How email deliverability affects your B2B marketing success rate and how to increase it

E-mail deliverability is of absolute importance to any business. There is a vast concern for e-mail deliverability which means e-mail is still king despite the proliferation of social media platforms for messaging. The online success of many companies still depends on e-mail. Social media is merely an adjunct and e-mail will still continue to reign as the primary mode of receiving the message because of the privacy it offers and its many user-friendly features.

Nearly everyone is dependent on their email to check on all the important documents received, subscriptions and notifications. Businesses know that e-mail is essential to people’s lives as much as a name or a physical address so many of them rely on it to start marketing campaigns, send surveys, or notify their customers of new products and services.

Getting the message across via e-mail is of utmost importance. Undelivered and bounced messages mean wasted time, resources, and effort. Since big businesses deliver e-mails by the thousands,  ISPs keep to a rule that they have a hygienic email list by choosing the email validation tools they can rely on. This kind of email list must have verifiable contacts where all are active users who have opted-in to receive messages and notifications. A hygienic e-mail list contributes to sender reputation and makes sure all your email is ending up in inboxes making for successful e-mail marketing campaigns.

How Deliverability affects your B2B Marketing

Inaccurate campaign reporting

Whenever you launch an e-mail marketing campaign you will be receiving data and statistics that can further reveal facts about your business processes. Marketing strategies live and die on the strengths of reporting processes. These reports are essential because it helps you and your team assess performance, test and scale campaigns, and gain actionable insights on how to predict future decision making and actions. Accurate reports must come from clean and accurate data.

Bad data has consequences when it comes to marketing reports. Your database, if it contains inaccurate or incomplete data contaminate your reports and cause an error in your results. When dependent on misleading reports, you make poor decisions that negatively impact your marketing strategy and keep you from moving forward. With clean and accurate data, you can be confident with the accuracy and effectiveness of your marketing metrics and your marketing reports.

Wasted Money

If you are sending emails without preventing deliverability issues then you are wasting money. If you are going for an email campaign it is absolutely necessary that your e-mail ends up on the inbox. Even if your deliverability rates look good it doesn’t necessarily mean you are in the clear. Your email hygiene has to be excellent otherwise those emails will just most likely end up delivered to junk mail folders.

According to data by Research Path, 79% of email worldwide got into the target inbox in 2016 while 13% of email sent just ended up in junk folders. Of all those emails delivered in junk folders, a mere 1% of users found them and moved them back into the inbox.

The lesson here is if you want to build strong engagement with your campaign you have to find your own way to the inbox.

To get you to the vaunted inbox, however, requires that you follow e-mail design best practices. No matter how well-crafted your content is or how catchy and meaningful your subject line is if your company is known for sending to unresponsive, closed or inactive e-mail accounts there will still be a chance that you will end up in the wasteland of the junk folder.

Not Targeted Communication

You may find it very easy or convenient to go to the “one size fits all route”. This process doesn’t require any additional knowledge or planning on your part. In this case, you are letting the computer do the work for you. If you are thinking of e-mail marketing, sending identical messages to all your subscribers and hoping something will stick may not be a viable solution or strategy. Leaving your marketing efforts to chance may encourage people to unsubscribe. It should be noted that the top two reasons people opt out of emails is too high frequency and lack of relevance. You can solve both of these issues by having more targeted messages.

You should look into your email reports more carefully and start studying click-through reports as revealing your subscriber’s interests. Sending a survey to your existing subscribers is also a way of learning about their interests. Preferences change over time so it will be good to periodically check in with your audience to see updates on their interests.

What affects the Deliverability rate

Email Service Provider 

An email service provider is a company that offers email marketing or bulk email services. If you are launching an e-mail marketing or newsletter campaign you should make use of an email service provider to speed up your process.

An ESP may have several services and features to provide you with a template or a pre-made template for sending to contacts. You will get a feature for managing your subscriber’s list and a way of enhancing fields to hold additional information. You will have tools to get statistical reviews of each email sent to measure the success rate of each campaign. You can test templates for compatibility with email applications. You can have the ability to conduct some SPAM testing to test the score of the email against known factors that may get it blocked. ESPs also give you the ability to send both HTML and plain text formats to improve delivery success rates.

Sender Reputation 

There are spam filtering systems that analyze your reputation scores. Once you send an e-mail the spam filtering systems analyze of the email you are sending is spam based on complicated algorithms. If a system has decided that you are sending spam your reputation score is lowered and if it gets low enough you may even get blocked. You can also get low scores if real people report you as an abusive sender. The “mark as spam” button in webmail interfaces alerts the spam filtering system than an email is spam. If you get reported often enough your reputation will go down as well.

Email List hygiene and List verification 

You should always make sure to verify your email list. Email verification is the process of determining whether the email address on your list is valid and deliverable. There are services out there the deliverability of an email address. Usually, this service is as part of a software service wherein you are given a dashboard to upload a list of an email account and as a result, you get a clean list of emails.

How to improve email marketing campaign deliverability rate 

How to choose a good ESP

In order to get a good ESP, you have to know the kind of features you want in a vendor. Of course, it depends on what kind of email marketing program you are running. The success factors in email marketing for bloggers are completely different than for an eshop. Yet, there are 5 benefits an ESP should always be looking into:

• Email automation
• Usability
• Integration
• Segmentation and Targeting
• Reporting and Analysis

An important question to ask is also their deliverability rate. Do they have good deliverability and is their deliverability monitored?

How to Maintain perfect Sender reputation

You can uphold your sender reputation by sticking to best practices. When starting out e-mail campaigns you should start out small and just send out to only a few hundred recipients. You should make sure your e-mail list is clean by updating it regularly and clearing out bounces. Finally, you should never send emails to people you don’t have a relationship with.

How to scrub your email list 

When you scrub your email list you are removing unengaged subscribers from your e-mail list so you will only be sending to people who want to receive your emails.

When scrubbing your email start with the most active email lists first. You must also pay attention to older lists because unengaged customers may count among your total. Even with a new list if there are uninterested people there is no point in emailing them.

When scrubbing lists you should include all your email lists, especially if you are marketing regularly. It is advisable to update your list at least twice a year.

Email deliverability is of absolute importance to your e-mail marketing campaign. Your leads, conversions, and ROIs depend on a hygienic email list filled with active users who are actually interested in your products and services. Good e-mail lists and a healthy sender reputation guarantees that you will be doing good business on the internet and maximizing your time and effort in all your marketing campaigns.