Email shows no signs of slowing down. With an average ROI of $42 for every invested dollar, it’s still a star among marketing channels. If you don’t feel the same way, it may be time to look at why email isn’t working for your business. Often, the reason is poor email deliverability.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to the number of emails that reached an inbox successfully. You’ll also encounter the term inbox placement to describe this same concept. 

Make sure you don’t confuse your email deliverability with your email delivery rate. The latter is the number of emails that were delivered to a mailbox. However, it refers to both inbox and spam.

Your email deliverability focuses solely on the emails that landed in your customers’ inboxes. It matters more since most people don’t check their spam folders.

Many things influence this metric, but at the top of the list is the content you send and who you send it to. Let’s look at some quick ways to improve your email deliverability, so you can convert more.

Verify your email list regularly

Data decay is a real phenomenon, and the pandemic made it even worse. More than 22% of your email list degrades every year. Since March 2020, millions of people have either quit their jobs or been let go. Your B2B data may have churned at an even higher speed.

Successful email marketers stay on top of their email hygiene and validate their databases regularly. Bounces have a tremendous impact on email deliverability. Internet service providers (ISPs) take note of indiscriminate senders – they’re usually spammers who belong in the junk folder.

Keeping a fresh, valid email list is easier than you may think. There are two ways you can use an email validation service to check your leads:

• Upload your existing email list onto an email verification platform. ZeroBounce will validate 100,000 contacts in about 45 minutes, then notify you of the results. Download them, and you’ll see how many email addresses were outdated and how many are still in use. 
• Connect an email verification API to any lead collection form. Working silently in the background, the API will reject poor-quality addresses and allow only real, valid ones to get on your email list.

ZeroBounce spots and removes 30 types of email addresses that are risky to your email deliverability. What’s more, you can validate 100 contacts for free every month.

Send content people expect from you when they expect it

When they think about ways to improve their inbox placement, many marketers don’t pay much attention to content. But the content you send has a critical influence on how your subscribers – and ISPs – perceive you. 

Your overall email engagement sends ISPs a signal regarding the relevance of your content. Are people opening and clicking through your emails? ISPs will want to serve your audience more of that, so you’re more likely to land in the inbox. The contrary applies, too: if your audience is passive and your emails aren’t getting much traction, you might end up in spam.

So, how do you build healthy engagement that helps your email deliverability? Send your subscribers the content they signed up for, and deliver it as expected. 

For instance, if your company promised weekly marketing tips, make sure you send out just that every week. This doesn’t mean you can never talk about anything else but strive to tie any topic back to your industry. The more you stick to your niche, the more brand awareness and trust you build in that space.

Test the email deliverability of every campaign

There’s nothing you can do to pull your emails out of spam once they land there. However, you can address email deliverability issues and prevent them from happening.

An inbox placement tester will allow you to find out if your email will land in the inbox – before you send it. If certain elements of your email cause it to go to spam, you get a chance to edit them ahead of time. 

Here are some of the things that can cause an email to go to spam:

• A lack of balance between text and images. Such content can be blocked by spam filters, so make sure to include enough text in your campaigns.
• Link shorteners can also trigger spam filters. Relying on them to retrieve performance data is detrimental to your email deliverability.
• Inconsistent sending behavior. If your email goes to spam during the test, it could be that it’s been too long since you’ve reached out to your list. Warm up your IP before you send a mass email. 

Assuming your email list is clean, and your content is on brand, testing your deliverability ensures you have the highest chance of reaching your audience. 

Explore ZeroBounce to learn more about landing in the inbox. The platform gives you access to an entire suite of email deliverability tools – all working together to help you get more eyeballs on your emails.

Explore ZeroBounce’s email cleaning and deliverability tools

About The Author

ZeroBounce is an award-winning email verification and deliverability platform helping more than 185,000 customers land their emails in the inbox. The service removes email typos, nonexistent and abuse email accounts, spam traps and other risky email addresses. ZeroBounce’s email deliverability toolkit further supports the safe inbox delivery of transactional and marketing emails. The company operates a military-grade security infrastructure. ZeroBounce has validated more than 13 billion emails. Some of the companies it serves are Amazon, Disney, Netflix, LinkedIn and Sephora. In 2022, ZeroBounce founded Email Day (April 23), now an international holiday honoring email inventor Ray Tomlinson.

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