News Deliverability Best Practices: Webinar Recap

During our deliverability webinar, 80% of attendees said they have good deliverability but still want tips for improvement.

Email deliverability (aka “inbox placement”) is a complex topic, and inbox providers are constantly changing the game. It’s important to stay on top of deliverability best practices so that your content reaches a person’s inbox and potential problems can be spotted before they snowball. Devin Jensen, Email Marketing Manager at Inntopia, Steve Wagner, Senior Marketing Manager at Webbula, and I covered a lot of ground in the one-hour webinar. Here are the key concepts we discussed:

Respect opt-ins and opt-outs

This is rule number one. Get a person’s explicit consent before you add them to your email lists (the one exception being if they made a purchase, which is implicit consent).

+ Read the full deliverability whitepaper for more details

List sources and list hygiene

How you acquire email addresses is a huge factor in deliverability.

• Beware of using trade show lists, sweepstakes, and wi-fi lists. People who did not stop by your booth at a trade show don’t expect to hear from you. As far as sweepstakes and wi-fi lists go, those who signed up wanted to win a prize or wanted free wi-fi. They don’t necessarily want your emails.
• Use Webbula to remove invalid emails, delivery threats, known spam bots, and more from your email lists.

Engaging content is key

Inbox providers (e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc.) are watching how users interact with your emails. Do users open an email, click a link, and add the sender to their contacts? Positive behaviors performed by the user will bolster your sender reputation and increase your chances of reaching the inbox.

Negative behaviors (e.g. marking an email as spam, deleting without opening, etc.) will hurt your sender reputation and increase the chances of landing in the spam folder.

Deliverability metrics should be KPIs

Monitoring content and deliverability metrics over time and per inbox provider will help you spot list hygiene issues and deliverability problems.

Open rate, clickthrough rate, click-to-open rate, and unsubscribe rate all give you a good idea of whether an email is wanted by your subscribers. If the email is wanted, it will bolster your sender reputation and increase your chances of reaching the inbox.

If you notice a decrease in open rate, it could mean the email did not resonate with your audience. If your list and content have not changed and you notice a drop over the course of sending two or more emails, it could indicate a deliverability problem.

Deliverability metrics

Hard bounces, soft bounces, and abuse complaints should be monitored and kept as low as possible. For benchmark metrics, read the full deliverability whitepaper.

A large number of hard bounces indicates an issue with list hygiene. Think about where that list came from, if the opt-in was explicit, and whether the email addresses were correctly entered without spelling mistakes. Webbula can help to remove invalid emails, delivery threats, and known spam bots from your email lists.

Still have questions?

+ Read the full deliverability whitepaper

+ Watch the deliverability webinar

+ Request a comprehensive deliverability assessment

*Benchmark numbers from IBM’s 2018 Marketing Benchmark Report https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/L2VNQYQ0