Email deliverability is a crucial aspect of cold emailing that businesses cannot afford to overlook. Deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach your subscribers' inboxes. It is affected by several factors, including your email infrastructure, content, and list management practices. Conducting a regular email deliverability audit is essential to ensure your cold emailing campaigns are effective. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of conducting an email deliverability audit and checking your sending reputation.
Understanding Email Deliverability
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is a critical aspect of cold email that refers to the ability of your emails to reach your subscribers' inboxes without bouncing or being blocked by spam filters. In other words, it is the measure of how successful your email campaigns are at reaching their intended audience.
Having a high email deliverability rate is crucial for the success of your cold emailing campaigns. It ensures that your subscribers receive your emails in their inbox, rather than being marked as spam or ending up in the junk folder.
Why is Email Deliverability Important?
Good email deliverability is essential for the success of your cold emailing campaigns. If your emails are not reaching your subscribers' inboxes, then your email marketing efforts will be in vain. Poor email deliverability can harm your email marketing efforts, leading to a significant impact on your email open rates and click-through rates, ultimately affecting your revenue. Additionally, good email deliverability is essential for maintaining a positive brand image and building trust with your subscribers.
When your emails are delivered to your subscribers' inboxes, it provides an opportunity for them to engage with your brand, which can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the factors that affect email deliverability.
Factors Affecting Email Deliverability
Several factors can impact your email deliverability, including: Your email domain and IP reputation: Your email domain and IP reputation play a crucial role in determining your email deliverability. If your email domain or IP address has a poor reputation, your emails are more likely to be marked as spam or blocked by spam filters. Your email authentication methods: Email authentication methods such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are essential for ensuring that your emails are delivered to your subscribers' inboxes. These methods help to verify that the email is coming from a legitimate source, which can help improve your email deliverability.
The content of your emails:
The content of your emails, including subject lines and body content, can impact your email deliverability. Spam filters are designed to detect certain keywords and phrases that are commonly used in spam emails. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your email content is relevant and engaging, without being spammy.
Your list management practices:
Your list management practices, such as list hygiene and email frequency, can also impact your email deliverability. It is essential to maintain a clean email list by removing inactive subscribers and ensuring that they haven't unsubscribed. Additionally, sending too many emails can lead to subscribers marking your emails as spam, which can harm your email deliverability.
By understanding the factors that affect email deliverability, you can take steps to improve your cold emailing campaigns' success. Implementing best practices for email authentication, maintaining a clean email list, and creating engaging email content can help improve your email deliverability and increase your email marketing's effectiveness.
Preparing for Your Email Deliverability Audit
If you're planning to conduct an email deliverability audit, it's important to be well-prepared. A thorough audit can help you identify areas where you can improve your cold mailing campaigns, and ultimately increase your email deliverability rates. In this section, we'll discuss some key steps you can take to prepare for your email deliverability audit.
Setting Goals
Before you begin your email deliverability audit, it's crucial to set clear goals and objectives. What do you hope to achieve from the audit? What areas do you want to focus on? Some common goals for an email deliverability audit might include:
Improving email deliverability rates
Reducing bounce rates
Increasing open and click-through rates
Identifying and resolving email delivery issues
By setting clear goals and objectives, you'll be better equipped to evaluate your email sending practices and identify areas for improvement.
Gathering Necessary Data and Tools
To conduct an effective email deliverability audit, you'll need to gather data and use tools that will help you evaluate your email sending practices. Some of the data and tools you may need include: Email Service Provider (ESP) data: This includes information about your email campaigns, such as the number of emails sent, open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. Delivery and bounce rates: These metrics can help you identify potential issues with email delivery and bounce rates. Open and click-through rates: These metrics can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaigns. List segmentation data: This includes information about how you segment your email lists and target specific audiences with your campaigns. Email authentication data: This includes information about how you authenticate your emails and ensure they are delivered to your subscribers' inboxes.
By collecting and analyzing this data, you'll be able to gain a better understanding of your cold emailing practices and identify areas for improvement.
Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that can help you measure the success of your cold emailing campaigns. By identifying and tracking KPIs, you'll be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions about how to improve them. Some common KPIs for email marketing include: Delivery rate: This metric measures the percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to subscribers' inboxes. Bounce rate: This metric measures the percentage of emails that were not delivered to subscribers' inboxes due to a variety of factors, such as invalid email addresses or full mailboxes. Open rate: This metric measures the percentage of emails that were opened by subscribers. Click-through rate: This metric measures the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link within your email. Unsubscribe rate: This metric measures the percentage of subscribers who opted out of receiving future emails from your company.
By tracking these KPIs, you'll be able to identify trends and patterns in your cold emailing campaigns and make data-driven decisions about how to improve them.
