What is Email Deliverability and Why Does it Matter?

Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to successfully reach your subscribers' inboxes. High deliverability rates mean your messages are seen by your audience, leading to better engagement and more effective marketing campaigns. Poor deliverability, on the other hand, can hinder your efforts, causing your emails to end up in spam folders or being blocked altogether.

For climate tech companies, effective communication is vital. Your audience includes potential clients, partners, and stakeholders who need to stay informed about your latest innovations and environmental solutions. Ensuring your emails are delivered is essential for building relationships and driving your mission forward.

Step 1: Authenticate Your Emails

With Google & Yahoo recent rules, this has become even more important. Email authentication helps ISPs (that's Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc) verify that your emails are legitimate and are being in fact sent by you.

There are three elements you need to implement, starting with SPF (Sender Policy Framework). This protocol verifies that the sender's IP address is allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain.‍

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to your emails, ensuring they haven't been altered during transit.

Finally DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, which builds on SPF and DKIM to provide instructions to ISPs on how to handle unauthenticated emails.

Implementing these authentication protocols can prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder.

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Step 2: Maintain a Clean & Relevant Email List

Once your authentication is in place, the next important factor is your audience.

A clean email list is the foundation of good deliverability. Regularly update your list to remove invalid addresses, duplicates, and inactive subscribers.

You can consider using tools that verify email addresses at the point of entry like Kickbox and periodically cleanse your database to keep it up to date.

Monitor hard and soft bounces and address the causes promptly.

Only add relevant subscribers to your list. An issue we often identify with clients is that in their efforts to grow fast they may have acquired email addresses through dubious sources or by compromising how targeted they are with their acquisition efforts. This leads to an unengaged audience which harms you in the long run, so remain patient and grow your audience organically.

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Keeping a balance of images and live text in your emails improves deliverability.

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Step 3: Optimise Your Content

Email content plays a significant role in deliverability. Ensure your content are relevant and valuable to your audience and your message is well-crafted. This will ensure you engage your audience and avoid your emails being marked as spam.

Personalisation of content is no longer a nice to have – recipients have come to expect it. Use subscriber data to tailor your messages to individual preferences and behaviours.

Misleading subject lines are a no-go. You may be tempted to use click-bait language, but this will only yield short-term results and may cause your subscribers to get annoyed and mark your communications as spam. So steer clear of spammy words and phrases, excessive punctuation, and misleading subject lines.

Keeping a balance of images and live text in your emails improves deliverability. It may be quicker and easier to create your emails as one big image, but unfortunately that is harming your deliverability.

You can also use tools like Litmus to test your emails for potential deliverability issues before sending them out.

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Always provide a clear unsubscribe option. You have no gain from emailing subscribers who don't want to be receiving your updates.

Step 4: Manage Your Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation is a score assigned by ISPs based on your email-sending practices. A good reputation ensures better deliverability, while a poor one can lead to your emails being blocked.

Maintain a regular sending cadence to build a positive reputation. Audiences can go "cold" if you take big breaks between contact.

Monitor your feedback loops. Pay attention to complaints and unsubscribe rates, and take action to address the issues causing them.

For high-volume senders, using a dedicated IP address can help manage your reputation more effectively.

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Step 5: Monitor and Analyse Performance

Regularly monitoring your email performance helps you identify and address deliverability issues promptly. Use analytics to track key metrics and make data-driven decisions. The KPIs to keep an eye on:

• Open Rate: Indicates how many recipients opened your email. We like breaking this down by ISP to identify any issue areas.
• Click-Through Rate: Shows the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email. If this is too low, it could indicate the email landed in the spam folder.
• Bounce Rate: Measures the number of emails that couldn't be delivered. A high bounce rate could be caused by many different reasons, ie. the recipients inbox is full. However, it could also indicate your domain has been blacklisted, so it's worth monitoring it closely.
• Spam Complaints: Tracks the number of recipients who marked your email as spam.

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Summary

Improving your email deliverability is an ongoing process that requires attention to detail and a commitment to best practices.

By maintaining a clean email list, optimising your content, authenticating your emails, managing your sender reputation, and monitoring performance, you can ensure your messages reach your audience effectively.

There are certainly a lot of factors affecting your deliverability and it requires a lot of effort to stay on top of them all. Here at Matterra we have experience helping B2B and B2C clients with warming up infrastructures and improving deliverability. We recently improved the deliverability score from 50 to 80 in two months.

So if you need deliverability help, feel free to contact us.