5 Simple Steps to Increase Your Email Deliverability & Get Out Of Spam

‍What is Email Deliverability?

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Email deliverability is all about ensuring that the emails you send from your e-commerce business successfully arrive in your customers' inboxes. When you send an email, it travels through various routes and systems before reaching its destination.

‍This is how the process goes: 
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1. The email passes through your e-commerce server.
2. Interacts with the Domain Name System (DNS) to find the recipient's server.
3. Uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server for transmission.
4. Arrives at the recipient's email server.
5. Undergoes checks by anti-spam filters and security systems, and ultimately they’re placed in either the recipient's inbox or spam folder. 

The goal of email deliverability is to make sure your emails navigate this journey without any problems, ensuring they reach their intended recipients reliably.

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Why is Email Deliverability Important?
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The reason why email deliverability is so important is because the WHOLE point of email marketing is to have DIRECT communication with prospects and customers.

But what’s the point if they aren’t even seeing your emails, since they just get sent to their spam folder?

A healthy and active email list can contribute up to 40% or more of an e-commerce business's revenue.

So to put things into perspective, if your business is generating $100,000/year in revenue, without using email marketing, that means if you were to utilize it and have good deliverability you can start generating an extra $40,000/year.

That goes to show just how important it is to have good email deliverability because, without it, your email marketing efforts go down the drain.

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The Main Reasons Why Most Emails Land in Spam
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If you don’t already know, back in September 2021, IOS had a privacy update that forever changed the email marketing landscape. This update made it harder for people to track recipient behavior on Apple devices.

Before, you used to be able to see when and where emails were opened, but this update limited that tracking. Email marketers had to adjust their strategies and rely on different data sources to continue effective email campaigns.

The problem is MOST e-commerce businesses haven’t updated their marketing strategies since then.

They’re still sending emails to their WHOLE list, sending multiple emails a week or even per day, not segmenting their list properly, and sending heavy design-based emails.

These reasons are the most common and BIGGEST mistakes e-commerce brands make when it comes to deliverability.

But it doesn’t have to be that way…

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5 Insider Secrets We Use to Improve Deliverability

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We’ve helped 30+ e-commerce brands get their emails out of spam and straight into their subscribers' inboxes.

This helped them squeeze out TONS of added revenue and made email marketing their most effective revenue-generating asset (even more than paid ads).

Without further ado, here are 5 simple, yet effective steps to GUARANTEE better email deliverability…

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1. Clean up your email list

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The first step is to clean up your email list. You can do this by using a tool like NeverBounce.

This tool checks your WHOLE list for emails that don’t exist anymore, fake emails, and many other important filters.

‍NeverBounce is very easy to use, but there are multiple different ways to use it. We recommend exporting your customer lists, plus your whole email list, then once it “cleans” the list, get the new list and re-upload to your CRM.

But make sure that you “exclude” all of the spammy email contacts and remove them from your list!

As for the pricing, NeverBounce makes it so you only pay for the size of your email list. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 emails you want to “clean”, it would cost you $50. Also, you can try it for free!
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2. Segment Your List (Properly)

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Once you’ve cleaned up your list, the next step is understanding you won’t blast your whole list with emails again. Not until your email deliverability score is back up.

This step will take some trial and error so we’ll create multiple segments to test your deliverability.

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The 3 segments we recommend creating are: Engaged 90 Days, Engaged 180 Days, and Engaged 360 Days.

These segments can involve:
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• Anybody who has purchased in that time period. 
• Anybody who signed up for your newsletter/popup or “accepted marketing” in their checkout process in that time frame. 
• Anybody who opened or clicked an email in that time frame 
• Anybody who visited your website in that time frame. Also make sure to exclude any contacts that have marked you as spam, that have bounced, or unsubscribed.

Once you have these 3 segments, start sending your next campaign to the most engaged people, and as your open rates and deliverability increase, you can start to gradually expand to the next larger segment.

Pro Tip: Filter Gmail emails more aggressively, since they have the most advanced privacy settings and require the most attention. You can do so by creating separate lists that have “@gmail” in their email address.

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3. Get More Email Replies

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Now that you have clean and segmented lists, it’s time you put all your focus on trying to get email replies from your subscribers. This is one of the most effective ways to get better sender credibility.

‍Think of it like this: If you’re a spammer or a “blackhat” marketer who buys emails and blasts campaigns, you probably don’t have an audience that engages with you, replies, or opens your emails.

One trick we use at ConversionBird is to talk to our prospects as if they’re your friends. You can do this by asking them questions and starting friendly conversations via email. Remember, your email subscribers are REAL human beings.

‍Here’s a great example of a plain text email:
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This email is from Daniel Throssel, an iconic email copywriter. This email he wrote does a great job of engaging his audience, learning more about them, and giving them a gift for replying.

This not only adds to his sender credibility, but it also shows more of his personality and makes him come off as more human.

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4. Design/Copy Tips

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Most e-commerce brands send very design-heavy emails. While sending beautifully designed emails are great, making sure they’re responsive for mobile and desktop is more important.

The BEST way to make sure your emails will be responsive for both mobile & desktop is to custom code your emails. What we recommend is to design all of your emails outside of your email tool and then have a developer customer code the text onto the images.

If you don’t have the budget to hire a developer, you can use your email editor tool and try to have “live text” where the text on the images isn’t “stuck” on the images, so it can be scraped more easily.

‍Pro Tip:

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Make sure the copy in the email doesn’t use too many spammy keywords. Some common spammy keywords are FREE, Guarantee, Buy Now, Cash, Limited Time, and more. You can use these words, just make sure you don’t overuse them.

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5. Test Out Your Deliverability Using Software‍

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Now that you finished the 4 most crucial, and your deliverability is starting to see some BIG improvements, it’s time for the final step.

For this step, you want to understand what’s going on with your deliverability, why you are going to spam, and how you can improve it. We recommend you use apps/software such as GlockApps and Email on Acid.

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These tools show you exactly what your email will look like for each client, and also show where your IP is blacklisted. This will help you figure out what needs to be done and improved.

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A Profitable Email List is Only ONE Call Away

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As a business owner, there aren’t many assets that are more valuable than a healthy, engaged, and profitable email list.

But that isn’t possible if your emails are just getting sent to the spam folder.

And the problem is, you already have a lot on your plate, so spending even more time trying to improve your deliverability will do you even more harm than good.

So why not let a team of email marketing experts take the stress off your shoulders?

The best part is, if you aren’t ready to spend your hard-earned money on us yet, you can instead book a call where we will audit your email marketing strategy with no strings attached, or hidden contracts, all it takes is a friendly chat!

If you’re ready to make more revenue, grow your email list with an engaged audience, and want a reliable revenue generator for your business, go ahead and…

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BOOK YOUR CALL

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Summary

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• Email deliverability ensures emails reach customers' inboxes.
  ‍
• Email journey involves servers, DNS, SMTP, anti-spam checks, and folder placement.
  ‍
• Good deliverability is vital for email marketing success.
  ‍
• iOS privacy update in September 2021 affected tracking recipient behavior on Apple devices.
  ‍
• Common mistakes: not updating strategies, sending to the whole list, over-emailing, improper segmentation, and using heavy design-based emails.
  ‍
• Five insider secrets for better deliverability:
  ‍
• Clean up your email list with tools like NeverBounce.
  ‍
• Properly segment your list based on engagement levels.
  ‍
• Encourage more email replies to boost sender credibility.
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• Ensure responsive design and avoid spammy keywords.
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• Use software like GlockApps and Email on Acid to test deliverability.
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