Overall, preparing for an email deliverability audit requires careful planning and attention to detail. By setting clear goals and objectives, gathering the necessary data and tools, and identifying key performance indicators, you'll be well-equipped to conduct a thorough audit and improve your cold emailing campaigns.
Assessing Your Email Infrastructure
Email is a critical tool for businesses to communicate with their customers, partners, employees and leads. However, email deliverability can be a challenge, with many factors affecting whether your emails reach their intended recipients. In this section, we'll explore some of the key areas to assess when evaluating your email infrastructure.
Evaluating Your Email Service Provider (ESP)
Your ESP plays a crucial role in email deliverability. They are responsible for sending your emails and ensuring they are delivered to the right place. When evaluating your ESP, there are several factors to consider: Infrastructure: Your ESP's infrastructure should be reliable and scalable. They should have multiple data centers and redundancy built-in to ensure high availability. Processes: Your ESP should have clear processes for handling bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes. They should also have a process for handling deliverability issues, such as getting your IP address delisted from blacklists. Policies: Your ESP's policies should align with industry standards and best practices. For example, they should have a strict anti-spam policy and require opt-in for all email recipients.
Analyzing Your Domain and IP Reputation
Your domain and IP reputation have a direct impact on your email deliverability. If your reputation is poor, your emails may be automatically filtered into spam folders or blocked altogether. To analyze your reputation, you can use tools such as Sender Score and Google Postmaster Tools. These tools will give you a score based on various factors, such as your email volume, complaint rate, and bounce rate. If you find issues with your reputation, take steps to address them, such as requesting delisting from blacklists and improving authentication.
Reviewing Your Email Authentication Methods
Email authentication methods such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are essential for ensuring email deliverability. These methods verify that your emails are coming from a legitimate source and can help prevent spoofing and phishing attacks. When reviewing your authentication practices, ensure that they are set up correctly and that all necessary records are in place. You can use tools such as MX Toolbox to verify your authentication settings.
By evaluating your email infrastructure in these key areas, you can improve your email deliverability and ensure that your messages reach their intended recipients.
Analyzing Your Email Content and Design
Cold emailing is a powerful tool that can help you connect with your audience and promote your brand. However, to make the most of your email campaigns, you need to ensure that your emails are well-designed and optimized for maximum deliverability. Here are some tips to help you analyze your email content and design:
Ensuring Mobile-Friendly Design
Did you know that the majority of email opens happen on mobile devices? This makes mobile-friendly design essential for good email deliverability. To ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices, use responsive design and test them on different devices and email clients. You want your emails to look great on any screen size, whether it's a small smartphone or a large tablet.
Another important aspect of mobile-friendly design is making sure that your email content is easy to read and navigate on a mobile device. Use a clear and legible font, and make sure that your links and buttons are large enough to be easily clicked with a finger. You should also avoid using too many images, as they can slow down the loading time of your email and make it harder to read on a mobile device.
Evaluating Subject Lines and Preheaders
Your subject line and preheader are the first things that your subscribers will see when they receive your email. They are critical components of your email content that can affect email deliverability. To make sure that your subject lines and preheaders are effective, you need to make them compelling, relevant, and avoid spam triggers.
Compelling subject lines and preheaders can help increase your open rates and encourage your subscribers to engage with your content. Consider using personalization, humor, or urgency to make your emails stand out in your subscribers' inboxes. However, be careful not to use misleading or clickbait-style subject lines, as they can damage your brand reputation and lead to unsubscribes.
It's also important to avoid using spam trigger words in your subject lines and preheaders. These are words or phrases that are commonly associated with spam emails, such as "free", "urgent", or "act now". Using too many of these words can trigger spam filters and cause your emails to be marked as spam.
Assessing Email Body Content and Calls to Action
The content of your email is also essential for email deliverability. To optimize your email body content, you should include clear calls to action that encourage your subscribers to take action. Whether it's clicking a link, making a purchase, or filling out a form, your calls to action should be easy to find and understand.
Another important aspect of email body content is avoiding spam trigger words and phrases. In addition to the words mentioned earlier, other spam trigger words include "discount", "limited time", and "make money". Using too many of these words can make your email look like spam and harm your deliverability.
Finally, it's important to pay attention to your email text-to-image ratio. While images can be a great way to add visual interest to your emails, using too many images can make your email look like spam and cause it to be filtered out by spam filters. Aim to use a balance of text and images in your emails, and make sure that your images are optimized for fast loading times.
By following these tips, you can ensure that your email content and design are optimized for maximum deliverability and engagement. Happy emailing!
Examining Your Email List Management Practice
Managing your email list is a crucial aspect of any successful outreach campaign. It's not just about sending out emails to your subscribers, but also ensuring that your list is up-to-date and engaged. In this section, we'll take a closer look at some of the best practices for managing your email list.
