“You don’t want a huge list. You want an engaged list. The gold isn’t in the list anymore, it’s in the engagement.” – Scott Stratten
Marketers are facing a lot of challenges when it comes to providing a great experience for their subscribers. However, email engagement is considered to be one of the biggest challenges for businesses. You might’ve had the privilege of obtaining someone’s email address, but getting them to interact with your emails can be a difficult task.
In this article, we’ll discuss the following email engagement topics:
- What’s email deliverability?
- What’s email engagement?
- Best practices to boost email engagement
Let’s dive in.
A lot of email marketers view email engagement as a ‘black box’ – a complex system whose internal workings are hidden or not really understood. They rely too much on metrics that are only scratching the surface. Hence, in order to boost email engagement, a business should be aware of the whole picture. Therefore, gaining better insight is essential for optimising the performance of your email campaign as well as keeping email engagement alive and lucrative.
What Is Email Deliverability And Why It Matters?
Your awesomely creative email team has drafted the perfect email campaign and sent it to your targeted email list(s). However, did it actually get delivered?
If you are aiming at having an effective and successful email marketing program, email deliverability is one of the most vital elements you should focus on. Why? Because your emails will be worthless unless they actually reach the subscribers’ inbox.
With that said, we’d like to focus on two important concepts: email delivery and email deliverability. You might’ve never thought there’s a difference between the two, there is.
Email delivery is the process of successfully delivering an email to the recipients’ receiving server. It comes before the inbox and spam folder distinction. Overall, it refers to whether the email message has been accepted, or not, by the ESPs servers.
Email deliverability (also known as inbox placement) is the process of successfully delivering an email to the subscriber’s inbox. In other words, once your email message has been accepted by the receiving server, it will get placed accordingly – for example, the inbox, the updates tab, the promo tab or the spam folder.
As incredible as it might sound, you can have a good delivery, however, your deliverability rate can be quite disappointing. Why? Well, because your email message ended up in the subscribers’ spam folder instead of their inbox.
Here is a selection of factors that can affect your email deliverability –
a) spam complaints – when a recipient marks your email as ‘spam’;
b) bounces – when an email address is invalid or doesn’t even exist;
c) spam traps – email addresses created for the sole purpose of catching fraudulent emails;
d) IP address reputation – it measures the reputation of your IP address based on the quality and type of the emails you’re sending; and
e) domain reputation – it measures the reputation of your email address based on the quality and type of emails you’re sending.
Why does email deliverability matter?…
