While social media is all the rage, email marketing just keeps plugging along and doing its job. Companies go out of their way to get on social media and place ads while email does the heavy lifting of bringing in the sales. Some pundits in the digital marketing world have gone so far as to declare email marketing dead. Not by a long shot is email marketing dead.
Email marketing remains the king and queen of the digital marketing world. It just goes about its work much quieter. Emails bring you higher click rates and higher conversions rates. It’s ROI is through the roof; marketers are still not entirely sure how to measure the ROI of social media.
Email is only effective, however, when it arrives at the intended recipient. Having your marketing team go through your list and check for ways to improve it is something that should happen regularly. Your delivery rate is calculated by how many emails you send versus how many emails bounce. An email is not delivered when it hard bounces. That means either the address itself is wrong or the domain doesn’t exist. Your deliverability rate sounds the same but is a bit different. Email servers have put in so many safeguards these days to protect users from spam that you may not know that your emails are getting caught in a company’s spam filters. Here are some tips to get you past the filters and into your consumers’ inboxes.
1 – Prime Your ISP as a Trusted Source
First, you will want to “prime” your IP, so to speak, as a trusted IP with email ISPs. Start by sending your email in small batches to customers on your list. As these people open and engage with your email, it raises the credibility of your IP with ISPs. As weird as it sounds, this is a tested method and will help you get your email into the inboxes of your guests. Continue to send your email in batches until you have submitted your content to your whole list.
2 – Legitimize Your Mailings with SPF
The term SPF means one thing for sunscreen and something totally different for email marketing. For email marketing, it stands for sender policy framework. This is an email authentication technique that permits email servers to recognize your legitimacy. A technique spammers are currently using is to clone emails of legitimate businesses in an attempt to get you to click on their spam. Having an SPF helps email servers tell who is real and who is not. The average company sends out hundreds, if not thousands, of emails at one time. If you do not have this authentication, it is a red flag to an email server. This helps you get your email into the inbox of your customer.
3 – Audit Your Mailing List Subscribers
Did you know there was such a thing as a sender reputation score?If you didn’t, now you do! And that means you should check yours. The company Return Path can pull together the data needed to calculate this metric for you. If your score is low, that could also be a contributing factor for why your emails are not getting through to your customers. ISPs set up protections to block scores below a certain number. If you are below that number, you are not getting through.
4 – Stick with Opt-In Subscribers Only
Get rid of your automatic enroll email button and add a double opt-in feature. I know, this is a real bummer to hear. This could have a drastic impact on your numbers. But guess what? There is more risk with keeping the basic opt-in button than using this method. If a customer has gone through a two-step opt-in process, that means they really want to be on your email list. The previous way of requiring people to uncheck an opt-in box is starting to backfire. People do not always realize that they have to uncheck that little box. Once they start getting emails from you, they get super irritated and report you as spam. Email servers are getting extremely picky these days. Some block you when you receive as few as three spam complaints per one thousand emails sent. Don’t fall into this category. Take the hit to your numbers and go for the double opt-in. You should only want people on your list that want to be there anyway.
For all of these reasons and more, AfterOffers is focused on only delivering the highest of quality subscribers through our 100% opt-in email lead generation process.
5 – Periodically purge your email list.
Hard bounces tend to be auto removed by most email marketing programs. But if for some reason they are still there, get them off ASAP. If someone isn’t engaging with your content, get rid of them. Any time a list is in flux, this also gives you credibility with the protection mechanisms that email servers are putting in place. A spammer wouldn’t care about the quality of their list, but a real company would. Take the time to do some cleaning from time to time.
Hopefully, these tips help you get your emails into the inbox of your customers!
Grow Your Mailing List Day with 100% Opt-In Email Marketing
As mentioned earlier, if you want to have a success email marketing and lead generation strategy, you need to focus on high-quality data.
With the many costs associated with email and online marketing these days, you want to squeeze out as much ROI as possible, while also keeping your operating costs low. By only have real confirmed email subscribers being added to your list, it’s a sure way to increase ROI and also minimizing dead emails that might end up sitting on your list hosting account.
To get started with your own 100% opt-in email marketing campaign, contact us today.