Successful email marketing requires more than clever content and beautiful design. All that work means nothing if the email never reaches the inbox, and that’s why email deliverability matters, especially for enterprise companies. Email deliverability isn’t a technical detail assigned to the IT team and then forgotten about or something to be ignored until it becomes an issue — it’s a core performance metric for enterprise email marketers.
When carefully written and designed emails don’t reach the inbox, you’re missing opportunities and wasting valuable resources. In this article, we focus on five strategies to ensure high email deliverability for enterprise email marketers.
1. Know your tech stack
At enterprise companies — and sometimes small businesses as well — the email service provider (ESP) sending marketing emails isn’t the only tool that can impact email deliverability. Is your sales team using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or other platform to send cold outreach emails? Is your company sending invoices out of another system?
Every tool sending email from your domain can impact your overall deliverability, which means it’s important for email marketers to have a general understanding of the entire tech stack. At the very least, you need to know who manages the different platforms in the tech stack, so you know who to contact with questions.
When any new tool gets added to the mix, think about how it could impact your overall domain reputation. Is there a strategy in place for sub-domains? Are the necessary steps being taken for domain authentication when new tools are added?
2. Send permission-based emails
One of the best things you can do to ensure high email deliverability over time is to follow best practices for sending permission-based emails. In other words, only send email to people who’ve opted in to receive your emails. No buying lists. No scraping email addresses. No adding previous unsubscribes back to your list to boost your numbers.
Effective mail marketing is about building trust with your audience. When you break that trust and send unwanted email or send to old addresses, your bounce rate and spam complaint rate will increase, which hurts your sender reputation and negatively impacts email deliverability.
That also means the unsubscribe process should be easy — as easy as a single click. If someone no longer wants to receive your emails, make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your list. If you make it difficult to unsubscribe, you’ll likely see an increase in spam complaints from people who want off your list but can’t navigate the barriers you’ve put in place.
3. Segment and clean your list
Quality matters more than quantity on your email marketing sends. Yes, it’s tempting to go after the big numbers and send to everyone every time, but it’s not best practice. Strategically segmenting your list so subscribers receive relevant messages can boost your engagement and help sustain high email deliverability over time.
There are many ways to segment your list. You can ask subscribers what types of messages they want to receive and offer a preference center to give them ongoing control of what hits their inbox. You can segment based on subscriber data for email engagement and past purchases. You can set up automations that send relevant messages in response to actions taken by the subscriber.
Then, there’s the topic of list hygiene. Again, quality over quantity here. Make sure bounces and unsubscribes get removed from the list promptly. Most major ESPs take care of that for you, but be sure you understand how your ESP handles those and any action you need to take to keep your list clean.
Think about how you want to manage unengaged subscribers. Are you looking at both email engagement data and purchase history when deciding who is unengaged or inactive? Do you have a strategy in place to start re-engaging those customers when they first start lapsing rather than when they’re completely unengaged? Are you watching out for old email addresses that could turn into spam traps?
4. Create high-quality content
Content plays a role in ensuring high email deliverability, too. Are you sending content your subscribers want to receive? Are you taking the time to write engaging subject lines, or are your subject lines an afterthought once the email is designed?
Speaking of designing the email, are you using both live text and images with alt tags in your email? Are you testing how your email renders across multiple platforms to ensure a good user experience? Are you leveraging any interactive design elements to engage your subscribers?
The better your content, the more people will engage with it. Take the time to understand your audience and create high-quality email content they want to receive.
5. Be proactive about monitoring deliverability
It’s always best to catch deliverability issues early before they become a major problem. For enterprise companies, that means putting deliverability monitoring in place before you need it. Monitoring open rates isn’t enough for enterprise email volume. You want a tool that watches your email metrics (bounces, opens, spam complaints) plus the bigger things like domain and sender reputation, spam traps, and blocklists.
Often, enterprise senders brush off the need for deliverability monitoring because they’ve never had an issue before and think they don’t need it. In some companies, they’re worried about the email marketing budget and consider it an unnecessary expense. But catching deliverability issues early can save you time and money. If you wait until you see a downward trend in open rates to investigate deliverability issues, it’s going to take much more time to resolve the problem than if you get an early alert from your monitoring tool. That means you’re losing money from poor deliverability and spending money to fix it at the same time.
There are many factors that go into sustaining high email deliverability over time, but it’s a manageable process for enterprise companies who take a strategic approach to email marketing. When you know your tech stack, send permission-based emails, segment your list, send engaging content, and monitor your deliverability, you can sustain high email deliverability and ensure your emails make it to the inbox.
Want a deeper dive on all things email deliverability? Download our Mastering Email Deliverability: Strategies and Best Practices whitepaper.
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