Email deliverability, inbox placement, subscriber engagement rates and all these terms we have heard and read but not sure of how they work. What they are up to in email marketing? The process in which an email travels from the sender to the subscriber's inbox is quite different in great old days. The giant ISPs like Google, Hotmail and Yahoo have changed the way of evaluating the efficiency of email campaigns with engagement rates and behaviour of the customers instead of evaluating the efficiency of content.
If you want your emails to get delivered and read by your subscribers, then you need to make sure that your engagement rates are up to the mark as fixed by giant ISPs.
Remember that your emails are read by a human not a robot, hence make sure to personalize the content according to their interests and choices to get your emails opened and clicked through. This will naturally improve your engagement rates and reputation score at the most.
Deliverability rates:
The most basic metric to measure your emails reaching your subscriber's inbox are the email deliverability rates. This is achieved only when your emails are capable enough of engaging your subscribers with killer content and attractive subject lines. The engagement of subscribers is considered in two different forms: Positive and Negative.
Positive engagement increases the chances of your emails getting into the subscriber's inbox. Negative engagement increases the chance of getting your emails into the spam folder. Even though the ISPs do not deliberate of how they generally weigh your deliverability rates, it is understood that positive engagements have an upper hand in terms of reputation score.
Researchers and experts in email marketers have come up that the giant ISPs evaluate the engagement score based on several features like content, social sharing, labelling, layouts, headers and HTML features.
Positive engagement generally defined as:
- Subscribers clicking on the links in an email campaign
- Opening the email campaign but have not acted
- Marking your email campaign as important
- Moving your email campaign from spam folder to inbox
- Replying to your email campaign
- Clicking on the CTA button to purchase from you
- Forwarding an email campaign to others
Negative engagement generally defined as:
- Open, read and the deleting an email campaign
- Hitting the delete button without reading the email campaign
- Marking an email campaign as spam
- Hitting the unsubscribe link or button
Experts research output:
In order to make you to understand how engagement rates are capable of increasing and decreasing email deliverability rates. Let us take two sets of IP addresses called as Strategic IP and Normal IP.
Strategic IP have said to have a good track record with excellent reputation rates of engaging their subscribers with killer and relevant content of their needs and interests. This IP is used to send email campaigns to targeted audience. Normal IP devoid of such track record and is used to send email campaigns to all others in an email database.
Research reports have shown that the strategic IP have higher deliverability rates when compared to that of Normal IP. Why because, Strategic IP have made their prime motto to engage subscribers in the very best way which is the ultimate cause for increase in email deliverability rates.
Improving email deliverability rates:
If you want your email campaigns to get land in the inbox then you should be keen on the subscriber engagement rates. Remember to check efficiency of your subject lines and killer content. A small change in the layout or landing page design or using any light colours that you do may constitute the big picture in terms of success rates.
Here are some of the tactics to improve your email deliverability rates
Personalization and Segmentation:
If you are interested in sending your emails randomly to all subscribers in your email database thinking that at some point of time they will open and read your email campaigns then you are wrong. You are forcing your clients to mark you as spam. Pushing your emails to all subscribers without segmenting your database and forcing them to make them intact is not a good sign for increasing engagement rates.
According to email marketing, it revolves around the word "relevance", it is accepted that relevance is the key for engaging subscribers in email marketing. When you are able to craft perfect subject lines, relevant content, targeting interested audience then your work is done. You have made them engaged, when a similar group of clients get similar messages then they act similarly.
By making small changes in your content, subject lines, layouts and designs you will see a hike in terms of engagement rates. Remember to target smaller similar group of clients since ISPs consider past engagement rates in calculating your future reputation score and deliverability rates to get your emails land in the inbox.
Keep updating your subscriber information:
Update your signup form with required questions to know more about your subscribers. You can ask their interests when they tend to purchase from you, after they have made a purchase, based upon their past purchase history gather more information to target them with relevant content. When your email campaigns reaches the right people on right time with right content then you have made it right.
For example, if your email campaigns talks about holiday campaigns then knowing your clients anniversary date would be beneficial. If it falls under the current month then you can really ask them where they would like to spend their anniversary. You can suggest them some awesome places which they would be really interested in. If they say "yes" then personalization and updating your subscriber information have fetched you a sale. If "no" then you should concentrate on improving content and keep updating your subscriber necessary information.
Personalization leads to positive engagement which ultimately results in marking your email campaigns as important with more of open and click through rates. The more the negative engagement, the more your subscriber mark you as spam.
Wash off non-responders:
When your clients are not responding for your email campaigns like deleting your emails, not opening your emails for more than 6 months then the email addresses might go stale, it is better to bid a goodbye email to them.
To stale and non-responders send one last email explaining them about the issue from their end and make prominent call to action button giving them a chance to re-engage or to re-activate their account. Still not responded, then the best option is to delete such subscriber email addresses from your email database.
This action plan might make your email list smaller but your list contains only interested people who like to hear from you and generally know what you are going to sell them. By this you are increasing positive engagement rates which ISPs will make a note of it and will place your email campaigns in the inboxes.
Bottom lines:
Email marketing is the cost effective medium but the key for success is relevance in email marketing. Hence when you are capable of crafting a relevant content to target the right customer at the right time then you have made it right to engage your subscribers in the right manner. Engagement rates are the most important tools to get your email campaigns likely to land in the inbox. Based upon your engagement rates, ISPs will give you a chance to show off your email campaigns to subscribers.