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In my last piece for Entrepreneur.com, I went over the basics of email deliverability — what it is, the key metrics to understand and some of the tools to use to understand how your deliverability is being scored by the major inbox providers. Hopefully, you have adopted the use of some of those tools and have fairly good insight into your deliverability rating. Now that you understand your goals for deliverability and how to measure the effectiveness of any of your efforts it is time to get into the actual tactics and actions you can take to improve your inbox placement.
The basics of list maintenance
There are hundreds of actions that may have an adverse impact on your deliverability — particularly when you are accelerating your list growth through using tools like ReferralCandy to build incentive-based referral programs or DojoMojo to run giveaways and sweepstakes (full disclosure: I am a founder of DojoMojo), which are powerful growth engines but can also result in the acquisition of many less-qualified emails that require active maintenance.
Fortunately there are numerous methods you can adopt to improve your reputation. The key is to identify which of these efforts are likely to have the highest return on investment in the form of making sure that your emails get in front of your target audience. When confronted with our own list issues, these were some of the actions — among the nearly countless ones we tried — that yielded the highest return for us.
Prune your list regularly.
Think of your email list as a garden that requires constant nurturing. While many delicious fruits and vegetables may grow therein, weeds will also spring up from time to time. Left untended, the weeds will overrun your garden and ravage your otherwise healthy plants. But, if you actively prune those weeds so your vegetables and fruits have space and can grow, your garden will become more vibrant than ever.
In much the same way with email, you need to be diligent about removing unengaged users from your list. I hear all too often that brands are reluctant to remove users from their list in the vain hope that they will someday become engaged. Trust me: If someone has not opened an email from you in six months, he likely never will. Not only are you paying your email service provider (ESP) to have that person in your list but you are harming your ability to reach your already engaged existing audience. Worse yet, any future emails you acquire will as a result be even less likely to see your communications. Since success is defined as having an engaged email list, and not simply a massive one, it’s important to be proactive about ridding your list of unengaged users regularly.
Make it incredibly easy for a user to unsubscribe.
This should go without saying but bears repeating. Ensure that each message you send includes a working unsubscribe within the email. Some ESPs like Mailchimp automatically generate these links and include them in the footer of each email, while others like Sendgrid do not. If you’re using an ESP that doesn’t include the link by default, be sure you…
