With retail sales projected to rake in up to $965 billion between November and January, a 4% increase from last year, now is the time to consider how your email marketing strategy can make the most of this.
With only 28% of all emails sent reaching the Inbox, it is vital to look at ways in which you can improve your deliverability rate.
This post details 5 Tops Tips that you should address today. But if you would like more information on the effects of poor deliverability you can download our FREE report ‘The Smarter Marketers’ Insight into Improved ROI via Increased Deliverability’ by clicking here.
1 – Verify your emails
Sending large volumes of emails to bad addresses can seriously damage your sender reputation and therefore stop your ISP delivering your emails.
The good news is that we now have a fully integrated verification solution, within arpReach.
This new upgrade will bring you:
- The ability to verify your entire existing database from within arpReach
- Real-time integrated email verification from your online forms and contact points.
- Constant, automated, list monitoring
- Batch import new or existing, email lists and get them verified instantly!
You can find a short video explaining the value of email verification here
2 – Sending from a free domain email address
Using a ‘from’ address that is a domain other than your own is a definate no! This will instantly perceive you as spam and damages your deliverability.
3 – Subject lines
Check your subject lines! Does it come across as SPAM?
Also ensure that you limit the use of characters such as £ or ! as this will often send emails straight to the spam folder.
4 – Use of images
Consider your choice of images for 2 reasons:
A – Using overly large images without any supporting text in your email can be a flag for SPAM filters (historically this is one way that SPAM mail could get through). There is currently no definite guidelines on text/image ratio, but general advise would be 60/40 text to image. However test and track and please do share your results!
B– Make sure that you consider the use of images and equally how does this view on mobile? Always ensure that you also have a text version for those who don’t accept HTML.
arpReach handles this with ease with a simple tick box ‘multipart’ which delivers both an HTML and text version of your email.
5 – Sending to unengaged recipients
Low open rates are a signal to ISPs that your recipients are not engaged with you, and your content is not relevant to them. This lack of engagement is just one of the factors that ISPs will use as part of your sender score and so could effect delivery of future emails. Worst case scenario they could even block your campaigns!
Therefore ensure you are monitoring your email campaigns and segmenting and targeting to get the best possible engagement.
You can find more information on how arpReach can help with targeting and segmenting here
We hope that this is a useful guide to improving your deliverability rate. There are other elements that could affect your email deliverability, however these Top 5 are ones to check today!
The good news is that arpReach users can now benefit from a fully integrated email verification solution, arpverify, check it out by clicking here.
PHP requirement
Upgrading to the latest version release of arpReach is a simple process if you follow the basic process outlined below. While a little technical knowledge will help anyone can perform an upgrade.
arpReach allows you to add individual contact records and details for your subscribers using forms, email sign-ups, using the API and even manually using the ‘Add a Contact’ function. To protect your contact list and maximize your ability to reach more of your subscribers more of the time you need to verify that each email address is live and valid.
Monitoring the emails you import in to your contact management or autoresponder systems and removing the bad email addresses will help to increase your email delivery rates by improving your sender score. This is because one of the metrics used by email service companies like Gmail and Outlook looks at the percentage of attempts made to send messages to dead or non-existent email accounts. The more attempts you make, the harder it is to get your email delivered.
In this video we show you how to set up and configure the contact list monitor which allows you to check and verify the existing email addresses in your arpReach autoresponder installation automatically, without the need to export and re-upload files.
To help you get the best results and to improve your understanding of how the arpVerify integration works within arpReach we have put together a list of questions and answers to the common questions.