How to improve low delivery rates in email marketing

Email deliverability is the process of reaching your subscribers' inboxes. However, emails can bounce or land in spam folders. To increase your chances of landing in the inbox, follow email deliverability best practices.

Sending an email involves several technical steps:

• First, you compose an email in a service like Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook. 
• Next, you click send, and the message is uploaded to a simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), which passes the email between servers. 
• The SMTP communicates with a domain name server (DNS) to locate the recipient's server. Once found, the SMTPs exchange the message, and the recipient's SMTP decides where to deliver the email.

Factors that affect email deliverability

• Internet Service ProvidersInternet (ISPs) enable access to the internet and every Internet Protocol (IP) address is linked to one. There are many different types of ISPs, each with its own functionality. Some lower-budget, lower-bandwidth ISPs may have difficulty handling larger emails. 
• The appearance of an email can differ depending on the device it is viewed on. For instance, an email may look different on a mobile phone as compared to a desktop computer. Moreover, email hosts like Gmail and Outlook may display emails in different formats. Check out: How to prevent Gmail from clipping messages and Editing your email for Mobile

Best practices for improving email deliverability 

1. Authenticate your domain sender addresses to ensure that they are verified. Check out: Domain Authentication

2. Make sure to test your emails by sending them to your internal team. Check out: Best practice: testing your email

3. Start by sending a limited number of emails to avoid being marked as spam. As you grow your subscriber list, you can increase the sending frequency.

4. Send high-quality content that is relevant and valuable to your audience to avoid being flagged as spam. Check out: Best email design practices

5. The more opens and clicks your emails receive, the better your sender reputation becomes. Aim to increase opens and clicks. Check out: A/B email testing

6. Respond to replies promptly to show ISPs that your audience is engaged and interested.

7. Keep your audience clean and engaged by avoiding spam traps, unengaged subscribers, and unknown users. Check out: Managing unsubscribes

8. Avoid sending emails to invalid email addresses to prevent hard bounces, which can damage your sender reputation. Check out: Improving bounce rate in your email

9. Ensure that your emails look professional and legitimate to avoid being identified as spam or malicious by ISPs. Check out: How to avoid spam filter triggers

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