Email open rates are at their highest rate in 3 years.* But this is almost more important: click rates are NOT rising, so content and quality emails are more crucial than ever.
Delivering content that is relevant to your email list, and making sure it is easy to read and entertaining isn't just lovely for your brand. It also determines how Google - or whatever email provider your readers are using - ranks your emails and whether they allow your emails to end up in the main inbox or the junk folder.
It is important to note that sending an email is a privilege, not a right. Your email list should be your own made up of people who have opted-in to getting your emails. It might be tempting to purchase a list or keep sending emails to people who aren't interested; however, this hurts your sender reputation (more on that in a minute) and actually pushes your emails into more junk folders.
To give some background, let's start with the lifecycle of an email.
The sending and delivery of your emails are dependent upon the engagement of your users.
If your emails are uninteresting, irrelevant, off-brand, or negative in some way, the likelihood that users will engage with your emails goes down significantly. When users stop engaging with your emails, your "sender reputation" rate goes down significantly. After about 30 days of bad emails, the email provider starts to automatically redirect your emails to junk, even if you are sending it to someone who might be interested.
So now you're probably wondering how do I increase my email deliverability rating and prevent bad emails?
There are three key points to preventing your emails from ending up in no-man's land.
1. Engage Customers
2. Send Great Content
3. Monitor Your Results.
Easy, right? It should be, but creating good content can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming. We recommend working with an agency, like us, or someone on your team who is dedicated to building out your brand messaging, tone, and content.
Engaging customers, and growing your email list can be a labor of love, there are lot's of tip and tricks we will be offering in other blog posts about how to grow a list successfully, but like all good things, it takes time and effort. Running giveaways with other brands, offering up contests, goods, or discounts in exchange for emails are some of the most popular ways to grow, but be patient, it takes time!
Lastly, monitoring your results is an essential part of determining a successful email list. We suggest using an email marketing tool like Klaviyo to manage all your owned media. If you start to see you get a lot of opens and clicks, with certain headlines or specific content, start moving your messaging more in that direction. If you see that certain clients are really interested in one type of product, you offer, only send them emails on that product.
The main goal here is to make email as personal as possible. As if the customer is in your store, and saying "hey, I want this product, where can I find it?", and you point them directly to the product, as opposed to saying "can't give you specifics. look around everything in our store, you might find it!" Customers are hit with an onslaught of information, and decision-making fatigue is very real when it comes to preventing purchases. Make the shopping process via email as easy as possible, and you will see significant financial results.
These three tools working in conjunction can almost guarantee a high email deliverability rating and landing your emails into more inboxes successfully. We have found that emails are one of the best ways to grow your e-commerce brand, and 89% of customers are looking for brands to email them discounts, product updates, and interesting content.*
Thank you for reading and please let us know what your thoughts are in the comments. We'd love to chat email marketing tips with you!
* https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks/