We’ve all been there. We work really hard on an email, cue it up, and hit send and even though we can’t see what happens, our low open rates are indicating a lot of our emails just hit the promotions tab, or even worse, the spam folder. Email marketing can often feel like a massive uphill battle.
I’m here to tell you not to lose hope. There are six long-term habits you can get into when building your email marketing strategy and sending emails that will help your open rate climb and keep your emails out of the dreaded spam folder.
Deliverability is something that’s not often talked about and unfortunately, is mostly out of our control.
You see, each email service provider is ranked for deliverability and sometimes we’re starting from a disadvantage and we didn’t even know it! For example, Mailchimp is ranked one of the lowest for deliverability so our emails are already in jeopardy of automatically being sent to spam just because we’re using Mailchimp as an email service provider.
(They are ranked low because they accept unverified email addresses as sending addresses. Those are email addresses that are gmail.com, hotmail.com and many other free email addresses.)
Conversely, using Mailerlite gives you an advantage you may not have known about because they are historically at the top of the deliverability scale, so more of your emails will end up in inboxes.
But let’s break down the six tips I’ve got to help you get more emails delivered over time, shall we?
#1 – Choose your email service provider wisely
I just mentioned that Mailchimp users start out at a disadvantage. When choosing an email service provider, sometimes the cheapest isn’t always the best. Pay attention to their deliverability ratings so that you can make more sales from your emails and then the cost isn’t such a big issue.
#2 – Split test your subject lines every single time.
When you test your subject lines to a small segment of your subscribers before sending it out to the entire list, then you have a much better chance of getting your email opened. Split testing takes a percentage of your segment, say like 20% and sends half of that percentage one subject line and the other half a different subject line.
Then declares a winner usually after an hour so. The winner can be declared by the open rate or the click rate (Pro tip: I use the click rate whenever possible. It’s way more accurate.)
Then it sends the rest of the subscribers the winning subject line.
How does this help deliverability? Well, your email address has a rank just like your email service provider and it’s made up of some mysterious algorithm and some well-known parts. One of those parts is your average open rate.
Therefore, if you’re open rate is above your industry’s average, your rank goes up as a safe email for a user to open. Which in turn means your email is delivered to an inbox more often.
There are a few other known pieces to this ranking. They make up the rest of this list.
#3 Strategize for clicks. Always clicks.
With the onset of many ways a subscriber can filter emails that appear to have been opened but aren’t being opened IRL, it’s no longer a safe bet to measure your sending success by the open rate.
Instead, tracking your success with your click-through rate is a much more reliable statistic. As you might have guessed, the sending algorithm takes your average click rate into consideration when ranking you and deciding where to deliver your email.
And of course, there’s the added bonus that clicks often = sales!
#4 Know your ratios
Who knew that math would be involved when sending emails to inboxes?
A ratio is the measurement of the amount of text in your email versus the amount of imagery and the accepted ratio these days is 80:20.
That’s right. 80% text to 20% imagery. Feels hard to accomplish some days, right?
Over time, sending text-based emails every once in a while is a needed strategy from a relationship-building perspective but it also helps boost your deliverability, so I’d encourage you to give it a try every third or fourth email.
#5 Use a welcome sequence for every single new subscriber
This one’s a no-brainer and once you’ve got a sequence up and running, it’s not too hard to duplicate it and use it for every point of entry that your subscribers will be using.
The reason it helps with your deliverability is that when a welcome sequence is doing its job of repelling the wrong subscriber before you send them a regular newsletter, then it helps keep that open rate higher.
Welcome sequences nurture subscribers deeper into a brand relationship, which in turn, creates readers who open everything you send.
#6 Reply To All
The ultimate in verification that you’re a legit sender and all your emails should go to inboxes is the reply. Once readers start replying to you, your ranking really starts to fly.
If you think about it, when a reader hits reply and sends you a message, they’re telling the internet that your email was exactly something they wanted to open and in turn, the internet sends your email to more readers.
The trick is trying to send emails that encourage a reply. Have you ever sent an email that got lots of replies? Drop your subject and reason for the reply below!
So, you see, this list could double as an email marketing best practices list. Ultimately the one thing I didn’t talk about that will help most of these points is consistency and frequency. Send more valuable emails with great subject lines that compel your readers to hit reply and start a conversation.
There’s no better gold standard to aim for.