Increasing Email Deliverability Rates
Open rates for email campaigns are dropping every year - but is the open rate an acceptable statistic for measuring how successful your campaign is? If your email doesn’t reach your prospect, how can they open it?
To increase your return on investment from email marketing, first look at whether your intended recipients actually receive your email. Your deliverability rate, the percentage of your list that actually gets your email delivered to their inbox, is the first statistic that you need to improve. Here are some tips for doing it:
1. Use double opt-in to make sure that the recipient wants to be on your list. When a user signs up to your newsletter from your website, send a confirmation email that must be replied to (or a link that must be clicked) before users are placed on your list.
2. If some of the addresses on your list persistently ‘bounce’ (i.e. emails can not be delivered to them), remove them from your list. Service providers track bounced emails, and your email can be blocked if it causes regular bounces.
3. Choose your words carefully. If at all possible, avoid words such as ‘medication’, ‘money’, ‘poker’, ‘viagra’ and so on. There’s a good list of spam-words here.
4. The HTML code you use in your emails may be affecting your deliverability. Make sure your images use “alt” tags, be careful with tracking your emails for responses, and have a read of this article to make sure your HTML is up to scratch. If you put your email up on your website, you can validate the HTML code on the W3C Markup Validation Service.
As always, the Wikipedia website is a solid source of information. Check out their article on email spam. And be sure to keep your list, content and HTML clean if you want to get your message out.
