While we appreciate the necessity for marketers to engage with their audiences, it’s equally critical to consider the impact these emails have not just on your sender reputation, but also on the experience of the individual who receives them.
Deliverability of your emails and maintaining your (and our) sender reputation are major priorities for us as your trusted email service provider! Before you send your next email, consider the following points.
Permission to send emails does not last indefinitely.
People forget where and how they signed up for your email list, so permission to send emails might soon expire. This is especially true if you haven’t contacted your subscribers by email in the last 12 months. People who last shopped, dined, or connected with you 1-5 years ago are unlikely to recall who you are, how you obtained their email address, or why they are suddenly receiving your emails.
Sending emails to an unengaged list with many inactive addresses will result in low open rates, high bounce and unsubscribe rates, and potentially high spam complaint rates in terms of engagement and delivery. Mailbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, and B2B domains) use these metrics to assess your sender reputation and how to treat your emails.
Your emails will be delivered to the inbox if you have a good sender reputation, but if you have a bad sender reputation, your emails will be blocked or screened as spam.
Analyze and segment your database based on subscriber behavior.
We strongly advise analyzing your database and segmenting your list depending on user activity and engagement before sending your next campaign. This aids you in determining:
- Subscribers who have opened an email or clicked a link in the last 12 months are the most engaged.
- Your most recent subscribers who signed up for your emails during the previous year
- Contacts with recent online activity, such as online purchases, website visits, account activity, and active paid subscriptions.
- Your most inactive and unengaged subscribers from the previous 12 months who do not fulfill the aforementioned criterion
If you’ve been in touch with your list on a regular basis throughout the last year, you can keep sending emails to your engaged subscribers and consider sending a re-engagement email to your inactive or unengaged subscribers. If you haven’t emailed your list on a regular basis—at least 1 or 2 emails every 6 months—you’ll need to gradually increase the number of emails you send to your entire list.
Any subscriber who hasn’t emailed or engaged with you in over a year should be removed from your list, since sending to these “ghost” addresses will only hurt your sender reputation. You also run the danger of emailing spam traps and being blacklisted by anti-spam software.
Increasing the number of emails sent to your entire list
Your sending domain – everything following the “@” in your From email address — is linked to your sender reputation. You may need to gradually train mailbox providers that your emails are real and that your subscribers wish to receive them, depending on when you last emailed your entire list and the size of your list.
Send an email to a smaller portion of your list and track how your subscribers respond over the next 24 hours to re-establish your domain’s reputation. If you see good delivery and engagement data, such as open rates of more than 10%, bounce rates of less than 4%, and spam complaints of less than 0.2%, you can double the volume for your next campaign and check the results again after 24 hours.
Before ramping up to your entire list, it’s critical to examine your results after each campaign to see how the increase in email volume affects your overall performance and take actions to fix any underlying engagement issues.
After each campaign, have a look at the outcomes.
Your subscribers are the best source of information about the effectiveness of your emails. After each campaign, review your campaign analytics to evaluate how active and engaged your audience is, as well as any unfavorable indications, such as a decline in open rate or an increase in spam complaints bounces.
These analytics show any flaws with interaction and delivery, which have a direct impact on your sender reputation and future campaign success. Users of Campaign Monitor can track user interaction over time using the Insights portion of their account.
Email delivery and engagement issues are frequently symptoms of how emails are gathered and managed, and examining both might reveal the root cause of these problems. Are your mailing lists permission-based, meaning that users have opted in to receive your emails? With a reCAPTCHA, is your online form safe from spambot attacks? Do you have DKIM authentication set up for your sending domain? Are you re-engaging your less active contacts and eliminating dormant “ghost” contacts?
The easiest method to maximize user engagement and avoid deliverability concerns is to follow these recommended deliverability guidelines.
Finally
Your subscribers’ inboxes, like yours, may be flooded with emails from brands with whom they were previously associated right now. To engage your audience and make your emails stand out from the pack, think like a subscriber and offer relevant, needed material.
You can help your emails land in the inbox by focusing on your most active and engaged audience and creating and preserving your domain’s sender reputation.
To show respect for your subscriber’s inbox, develop brand loyalty, and a long engaging relationship, keep your emails personable, useful, brief, and relevant.