in what you do!
What are the benefits of having a clean list?
- Keeps a good domain reputation
- Improves open rates, click-through rates and conversions
- Increases the delivery of your emails into the inbox
- Reduces costs of your email software
With everything said, make sure that you schedule time to clean your database! We recommend checking your list monthly.
Look to remove:
- Hard bounces
- Spam emails
- Non-marketable emails
- Invalid email addresses
- Emails that haven’t engaged with your members for a long time
Another way to keep your subscriber list clean is to ensure that you’re collecting quality leads in the first place. You can make sure of this quality by setting up double opt-in (sending confirmation emails after someone subscribes) or adding a captcha to the subscription form.
Create an email sunsetting strategy
It can be disheartening to say goodbye to your subscribers. But going through your database and removing subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a while is essential for improving your deliverability.
The technical term for this is email sunsetting.
It’s defined as the process of identifying inactive subscribers, and building a strategy that will either re-engage or delete them from your email list.
Here are some ideas for developing your strategy:
- Establish sunsetting policies. For example, if you send emails everyday, after every month check for those who haven’t read anything. And if you send emails every week, check every 3-4 months.
- Run regular re-engagement emails with inactive subscribers.
- Notify people that they’ve been removed for your list, with a link to resubscribe.
- Consider running retargeting emails to your unsubscribers.
Make it easy for your unsubscribers to leave
It’s essential to make your unsubscribe process as easy as possible. It reduces the chance of people reporting your emails as spam and damaging your domain reputation.
Here are some tips to manage your email unsubscribes:
- Make the unsubscribe link big enough so that people using mobile devices can click on it easily.
- Provide a one or two click unsubscribe process.
- Ask your unsubscribers why they want to unsubscribe, and provide them with other ways to keep in touch – for example, social media.
- Give subscribers the option to unsubscribe from only one type of email, or remain subscribed to the less frequent emails
- Don’t require your subscribers to log into your app to unsubscribe.
- Use a common phrase like “Unsubscribe” so people can quickly find it in the message.
2. Encourage engagement
Email engagement is vital to improving your positive email deliverability metrics and ensuring membership growth for your association.
By sending emails that receive high levels of positive engagement, ESPs not only view you as a credible sender, but reward you with improved deliverability.
So, you want to encourage email engagement from your members as much as you can, right?
Create a new-subscriber sequence
A new-subscriber email sequence allows your association to encourage engagement and action from your members in several different ways.
- Ask your new subscribers to save you as a safe contact, flag your email as important, and move your email to their primary folders.
- Have your Opt in / Sign up page go to a ‘Thank you’ page with instructions on how to ensure they’re getting the mail
- Encourage subscribers to reply to your emails! In the first email, you can ask them to respond back with a question.
- Ask your members to “whitelist” your email address and include clear instructions on how to do so. Here is an example:
3. Improve your credibility
Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC
To avoid ending up in the junk folder, it’s essential that you build your association’s credibility amongst your ESPs and members.
You can do this by setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which are authentication methods that provide security for your domain and help ESPs verify that your emails are not malicious or spam.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) specifies mail servers that are allowed to send emails for your domain, which prevents deceptive emails coming into your organisation.
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds an encrypted signature to the header of all outgoing emails so that servers can verify your email hasn’t been changed after being sent.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) specifies how your domain handles suspicious emails.
However, these methods are fairly technical. So, check that your organisation’s IT staff have these set up in your domain address and email system.
Avoid using 'No-Reply'
Another way to improve your credibility with your emails is to avoid using ‘no reply’ email addresses (i.e. noreply@yourwebsite.com).
They can harm your organisation’s deliverability as it blocks two-way communication with your members! Instead, use your name in the email address!
What if things go pear-shaped?
If something goes seriously wrong with your email deliverability or reputation, like your members start no longer receiving your emails, here are a few techniques that you can use to improve the situation. Note that we only recommend using these techniques for a short period of time – and only in extreme cases.
- Identify and target your most engaged subscribers and send very relevant emails only to this group.
- Send only high engagement emails for a period of time (for example, transactional emails).
- If you’ve just moved to a new ESP, don’t forget about IP address warm-up: don’t send too many emails too fast and, instead, “warm up” by sending a small number of highly targeted emails and increasing this number over a few weeks.
Email deliverability is the make-or-break of a successful email campaign.
And once your association ‘makes’ this foundational level, you can delve deeper into ensuring your campaigns’ success and better connecting with your members.
Want more help creating a successful email campaign? We’ve developed an Email Pre-Send Checklist so you never have to worry about pressing the ‘Send’ button again! You can download it here.