Navigate the byzantine world of email deliverability and ensure you get the most out of your emails.
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Email is a core channel for almost anyone selling anything online, largely because it offers businesses multiple opportunities to communicate with the person on the other end to build rapport, trust, engagement and hopefully, a sale. All the benefits of communicating with your audience via email go out the window, however, if a damaged deliverability stops your campaigns from ending up in the inbox.
This is an issue that I and my team at WellPath know all too well. We are a company with an email list of over a million people and a digital marketing strategy that largely revolves around email as one of our core competencies. Thus it was detrimental when, in late 2016, we managed to screw up our deliverability so badly that we were seeing only between 20 and 30 percent of our emails ending up in our subscribers’ inboxes.
This was the sort of existential threat that could shut us down, and fast. It prompted our undertaking a deep dive into the byzantine world of email deliverability. And while we were fortunate enough to come out on the other side even better off than we were before, the process of getting over that massive roadblock was grueling, and could have been made immensely easier had we known then what we know now.
The question of deliverability is unfortunately one that many marketers don’t consider until it’s too late, but failing to address deliverability until you need to can spell disaster for your business and sabotage your momentum. To help you stay on the right track, here are a few of the key considerations I’ve come to find essential in keeping your deliverability — and your email marketing strategy — healthy.
Undestand how deliverability works.
The first thing to understand is that ending up in the inbox versus spam is a virtuous or vicious cycle. The more your emails end up in inboxes and are engaged with, the more the large inbox providers will ensure your emails continue reaching others’ inboxes. This in turn usually leads to higher engagement, which means continued improvements to deliverability, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, the opposite is true as well: Once you start ending up in spam folders it can be increasingly difficult to reverse course.
Understand the goals.
If you were about to undertake a journey, you would not do so without a map and a clear sense of a destination. When it comes to your email, figuring out what that destination is requires a…