Identifying Inactive Subscribers
One of the most important things you can do to improve your email list management practices is to identify inactive subscribers. These are subscribers who haven't engaged with your emails in a while, and they can have a negative impact on your email deliverability and reputation.
To identify inactive subscribers, you can look at metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement. If you notice that certain subscribers haven't opened or clicked on any of your emails in several months, it may be time to remove them from your list.
Removing inactive subscribers can actually improve your engagement rates, as it ensures that you're only sending emails to people who are interested in hearing from you. This can also help improve your email deliverability, as ISPs are more likely to view your emails as valuable if they're being sent to engaged subscribers.
Evaluating List Segmentation Strategies
List segmentation is another important aspect of email list management. By segmenting your list, you can send highly relevant content to specific groups of subscribers, which can improve engagement and overall campaign performance.
When evaluating your list segmentation strategies, it's important to ensure that they align with best practices. This means segmenting your list based on factors such as demographics, behavior, and interests. You should also ensure that you're not over-segmenting your list, as this can lead to smaller, less engaged segments.
Overall, list segmentation can help you improve email deliverability by targeting leads with highly relevant content. By sending the right message to the right people, you can increase engagement and build trusting relationships with your leads.
Contact segmentation is very important in your cold mailing campaigns. If you don't know how to go about it, you can read our guide: "Cold mailing: the complete guide to getting started."
Implementing Re-engagement Campaigns
If your email list contains inactive subscribers, implementing re-engagement campaigns can be a great way to try and win them back. These campaigns typically involve sending a series of emails to inactive subscribers, with the goal of encouraging them to take action.
When creating re-engagement campaigns, it's important to use compelling content and incentives. This could include exclusive offers, discounts, or other incentives that will encourage inactive subscribers to engage with your brand again.
It's also important to set clear expectations for what will happen if subscribers don't engage with your emails. This could include removing them from your list after a certain period of time, or sending them fewer emails in the future.
Overall, re-engagement campaigns can be a great way to improve your email list management practices. By encouraging inactive subscribers to take action, you can improve engagement rates and overall campaign performance.
For your cold mailing campaigns, you can consider starting a 2nd sequence +30 days after the first with a different message addressed to people who didn't interact with the first campaign.
Monitoring and Improving Your Sending Reputation
As a marketer, it is important to monitor and improve your sending reputation to ensure your emails are reaching your intended audience. Your sending reputation is determined by a variety of factors, including your email deliverability metrics, such as bounce rates, spam complaints, and open rates.
Tracking Email Deliverability Metrics
One way to continuously track your email deliverability metrics is to use tools such as Google Analytics and ESP reports to analyze your email performance. These tools can provide valuable insights into how your emails are being received by your audience.
For example, Google Analytics can track the number of clicks, opens, and conversions for each email campaign. ESP reports, on the other hand, can provide information on bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes.
Identifying and Addressing Issues
If you identify issues with your email deliverability, take swift action to address them. This may involve improving authentication, segmenting your list, or updating your email content.
Authentication is a critical factor in email deliverability. Make sure your emails are properly authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure they are not marked as spam by email providers.
Segmenting your email list can also improve deliverability by allowing you to send targeted messages to specific groups of subscribers. This can lead to higher engagement and lower unsubscribe rates.
Finally, updating your email content can also improve deliverability. Make sure your emails are relevant, engaging, and provide value to your subscribers. This can help reduce spam complaints and increase open rates.
Implementing Best Practices for Ongoing Improvement
To maintain good email deliverability, implement best practices for ongoing improvement. These may include regularly conducting email deliverability audits, staying informed on industry updates, and continuously optimizing your email marketing strategy.
Regularly conducting email deliverability audits can help you identify potential issues before they become major problems. This can include reviewing your email list for inactive or invalid email addresses, checking your email authentication settings, and reviewing your email content for relevance and engagement.
Staying informed on industry updates is also important for maintaining good email deliverability. Keep up-to-date with changes in email regulations, such as the RGPD for Europe and the CAN SPAM Act for the U.S., and stay informed on best practices for email marketing.
Finally, continuously optimizing your email marketing strategy can help improve your sending reputation over time. This can include testing different subject lines, email content, and sending frequencies to determine what works best for your audience.
Conclusion: Maintaining a Strong Sending Reputation Regularly Conducting Email Deliverability Audits
Conducting regular email deliverability audits is crucial to maintaining a strong sending reputation and improving the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Staying Informed on Industry Trends and Updates
Stay up-to-date on industry trends and updates to ensure your email marketing practices are aligned with best practices and industry standards.
Continuously Optimizing Your Email Marketing Strategy
Continuously optimize your email marketing strategy by implementing best practices, testing new approaches, and staying focused on your goals and objectives.
By following these best practices and conducting regular email deliverability audits, you can improve your email deliverability and maintain a strong sending reputation.
