What’s the point of executing your top-notch email marketing strategy if none of your emails find their way to the inbox? That’s where email deliverability comes in!
NB: This is an article produced from a Cendyn guide called: 10 Point Checklist for Email Deliverability
Your emails are useless if they never see the light of day! That’s why all good marketers have a solid grasp of email deliverability. It influences the rate at which your emails avoid the spam filter and make it to the inbox.
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To determine whether an email is legitimate, internet service providers (ISP) and email service providers (ESP) evaluate a few factors: the reputation of the sender, the frequency of sending, and the average engagement rate (opens and clicks), among other things. Optimizing your email program for each of these will give your email the greatest chance of reaching the intended recipients.
Here’s what you need to do to keep your emails out of spam and in front of your customers and prospects. Exceptional deliverability is within your reach!
WHAT’S EMAIL DELIVERABILITY, EXACTLY?
Email deliverability is the likelihood that your emails will arrive into the inbox of your subscribers. When done successfully, it means that your emails make it to your intended recipients without hiccups. When done poorly, it prevents your emails from ever being seen because they end up in the spam filter.
That’s the crux of why you need to pay attention to deliverability: without it, your entire email marketing strategy falls apart. And it’s not just marketing emails at risk. Email deliverability can also prevent important transactional emails, such as reservation confirmations, from ever making it to the inbox. Not a great guest experience!
Here’s what you need to do to keep your emails out of spam and in front of your customers and prospects. Exceptional deliverability is within your reach!
Below is a short synopsis from each point in the guide:
#1: Maintain a quality database
Clean data is crucial for email marketing success. You can have a killer email campaign, but if your email database isn’t healthy, it may never reach the intended person. That’s a waste of time and money!
Your top priority is to use a customer relationship management system (CRM) to manage your email lists. Your CRM should allow you to tag users and segment lists so you can build more targeted outreach. As we’ll see,
the better you are at targeting your list, the stronger your deliverability
#2 Get Permission
You’ll also want to keep your lists clean by using double opt-ins. That means that your list building always includes a follow-up email that confirms consent. The double opt-in is the most straightforward way to avoid getting flagged as spam – a huge red flag that can affect your reputation if it happens too often
#3 Preserve your reputation
Since you send emails through your domain, it becomes a signpost for reputation. This reputation is called your Sender Score, which assigns a number to every outgoing mail server based on metrics like unsubscribes and spam reports. Think of this as a credit score, but for emails: the worse your score, the less likely your emails make it to the inbox. Poor adherence to best practices will ding your reputation and push your score down, making it nearly impossible to reach the inbox.
#4 Know your authentication
Authentication is an “ID check” for emails. It provides the recipient’s email servers with a record of identification to check that a sender is legitimate. This verification step prevents spammers from spoofing email addresses and sending unwanted emails from seemingly-valid email addresses. Spam will not only affect your domain reputation but also how customers perceive your brand.
#5 Communicate consistently
When it comes to email deliverability, consistency matters. You want to send email campaigns at a consistent cadence (and from the same email
address) to build trust and reputation with ISPs. ISPs look for regular patterns to determine whether an email is legitimate or spam. A sudden spike in email frequency will lower your reputation score. On the other hand, sending emails sporadically also dings your score. In both cases, the infrequent send reduces the trustworthiness of your email domain.
#6 Focus on engaging content
Segment and personalize your content to increase recipient engagement – and boost conversions!. For obvious reasons, when the recipient engages with a message, it sends a positive signal to the spam guardians. It says: “This sender is reputable and the recipient wants to engage with it.”
#7 Play to the (spam) filters
The spam filter is enemy #1 to hotel marketers. It exists to protect recipients — but can also be overzealous in preventing legitimate messages from reaching the inbox. The reason why spam filters are more aggressive is because they exist to prevent phishing and malware attacks from reaching the end user. Since there are so many of these messages, you have to be on top of your spam filters!
#8 Know your automation
No more batch and blast! With behavioral-based email marketing gaining traction, there’s no excuse to send the same message to everybody. This user-based approach utilizes artificial intelligence to send emails to recipients based on their response patterns across email, web, and social media.
#9 Avoid triggers
Email service providers are master spam blockers. They process millions of messages daily, which provides a deep base for evaluating legitimacy. Spam filters can be triggered by specific keywords and phrases, as well as excessive punctuation, sloppy HTML, broken links, and blacklisted URLs. Spam filters also catch emails that express urgency or refer to customers in generic, casual terms (like ma’am, bro, or friend).
#10 Monitor often
Your Sender Score is dynamic. That means one underperforming campaign can push that score down. To avoid surprises, check deliverability in each of the major email clients and run a SPAM check on every campaign before you hit send. This is such a vital part of monitoring email performance that we built this functionality into eInsight’s Inbox Forecaster.
Strong deliverability rates arise from diligence, adherence to best practices, and adaptability to a dynamic landscape. Ideally, you manage your hotel’s email marketing inside a best-of-breed CRM that allows you to segment, personalize and monitor performance over time. With a centralized data warehouse, you can run highly targeted campaigns, fueled by real-time data around customer interests and recent behavior.
The payoff for maintaining deliverability is in the results. You’ll enjoy better performing campaigns that resonate with your customers, as well as a reputational moat that keeps your messages out of the spam filter. A classic win-win that builds over time!
Click here to download the guide
