One of the most important steps for a successful email marketing campaign is making sure that your messages reach the inbox.

Email marketing is a powerful tool to connect with your audience.  The success of your campaign depends on your ability to ensure that your message makes it to your intended recipient’s inbox.

Emails that end up labelled as spam and end up in the “junk” or “promotions” folder are a waste.  How do you get your emails to your audience with high-impact and high conversion rates?

You can always consult with a full service email marketing agency to see what they recommend.

Sender Reputation

Maintain a healthy sender reputation.  Your email should be engaging and relevant to what your customers are looking for.  Pay attention to spam complaints and take them seriously.  

Internet service providers and email services monitor the behaviour and practices of email senders to determine whether their email should be delivered at all.

If a high percentage of your recipients mark your email as spam or junk ISPs are aware of it and less likely to forward your emails.

Use an Accurate List

Perform regular list maintenance.  Remove old, inaccurate and unengaged subscribers.  Keeping your list clean minimizes rejection rates and improves your overall engagement rate.  

People who have not engaged with your emails over a specific period should be removed.  If you don’t want to remove them completely, keep them in an inactive file, and send something to them on a lesser frequency.   

Collect emails using opt-in or double opt-in techniques.  This ensures that the audience receiving your messages is truly interested in receiving them.  This will reduce the incidence of spammer complaints.

Email Authentication

Sender Policy Framework and DKIM are important protocols that verify your email is from a legitimate source.

SPF allows you to specify which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain.  DKIM adds a digital signature to the header of your email message.

These protocols are important for proving that your email is not forged and comes from a legitimate source.

Metrics

Keep track of your performance.  Use metrics like open rates, click-through rates and subscriber growth to assess the effectiveness of your campaign.

Other measures of performance are

• Bounce rate – the percentage of emails that were not delivered to the recipient’s inbox
• Open rate – the percentage of your emails that are opened.
• Spam complaint rate – the percentage of recipients who marked your email as spam.  The federal government encourages recipients of certain types of spam email to report it to law enforcement authorities.

Testing

Test your email before sending it.  If you don’t test before you send you could end up dealing with messy issues. 

Formatting that gets jumbled in transmission or emails that get caught in spam traps is only a couple of the problems you can avoid if you test your campaign before sending.

You should A/B test your email as well.  Vary the headline, graphics or other elements to find out what has the most impact.