Email is the most extensive digital marketing channel, with more than 3.9 billion active users worldwide. The fact that email is used by more than half of the world's population isn't the only thing that makes email every marketer's favorite tool. Research has revealed that email has the highest ROI rate, the highest customer retention rates, and the lowest average cost of acquisition than any other digital marketing channel.
Why My Email Isn't Getting Delivered
If you've been sending emails to your subscribers but are yet to realize the benefits that are often associated with email marketing, perhaps the question that you should ask yourself is – is your email campaign even getting delivered?
If you don't know already, email deliverability is the make-it-or-break-it of email marketing. Just what is email deliverability? In simple terms, email deliverability is the ability to send an email successfully to a receiver's inbox. If your emails are not getting delivered, the first step should be to find out why.
What Affects Email Deliverability?
- Sender Reputation
Inbox providers normally rely on the sender's reputation to figure out a score that determines their email deliverability. The higher the score, the more likely your emails will be delivered. Therefore, it's best to keep your score high because a poor score puts you at risk of being blocked or blacklisted by email service providers.
- Email Marketing Practices
When sending out emails, you should ensure that you adhere to email marketing and data privacy laws such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR. One of the ways you can violate these laws is by sending emails out to non subscribers instead of fully opted-in ones. Doing so can trigger a high number of recipient complaints that could get you blocked or blacklisted, which are drastic measures that can affect your email deliverability.
- Subscriber Engagement
When you are sending out emails, you are hoping that the recipients will open, read, reply, or forward them. When they do any of these, you can say that there is positive subscriber engagement. If they don't, then the lack of subscriber engagement to your emails is most likely to affect your reputation negatively. You already know what a negative reputation does to your score.
How Do I Increase My Email Deliverability?
Whether you are on the low or high end of the sender score continuum, there is always room for improvement. The following are some of the important steps to take to increase your email deliverability:
1- Improve your sender score
Your very first step to increasing your email deliverability, is to check your sender score. It's only after knowing how good or bad your score is that you can know how much of an effort you have to put in.
Wondering how to go about checking your deliverability score? Well, there are many tools online that have been designed for this purpose. One of them is the free deliverability checker by SendForensics. You can check your score and compare it with regional and industry benchmarks.
2- Authenticate your DKIM
After checking your sender score, the next step should be to authenticate your email account with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). DKIM authentication is a process that involves linking a domain name to an email message, thus enabling a sender to claim some responsibility for their emails. To implement DKIM, you will need to have a valid DKIM record. You can use a DKIM Checker to check your DKIM record.
3- Clean your email list
Sending emails to inactive or unresponsive users will continue hurting your sender score, lowering your deliverability score. Therefore, it's best to clean your contact lists regularly and ensure that the list only has more engaged recipients.
Conclusion
When it comes to sending email campaigns, your focus should be to find ways in which you can deliver marketing messages right into your prospective customers' inboxes. With that in mind, we recommend you get an email audit to get a clear understanding of how your email campaigns are performing