How to Master Email Marketing for Max Deliverability and Engagement

Achieving high deliverability and engagement rates is one of the biggest challenges in mastering email marketing. Irrespective of how great your email pitch sounds, it has no value for you if nobody sees it or engages with it.

When it comes to improving & mastering email marketing, marketers should start with optimizing their deliverability and engagement metrics. Maximizing such metrics will help improve and maximize your email marketing ROI.

The marketing experts at M-Connect Solutions have pinpointed the need of marketers to improve both email performance indicators. We are going to look at some vital strategies marketers can leverage to master email marketing and improve deliverability and engagement.

But first, let’s start with what deliverability and engagement mean for emails.

What Is Deliverability and Engagement in Email Marketing?

Let’s quickly recap what deliverability and engagement mean and why they are so important in email marketing.

What Is Email Deliverability?

As the name suggests, deliverability is a percentage amount of emails delivered to the recipients’ inboxes. Low deliverability indicates there’s an issue why emails are not ending up where they are intended to. There can be many reasons as listed below:

• Users provided the wrong email address
• Email addresses are misspelled
• They are no longer in use
• Or your emails are ending up in spam

Such issues drag down your email deliverability rate and do not help complete the next conversion goal because users can’t open emails they never received. Out of all, the biggest issue marketers face is emails being delivered to the spam folders.

This is because the internet service provider (ISP) considers you or your email a potential fraud or untrustworthy. If you encounter such issues more frequently, you’ll need to work a lot on fixing your deliverability problem.

What Is Email Engagement?

Email engagement refers to how the recipient interacts with your emails. Email open rates and other actions such as click-through rates are indicators of people actually interacting with your emails considering emails have landed in their inboxes.

However, conversion is the ultimate goal of email marketing where even the experts have failed. One way to optimize this and other metrics is by using the heatmaps to track what users are doing after they open your email.

Why Optimizing Email Deliverability and Engagement Is Important?

It all boils down to how ISPs perceive you and your emails. They look at the past user engagement records while assessing your emails’ trustworthiness. Businesses with a history of low engagement are perceived as untrustworthy. Thus, their emails end up as spam, which further reduces the deliverability.

This creates a loop where businesses are stuck because the reduced deliverability produces less engagement, which damages deliverability even further, and so on. Therefore, optimizing your email deliverability and engagement metrics is important.

Enough of this now, let’s get into some action. Shall we?

How to Maximize Your Email Deliverability Rate?

Improving deliverability deals with the problems that hinder emails to reach users’ inboxes. To start off one must avoid spam tactics such as buying email ID lists, cold emailing, etc. But there’s more to it. Let’s check it out.

1. Pay Attention to Subject Lines

When it comes to mastering email marketing, start with subject lines. Mastering this aspect of writing emails will make users crave to open your emails and engage with them. Here are some key points to remember while writing subject lines:

• Avoid Spam Triggering Words
• Keep a Cap on Your Caps
• Limit Exclamation Points
• Avoid Deceptive Subject Lines
• Size Matters: Keep it Short & Simple
• Avoid Using “Re:” or “Fwd:“
• Stuffing Keywords only

Familiarize yourself with HubSpot’s list of spam triggering words. Besides, make your subject lines informative, honest, and relevant to the email content.

2. Integrate Quality Email Software

High-quality email software is necessary for marketers to ensure their emails land in the inboxes of users. Choose a platform that offers plenty of resources such as templates, a solid email builder, and a good set of email automation features for creating email campaigns. Such features help you achieve higher deliverability.

Select the right tool from the start because your emails may experience a drop in deliverability if you keep changing your email marketing software. Further, ISPs also pick up on this and trigger pesky spam filters.

3. Build Reputation for Your IP Address

Another great step for building trust in the eyes of the internet service providers. ISPs assess the IP of every incoming email for its trustworthiness. They look at your historical data of sent emails and can punish your IP address for past mistakes if there are any.

However, you can build your IP reputation over time by following best practices and improve your deliverability ratio. You can also use tools such as Postmaster tool, Sender Score, and others to check your IP reputation.

