9 Time-Tested Ways To Increase Email Deliverability In 2021

After spending money on building email lists, dealing with deliverability issues isn’t a pleasurable situation to face. Emails generate an ROI of $44 per dollar invested, but if they don’t land inside the right mailboxes, you won’t even get back your principal amount. To understand the complexity of the problem, let us have a look at a few statistics: Every day, 319.6 billion emails are sent to the inboxes of over 4.147 billion users. Campaign Monitor finds that emails have an average open rate of 15-25%, click-to-open rate of 20-30%, and CTR of 2.5%.

No doubt, these benchmarks may change depending upon your industry. But, if you score significantly less, there may be underlying problems you need to fix. Thankfully, I got your back. Today, I will share nine time-tested ways shared by expert email developers and marketers that will help increase your email deliverability in 2021. Read ahead for more.

#1 Switch To Double Opt-In Sign Up Forms

It is a fact that you should never buy or rent email lists. Instead, you should use a double opt-in signup form. Also known as confirmed opt-in, it ensures that only the people who are genuinely interested in your brand join your mailing list. Under this method, a confirmation mail is sent after the user signs up for joining your email list. If you don’t already use double opt-in forms, switch immediately.

#2 Make Sure You Adhere To SPF, DKIM, And DMARC

Register your domain and IP addresses for sender policy framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). This is one of the basic parts of email marketing, yet a lot of marketers skip doing it only to hurt their deliverability rates.

#3 Warm Your IP Address

One of the common reasons for low email deliverability rates is having a cold IP. You can go for an IP warming plan to gradually increase the number of emails sent from your domain. This helps build sender reputation, and subsequently, your deliverability will increase. Remember that if your IP address is penalized, it is better to migrate to a new one instead of warming it.

#4 Optimize Email Send Timing

One of the reasons behind low engagement rates could be sending emails at the wrong time. If you are scheduling your messages randomly, you need to change the send times immediately. Email studies have found that the best days to send emails are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The slot between 10 AM and 2 PM is considered the best. Mailing at the right time will surely help you become the right sender.

#5 Leverage Personalization

For every dollar invested in personalization, you will get an ROI of $20. On the flip side, if you don’t personalize your messages, your subscribers may stop opening your emails and ultimately unsubscribe. Make it a point to personalize all your emails, including the subject lines, since it is one of the biggest factors affecting the open rates.

#6 Don’t Miss On Segmentation

A staggering 89% of email marketers don’t segment their email lists. If you too don’t put effort into segments, it is high time you start doing so. Sending emails to relevant subscribers increases their willingness to engage, and it also helps you personalize messages further. Segmentation also helps identify the subscribers who are most likely to purchase a given product and saves you from looking spammy.

#7 Maintain Right Text To Image Ratio In Your Emails

Did you know that sending all image emails can trigger spam traps? In the olden days, when HTML email templates weren’t popular, phishing attacks were carried out by sending an image as an entire message. Thus, ISPs consider it a red flag. However, there’s another reason you should avoid it: 43% of the people read emails with images turned off. If your message doesn’t make sense without images, you are likely to hurt your deliverability. Thus, maintain an ideal image-to-text ratio which is around 1:4.

#8 Perform Mobile Optimization

More than half of the emails are opened from mobiles, and if you aren’t sending mobile-optimized emails, this could be one of the factors causing low deliverability. You can easily address this issue by using responsive HTML email marketing templates and as they fit the reader’s screen size, thus giving them an optimal user experience.

#9 Maintain List Hygiene

The average churn rate for an email is around 25-30%. But, this shouldn’t discourage you from taking list hygiene measures. You can start by using a suppression list as disengaged subscribers will only increase your deliverability. You can also go forward and make opt-out easier for them. List hygiene improves your lead quality and helps to avoid deviations caused by irrelevant, disengaged subscribers.

Putting It Together

Generally, deliverability issues are a result of multiple problems. It is advisable to conduct an email audit before making any drastic changes. You should use these tips and focus on increasing your deliverability rates and overall ROI instead of starting afresh or abandoning it completely. I hope this post is insightful for improving your email deliverability rates.