November 25, 2024
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From the day a customer gives their email away and says yes to Cookies, all their activity on your website can be recorded and tracked. This allows for more personal marketing (great outcome!) but it is no wonder that every website tries to lure sign-ups with the promise of “10% off your first purchase” or “be in to win the trip of a lifetime”. It works!
The downside is that you can end up with large email databases of one-time purchasers and unengaged contacts. If you don’t take the time to tidy up you will run into trouble.
Things are changing. Too many people not opening your emails could mean they all go straight to spam. Even your existing customers and highly engaged prospects!
The average US person receives a huge number of 121 emails per day.
To stop us all going insane Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are becoming stricter on which emails make it to our inboxes.
Because of this, about 45% of emails are sent to spam. So... What decides if you’ll make the cut?
Your ‘Email Sender Reputation’ is what prevents your emails from falling into oblivion.
Your Email Sender Reputation stops your emails going to spam. It is built from two primary factors - IP Reputation and Domain reputation.
IP addresses are often shared between senders as they are expensive to own privately.
When using a shared IP, the behaviour of other senders in your pool will affect your IP reputation.
You can easily check if your IP is blacklisted with tools like apivoid or EasyDMARC.
The following factors build your ‘Domain Reputation.’
(Hubspot benchmarks)
If you constantly underperform below the above levels you will end up with a lower email Domain Reputation.
The result will be lower email deliverability, for EVERYONE in your database.
Some marketing automation tools and CRMs have a dashboard that will tell you your score.
If your CRM doesn't do this, you can use a tool like Google Postmaster Tools (you’ll have to add a TXT record to your DNS to verify it).
‘Oh no’ - you’ve done it.
You’ve sent 10,000 emails to a database you acquired via a third party and got a 6% unsubscribe rate, a 1% bounce rate and a 5% open rate.
You’re in the bad books.
Your customers are not getting your newsletter and EDMs anymore.
What’s next?
Thankfully, you can fix it with the following steps.
Note these steps are best practice and should be done regardless of where you are currently sitting with email reputation.
Ideally, that should be done from the start - you should have one sub-domain and dedicated IP for transactional emails and one for marketing emails.
This means the score of your marketing domain won’t affect the deliverability of your transactional emails (very important).
For example, you could have @news.yourbrand.com and @sales.yourbrand.com.
Or if you’re sending your purchase/thank you emails from Shopify and your newsletter from Mailchimp, you could link the transaction email to Shopify and the marketing one to Mailchimp.
Or if you’re sending all emails from the same platform (Hubspot or Active Campaign) you should link more than one email address. One for marketing and one for transactions.
Send your emails to people who you know will open them until your score improves.
If you’re doing a newsletter or any big volume send then exclude ‘unengaged contacts’.
Hubspot has a simple tick box for this (and you should tick it most of the time). In other tools, you can create segments of contacts who, for example, haven’t opened your last 6 emails and choose not to send it them.
If you have access to an automation tool that can send emails based on web visits on certain pages or nurture workflows, open the valve.
The best open rates often happen when your prospect is actively engaging with your website.
It doesn’t need to be creepy, like “Hey Jordan, we know you’ve been looking at our new sock collection”. You can create a few newsletter-style emails targeting specific product categories, and enrol existing contacts when they visit certain pages on your website.
You’ll notice they’re much more receptive. It’s all about timing.
Have you had an experience when you unsubscribe from a company newsletter and then you keep getting it, so you end up flagging it as spam?
A ‘mark as spam’ is much more damageable for email reputation than an unsubscribe.
That means the automation behind and the lists are poorly set up.
Make sure your unsubscribe is working properly.
Over time the above tactics should help you improve your email reputation and ensure that everyone gets your emails.
If you do decide to acquire an email list or you’re doing ‘fast and cheap’ lead generation - by doing a contest or Facebook Lead Ads for example, consider the following:
Things are changing. You can’t buy engagement. Easy marketing is not a thing anymore - you need to think smart marketing.
Other red flags can send your email straight to spam. Here are a few tips to help.
In today’s environment, email marketing is becoming more and more important. It has huge ROI potential. Follow the above tips to ensure that your email marketing makes it to your potential customers.
As a specialist in growth marketing, the Data Story team are experts in email marketing.
We can help you map out your customer journey and determine where email marketing fits into your marketing strategy. And we will make sure that you are doing it right.
We can help you map out an email marketing strategy with the best possible ROI.
Contact us to discuss how we can help you with your email marketing.
We're here to guide you every step of the way.
Author: Sabrina Poulin of Data Story.
Reference Links:
How Many Emails Does The Average Person Receive Per Day?
Email Deliverability - Hubspot
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