4. Utilize a Double Opt-In System

A double opt-in system is where users are asked to confirm their email address by clicking the link in the first email they receive after signing up. Doing so has a great many benefits to improve deliverability as it means you have the right email information about users. Also, you can save your efforts and deliverability rate by not sending emails to fake or misspelled emails.

Double opt-in also help enhance the engagement rate of prospects, which also aids in boosting the deliverability rate. One thing to note is the email list will be shorter but filled with valuable leads compared to big lists in a single opt-in filled with not so valuable leads.

5. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

Making it easy for users to unsubscribe rather than hiding it from them is actually beneficial for improving your deliverability and engagement. Wondering how?

Consider this, would it be better if users unsubscribe your email list than flag your emails as spam? It may be tempting to hide unsubscribe button or link but it’s damaging your brand and reputation. The key here is to know why people want to unsubscribe so that you can improve that area of your emails.

Further, GDPR norms and ISPs also want you to make unsubscribing easy by making it accessible for everyone.

How to Maximize Your Email Engagement Rate?

Till now, we covered various ways you can implement to improve your email deliverability rate. We have also mentioned engagement a few times because both are intrinsically linked. Improving engagement rate is not only beneficial for deliverability but also crucial for improving conversions to get profitable results. Here’s how you can go about improving your email engagement rate.

1. Optimizing Open Rates

Open rates are not only important for your email campaigns but also are an indication of engagement to ISPs. A low open rate means people don’t engage with your message, which hurts the success of your email campaigns.

There can be many reasons for people not opening your emails. Out of all, the contents in the email and the subject line are two major reasons for the low open rate. Here’s what you should do:

• Segmentize your email list as different groups of people have different needs that compel them to engage with your emails.
• Make your email content relevant, useful, and valuable enough for your audience to engage.
• Keep your subject line informative, short, and convincing to users to make them think your emails are worth opening.
• Another influence on open rates is the preheader text, which is a text users see as a preview in an email notification.

As long as you maintain your reputation as a reliable source for quality email campaigns, users keep engaging and opening your emails.

2. Segmentize Your Emails

Your business might attract different kinds of audiences, which later sign up for receiving your emails. When it comes to targeting those audiences, segmenting them is key to maximize email engagement.

Ensure that new leads are assigned to relevant segments just after they sign up. Also, keep track of their information and purchasing habits and needs to place them in the right segmented list. The more relevant you can be with your segmented campaigns the more improvement you’ll see in your engagement metrics.

3. Automate Email Workflows

A great email marketing campaign is what reacts instantly to the changing needs and interests of prospects. Many of your leads might start to search for other products they usually don’t purchase and read content relevant to those products. All these are an indication that they might make a purchase in near future.

Automated email workflows enable you to send relevant emails when users complete certain actions. Such types of emails can trigger more engagement and conversions than just sending out general emails and hoping for the best.

4. Boost Relevance with Personalization

Personalization is another powerful tactic to improve deliverability and engagement for your emails. Most of today’s advanced email marketing software allows you to personalize your emails in various ways.

For instance, you can personalize subject lines, email content, preheader text, and other aspects of your emails. Try different ways of personalizing your emails and see which ones work the best to find the right balance for maximum engagement.

Wrapping Up

Mastering email campaigns start by optimizing and improving deliverability and engagement metrics. Optimizing these two key performance indices requires care and attention to detail. Get on top of these two KPIs to transform your end results and boost your business’s growth.

Want to optimize your web or mobile application? M-Connect Solutions offers a team of well-qualified experts that help you optimize your websites or mobile applications to boost your digital growth. Contact us now to kickstart your project with us.

About Hemant Parmar

Hemant Parmar is an eCommerce expert and a keen Magento consultant who specializes in meeting the needs of businesses in the e-commerce space. Years in the eCommerce market make him a perfect choice for sharing his expertise on eCommerce and Magento 2 development. He believes that customers need to be met no matter how challenging it might be.

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