Email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy that can result in high returns on investment.
But to make the best out of this marketing tool, your emails need to arrive in your audience’s inbox, not their SPAM folder.
By using a professional marketing platform like SuperOffice you’re already on the right path. It is also important to follow best practices for email deliverability.
In this article, we will give you some tips and introduce some functionalities in SuperOffice to make it easier and ensure the success of your email marketing campaigns.
The importance of email deliverability
Picture this scenario: you've meticulously created an email campaign with top-notch content and design, hit the send button, and receive little to no response. Your open rate is disappointing and there are numerous bounces, or even worse, you’re marked as spam.
Email deliverability is a big deal because it decides if your emails actually make it to your subscribers' inboxes or not. If they don't get delivered, they won't be seen or read by your target audience, which means missed chances and lower success for your email marketing campaigns.
3 useful tips to improve your email deliverability
Read on to get tips on how to improve your email deliverability, some best practices and learn about functionality in SuperOffice Marketing to help you validate your email sending domain.
1. Create relevant messages that resonate with your audience
Crafting a good message that is relevant to your audience is where it should all start. It’s simple as that.
Think about your own email inbox: you already have a lot to read, things to get done, so would you read messages that don’t seem relevant? Probably not, right?
So, start with that.
✅ Create messages that are relevant to your audience, that they will find valuable and useful. One of the best ways to increase deliverability in your email marketing is having good engagement with your audience. Email clients give points to senders whose emails get open, read, and replied, so make sure you’re really sending a message with your audience in mind.
❌ Avoid using just images. One big-image email can be considered SPAM. Other email solutions – like Outlook - may block images at first, so your message will be lost.
✅ Test your emails. See them in different email clients, such as Outlook and Gmail, open them in your mobile phone and computer, make sure the images are looking good, and that the links all work. There are also a number of email testing solutions out there that can aid you, such as Mailtrap or Putsmail and more.
✅ Make it super easy to unsubscribe. No one wants to lose subscribers, but if someone doesn’t want to receive your emails anymore, they should be able to find that option easily. If not, people may be tempted to report you as SPAM, which will be way worse.
❌ Avoid looking (and sounding) like SPAM. Expressions like “Earn money quickly”, “Cash bonus” or “Risk-free investment” will make your email look suspicious. Avoid these spam-trigger words. Treat your email like a conversation with your audience, be real with them.
✅ Make sure people recognize you. When people look at your email in their inbox, they should immediately recognize it is from your company. Again, be real with your audience. Why would they open a message from someone they don’t know?
We’ve made this last tip extra easy in SuperOffice: read on to see how you can use the "From name" and address in your campaigns.
Having the right message will take you far, but to make sure you’re hitting the spot, you also need to send to the right people.
2. Take care of your subscriber’s list
You already know you need to create a killer message to get results in your email campaigns. The next piece of this puzzle is to make sure you’re targeting the right audience for it.
Getting a good reputation as an email sender is also about taking care of your subscriber's lists.
This means first making sure information about your contacts is updated. Having a lot of bounces – those returned emails of people who don’t work at a company anymore or have changed addressed can really jeopardize your reputation, making you a candidate for the SPAM folder.
It also means making sure people are interested in your messages. If a large part of your audience does not open or engage with your messages for a long time, it may be time to try some different approach with them. As you know, engagement is a key factor in deliverability, so make sure to check inactive users that haven’t opened your emails in a while.
Segmenting your audience to send more targeted emails is a good way to get that right message to the right people. In SuperOffice, you can use selections to target specific groups such as people from a specific country, or that have been in touch with your company recently. That way you can create even more relevant messages that will get your reader’s attention.
3. Make sure all wheels are turning behind-the-scenes
As you’ve seen, a lot in email deliverability is related to creating that right experience for your audience. Being relevant, making sure people are interested, taking care of the subscriber’s list are major aspects of what makes a campaign successful or not.
But there are some parts that are more “behind-the-scenes”. Technical aspects such as domain reputation and authentication are an equally important part of this puzzle. In the end, it all needs to work together to ensure email deliveries are spot on.
One of the most important aspects of these technical parts is the SPF record in your domain.
If you are unfamiliar with this term, it will be helpful to understand what it is and the reason why it is important to set up.
Tip: If you do not have access to your DNS page, please share the guide (and this article) with your DNS support or IT department.
Now that we have covered SPF and why it matters to validate your domain, let’s move on to how our improved functionality will help you validate your e-mail in SuperOffice Marketing.
E-mail domain validation in SuperOffice Marketing
SuperOffice Marketing contain some functionality to assist you in ensuring better email deliverability.
Hopefully, you’re already using the flexible options to personalize and specify the From and Reply to fields when you set up a mailing in SuperOffice.
This is great when you want to add custom text like <Jeanette from SuperOffice> to be displayed as the sender. Or if you are sending an email on behalf of your colleague or boss.
But if you add an unvalidated or misspelled e-mail address, that might hurt your e-mail deliverability. That’s why we have added functionality that will help you ensure the success of your email marketing campaigns:
- You can add validated domain in admin to make sure users select the correct and authenticated domain
- You will see a message if you’re using an unvalidated e-mail address in the From" field, to remind you to use authenticated domains.
- This will also help avoiding spelling mistakes in the email sending domain
So, if you created and successfully added the SPF records in your DNS, you can now set preferences and add approved email domains to Settings and maintenance in SuperOffice.
Remember, good email deliverability is a joint effort: you need the technical settings and the best practices to improve your sender reputation, reduce your bounce rate, enhance engagement, and reach the inbox every time.
Put these into practice and use our new functionality to create timely, relevant email marketing campaigns that will boost your return on investment 🚀.