Get Your Emails in More Inboxes With These Delivery Rate Tips

Are too many of your emails not reaching the intended recipients?

Enhancing your domain reputation is critical to getting more emails to your subscribers’ primary inboxes.

This guide explains what you must know to become an email domain reputation master.

Bonus content: Find out how you can measure email marketing success.

Email Domain Reputation: The Basics

To build or rehabilitate your domain’s reputation, you must maximize positive email signals related to it.

When it comes to email provider algorithms, some actions and activities are considered positive, while others are negative. On top of this, certain signals carry more reputational weight than others.

While many factors impact domain reputation — and most of the key ones are addressed in this piece — optimizing for replies likely carries the most positive weight. Other key positive signals include:

• Clicked

• Delivered

• Dwell time glance (<3 seconds)

• Dwell time read (8+ seconds)

• Dwell time skim (3-8 seconds)

• Forwarded

• Moved

• Opened

• Previous engagement date

• Sender domain

• Sender email

• Starred

• Time of user

All of these signals indicate that recipients are engaging with your emails and find value in them. To develop a solid domain reputation, your domain must build up as many positive signals as often as possible.

How List Segments Can Improve Positive Signal Strength

Who you send your emails to will significantly impact the number and type of signals you earn. Focusing on a highly responsive list will send the algorithm a load of positive signals. This tells mailbox providers you’re a top, respected, and trusted sender.

If you send it to a disengaged list, you’ll receive negative signals because people aren’t interacting with your emails. This will cause the algorithm to deliver your emails directly to the promotions tab or spam. An email that’s ignored can cause significant harm.

Your goal should be to strategically segment your lists so you send more to engaged recipients to generate as many positive signals as possible. Leverage your email results data to create segments of highly engaged people. Some examples are:

• Anyone who has made purchases in the last eight days and who has opened an email or clicked a link in the previous eight days.

• Anyone who has purchased from you more than twice and who has opened an email or clicked a link in the last 30 days.

• Anyone who has clicked on an email in the previous 30 days.

It’s also a smart move to do some segmenting around email platform activity. Just because your emails are delivered to inboxes with Yahoo email addresses doesn’t mean the same thing is happening in Gmail. Different platforms have different algorithms that rate signals differently.

Build or Rehabilitate Your Domain

Here are some things to focus on to improve the reputation of your email domain.

• Develop emails that encourage recipients to reply. Replies send powerful, positive signals to email providers. Some tactics you can use to generate replies include:

  • Asking questions and offering help to people who send in responses

  • Requesting replies to receive a coupon or special offer

  • Offering consultations or additional information to people who reply asking for it

• Encourage link-clicking. Email providers track link clicking, which is a strong engagement signal. To encourage click activity, offer links to compelling content or irresistible online deals. Sharing videos is another proven way to earn clicks.

• Produce great content. Email providers monitor how long recipients engage with content. The surest way to increase that time is to write compelling material that delivers value to readers. When you find something that works, offer variations to keep people reading on in the future.

• Control bounce rates. Bounces can negatively impact email deliverability.

  • Soft bounces. Most email services stop emailing subscribers after an email bounces twice or three times. Once that occurs, the subscribers become unmarketable. To avoid reputational harm, it’s critical to eliminate these subscribers from marketing campaigns as quickly as possible. If you want to re-engage with these people, consider doing it on an alternate platform.

  • Hard bounces. These bounces happen when an email doesn’t exist or another issue prevents it from being delivered. It’s wise to remove them from your database because it is an excellent way to improve your email reputation by showing you carefully manage your list.

• Manage spam. You can identify spam issues before they become significant using Google Postmaster Spam reports and the bounce codes mailbox providers return. It’s essential to remove subscribers reporting spam from marketing campaigns immediately. If they continue getting emails from you, they could continue marking them as spam, exacerbating the issue. It will seriously harm your domain reputation because mailbox providers count each spam report as an individual infraction.

• Develop a great welcome flow. It’s critical to prime the email algorithm when you earn a new subscriber. You can prevent deliverability problems by creating an engaging email welcome flow. Some welcome email ideas that will earn engagement and send positive signals to your provider include:

  • Offer of assistance or support (replies)

  • Company history and mission (engagement)

  • Connect on social media (clicks)

  • Survey (clicks)

  • Additional information (replies)

  • Testimonial videos (clicks)

  • Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) (engagement and move)

  • First-time offer (reply)

Increasing Email Open Rates: The Final Word

Developing and sending emails doesn’t matter if they don’t get delivered to the right people (or delivered at all). Leverage the tips in this guide to improve your email domain reputation so more get placed into primary in boxes, allowing recipients to act on them.

Check it out: Simple and easy things you can do to improve email click through rates.