Are your marketing emails actually getting to the customer’s inbox? Sure, some emails make it to the inbox but is this part of your email program properly optimized for inbox placement? Most corporate marketing teams have little to no insight to this component of the experience. We all track common metrics such as emails sent, opens, clicks and unsubscribes but how many of you are tracking what emails get pushed to the Other, Promotions or Spam box instead? Emails delivered is not the same as inbox placement.
Inbox placement and deliverability is a “black hole” that all marketers need to pay more attention to immediately. Without careful consideration and due diligence, even the most sophisticated email campaigns can be missing the recipients email inbox, get categorized as promotions or worse Spam. Most marketing teams spend significant time designing the perfect creative, refining audience segments, and determining the best day and time to send the email campaign. Yet they spend little to no time working through the myriad of inbox placement rules to ensure emails get delivered to the inbox.
Nearly 85% of all emails sent get tagged as Spam!
Are your emails part of that?
Source: talosintelligence.com
In the endless battle with spammers, Mailbox Service Providers are acting on your behalf to filter through emails that they think are not relevant. Most email marketing platforms provide you metrics about the emails Sent, Opened, Clicked, Bounced, etc., but they are not confirming that emails were delivered into the inbox. Significant time is spent trying to provide a great customer experience with relevant email messaging, but are those emails being read? Many companies have seen their email open rates drop unexpectedly because marketing emails are being caught up in the mailbox providers spam “drag net”. Once you are caught, it is really hard to get out!
This article is intended to help demystify inbox placement and provide some guidelines on how to help prevent your emails from being labeled as spam. This is under the assumption that your email authentication is already setup correctly (e.g., DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID and Sender Policy Framework (SPF))
1. Inbox Placement Assessment
As an email marketer it is imperative that you know if your emails are going into the recipient’s inbox by email domain (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). Each mailbox provider has their own “secret sauce” algorithm for how they interrogate email messages. It is possible you may get nearly 100% inbox placement on Hotmail and Yahoo, but only 65% on Gmail for the same exact email. One way to understand if your emails are going to the inbox is by generating a seed list with real email address for to each of the main domains. Send a distribution of your in-market emails to that seed list across multiple domains to determine if they are getting into the inbox. If time is a concern, there are companies that provide this service and aggregate the results like Data axle (formerly Inboxable)
If your emails are going into spam the next few sections will discuss best practices to ensure emails make it into the inbox.
2. Email List Hygiene
The quickest way to the spam folder is to continue to send emails to addresses that have unsubscribed or opted out of your emails. Sending emails to opt outs can hurt your domain reputation which is your company’s domain “rating” by specific mailbox providers. Sending to unsubs is also in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and your organization could be fined. This is not the way get noticed in your marketing department.
Use all the tools and data at your disposal to clean your email lists before sending. We recommend you be conservative here, not greedy. Remove anyone that has opted out or unsubscribed from your emails. Remove people that have already been over contacted recently by prior transactional or marketing messages to avoid email fatigue. Only send emails to addresses that you have permission to send to. Rented lists are never a good option.
Implement an email segmentation strategy to send relevant messages to different segments of your audience. You should always have segmentation testing as part of your email campaign design.
It is also encouraged to periodically scrub/sanitize email addresses in your marketing hub using 3rd party vendors such as Validity (BriteVerify and ReturnPath). These vendors score your email addresses so you can identify bad ones and filter them out of your mail lists.
3. Domain Reputation/Sender Score
Domain reputation is a rating on how the mailbox providers see your sending domain. There are tools available (e.g., Google Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS, etc.) that can be used to look up your domain to see how your domain or IP address is rated. A bad rating keeps emails from being delivered into the inbox. This can be a result of poor email list hygiene, bad messaging, or bad email design. For example, if your emails are not formatted correctly, your subject lines sound spammy or there is an excessive amount of emojis your reputation will suffer. A quick online search will provide a list of spammy words to avoid.
Sender score is a score generated by a company called Validity (previously Return Path) that provides reputation score using data aggregated from many ISP’s, spam filters and security companies to label your companies email sending practices. One of the factors that is included in your score is email volume over time. Your sender score can be negatively impacted if your email send volumes are erratic. You can quickly get a bad score if one day you send 1,000 emails followed by 100,000 sends the next and then you don’t send any emails for the next three days. Try to smooth out the number of emails that are send over a week to avoid looking spammy.
4. Content and subject lines
The content of your email and subject lines are important. It goes without saying that your messaging is key, but make sure to stay away from words that make your emails sound spammy. Think of any tag lines from infomercials and don’t use any of them. Use catchy subject lines without being pushy. Phrases such as “Act Now”, “Buy Today”, “Get it Now”, “Big Savings”, “Expires Today” should not be used. You can sprinkle in some emojis but use them very sparingly. And please, change up your subject lines! Use A/B/n tests to identify higher open rates for certain subject lines. Prepare to be both proactive and reactive. Just because an email is successful one month doesn’t necessarily mean it will work forever.
As mentioned earlier, do not get greedy with your emails. Sending blanketed or broadcast emails no longer equates to more retention or revenue. The individuals that you want to email are the ones that are engaged. Look at your engagement data! All email service providers have metrics on engagement (Opens and Clicks). Do not keep sending marketing emails to people that don’t open them. Our experience has shown that if recipients don’t open your emails, they may never open your emails and you are wasting time and possibly damaging your reputation by continuing sending to them. Email people that are unengaged 2-3 times and then stop sending to them. Focus on the group of people that are engaging with your emails and interacting with the email channel.
This article is really the tip of the iceberg. Mailbox providers are changing their algorithms daily. Your marketing department needs to have monitoring of inbox placement in place to ensure your messaging is getting to your customers. Still not sure if you have all these components covered? Engage with Solvenna below for a free conversation to assess your email practices and knowledge sharing.
Learn more about Solvenna services.
Sign up for a FREE in-depth conversation