If you have trouble understanding any industry jargon and buzzwords used in this article, have a look at our Glossary of Terms. This is where all the email marketing terms are defined and explained. Otherwise, enjoy this read 🙂
Sometimes your emails bounce and instead of landing in the mailbox they get lost in the internet (obviously they don’t but let’s keep it simple, this is about email!). Delivery rate, as the name suggests, indicates how many people actually received your email. You can easily calculate it on your own following these few simple steps:
- Subtract the number of bounced emails from the total number of emails sent.
- Divide this by the total number of emails sent.
- Multiply by 100%.
There is your delivery rate. So why is this particular indicator important? There are a couple of answers to that question. Firstly, if more emails are delivered it is likely that your open rate increases. Open rate is one of the most crucial indicators of your email campaign’s performance. The more emails you deliver the higher the probability that some people will open them. Secondly, every time your email bounces your sender score decreases. When your sender score is too low, your emails will start ending up in the Spam folder. If this happens, your open rate will be lower and it will be more difficult to reach your audience. Therefore, it is a good practice to avoid bounces and keep your sender score as high as possible. To do that, you need to ensure the delivery rate is high. Based on our extensive experience with email marketing, we prepared a few tips and suggestions that are easy to do and will most definitely increase your delivery rate!
The Quality Of Your Email List Can Increase Delivery Rate
Arguably, your email list is one of the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to email marketing. You can have amazing copy, extraordinary graphics but if the people you are emailing aren’t interested in all the interesting stuff you do, they will either unsubscribe or delete your emails. That is why you need to keep your email list as clean as possible. This means two things.
First and foremost, your list has to contain prospects that opted-in and are really interested in the content you produce. They want to know what’s going on in your business, what new things you created and what kind of video you watched and enjoyed this Saturday. There is absolutely no point in buying email lists; these people most probably have never heard about you and your business and they won’t care. You might get a prospect or two but in the long-term buying email lists could damage your reputation and lower your sender score. Not worth it. Instead try to build engaging funnels in which people can easily opt-in. By attracting the audience you desire, you will be able to build a high-quality list. Such list will always have high delivery and open rates.
Another habit you might want to develop is email list maintenance. Ideally from time to time you should clean up your list. People change and delete their email addresses and you don’t want to lower your sender score. Therefore every few months it is a good idea to upload your list to an online email list cleaner that will do the job for you. Alternatively, you can also ask the prospects on your email list to confirm their address once in a while. Either way you will end up with an email list that contains email addresses that are actually active. Your sender score will be safe and your emails will be delivered.
Use Content Of Your Email/Newsletter To Increase Delivery Rate
While the definition of the delivery rate focuses on emails being simply delivered to a certain email address, from a practical perspective you want more than that. You want your emails to land in the Inbox instead of Spam folder. We like and agree with your approach so let’s have a look at how we can do that!
Have you ever sent a business-related email that wasn’t a part of your marketing campaign or a newsletter but still ended up in the recipient’s Spam folder? Digital marketers can turn on (or get stuck in) this “selling mode” in their emails which completely reverts their dictionary. When you write copy you adjust the wording to the situation, your audience and the style of your previous copy. And while this has some benefits it very often means that throughout your email campaigns you constantly use the same style and wording. Moreover, thousands of other marketers around the world have a similar problem. Think about it; how easy is it to distinguish between a salesy newsletter and a normal email? Because of that mailboxes have been programmed to recognise such emails and automatically place them in the Spam folder instead of the Inbox. To avoid that it is often worth to change the style of your newsletters and email communication. And while this may seem like a challenge, there are some tools that could help you with that. For example, popcorn’s SPAM Rating Tool allows you to analyse every piece of the email you’re about to send. It also clearly shows you which words are classified as spammy and which words you should change. You can therefore write your copy, insert all the graphics and then just before you send your newsletter, use the SPAM Rating Tool to make sure that it gets delivered to everybody on your email list!
We hope that this article will help you improve your email marketing game and that after applying our tips your delivery rates will skyrocket! If there is anything you would like us to clarify or explain further, feel free to comment below or reach out to the popcorn team via our social media channels. Additionally, if you would like to see how popcorn can help you with email marketing, you can sign-up for the free-trial here.
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