It doesn't matter how great your campaigns are if no one gets to see them. You need to work on delivering your emails if you want an excellent open rate and a high conversion rate.
Several points are affecting the delivery of your emails:
Omnisend does everything to make sending your emails as simple as possible. All you need to do is add your sender email address, upload contacts, design the email, and hit send.
There is no single answer to why your emails are not delivered, as each email provider has its own set of filters and prioritizes them differently. In this article, we will explain what impact each of them has and what you should do to achieve a better result.
Your initial sending practice with Omnisend
When switching from one email marketing platform to another, the server you send your emails to will also change. Your new email servers are not allowed to send large numbers of emails in one go, so to ensure they get delivered to the right inboxes, sending volumes should be increased over time.
To make this change flawless, you need to go through the Warmup plan, the main goal of which is to give the ESPs some time to update their libraries and show themselves as good sender. If you manage to show good results from the very beginning, it will establish a great background and may even pay off with a better score compared to those you've established with your previous ESP.
It is essential to understand that you must go through the warmup plan on the shared or dedicated infrastructures. However, if your list is small, the warmup process may become a blind alley, causing more harm than benefit.
Customer engagement & segmentation impact on deliverability
Engaged contacts
Each ISP has its criteria for measuring engagement. Some are more advanced than others, but all always evaluate subscriber engagement to make Inbox/Spam placement decisions. Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo are the industry leaders in using engagement metrics to establish email placement.
Subscribers who do not engage with your campaigns are the primary cause of complaints, spam traps, and bounces. If you do not take action, your email may find itself in a lower position in an inbox or be banished to the spam folder immediately.
Segmentation
We think you already know there is a correlation between client engagement and deliverability. Sending an email blast to your entire subscriber list might work from time to time. But your chances of generating sales are the highest when you create personalized content dedicated to individual customer segments.
Ever heard about the Pareto principle, also called the 80/20 rule? If we adjust it in this context, it would say that 20% of your customers generate 80% of your sales revenue. Let's find that 20%!
The best and easiest way to personalize your emails is through segmentation based on things like:
Demographic
Location
Past purchases
Position in the sales funnel
Your customers want personalized emails that address their unique needs and specific pain points. While this approach takes more time than sending out a mass email, it is more effective at increasing engagement and improving deliverability.
General rules for spam filter-friendly newsletter content
We are sure you spend a lot of time on your email design. However, there are a few aspects you need to consider while working on them. Here is a short list of our recommendations:
Make sure your customers voluntarily subscribe to receive your marketing updates. Adjust your sign-up forms' headings and consider enabling the double-opt-in option.
Provide your customers with clear and visible opt-out instructions. It will protect you from unreasonable spam reports that could have ended up as unsubscribe requests.
Establish your brand identity. Ensure consistency with your sender name and pay special attention to your subject lines and preheaders.
Maintain a healthy image-to-text ratio. Emails with a significant number of images and little text raise a red flag for spam filters. The design should be crafted to supplement your message with images, not vice versa.
Avoid spammy content. Don't use CAPS and excessive exclamation marks; avoid using sales-like words.
Avoid URL shorteners, as spammers and phishers usually use those to hide their identity.
Your account technical setup
From the technical side, there are a few aspects that may impact the placement of your email in the customers' inboxes, including:
Sender email address
Sender domain
IP address
Sender email address
To create an account with Omnisend, you will need to have an email address. We will use this email address to communicate with you. To send your email campaigns and automation to your customers, you can add different email addresses and use those for communication.
You won't be allowed to use the email on these domains to send emails to real recipients:
@yahoo.com;
@msn.com;
@hotmail.com;
@outlook.com;
@live.com;
@gmail.com, etc.
You can use your personal email to test the platform. However, you must use an email address on a custom domain when you start sending emails to real recipients.
Sender domain
Although it makes sense to sign your domain with Omnisend as it is required to pass the authentication process, it may not be as beneficial to small volume senders (<2k subscribers), and in any condition, it will require the brand to go through the warmup process.
However, if your sending volumes are sufficient, or you experience deliverability problems and have already followed the recommendations, you may consider signing your domain with Omnisend.
Dedicated IP
Most email marketing services have a range of IP addresses used for sending emails. These IP addresses are often shared by multiple customers, meaning that one customer's sending behavior can affect the reputation of other senders on the same IP address.
However, implementing a Dedicated IP address is recommended for high-volume senders only.
Monitoring and understanding the delivery of your email rates
When solving deliverability problems, it is also essential to set up a feedback loop where each strategy change is checked against the metric your emails report. For email marketing, the most important stats are:
The open rate indicates the number of emails your customers have opened. If this number is high, we can be sure a significant portion of your emails hit your customers' inboxes. The average open rate in the market is close to 20%. If you find yourself above this number, you are definitely on the right track. If your open rate falls below, you need to review your strategies.
Unsubscribes indicate the number of customers who choose to opt out of your marketing by clicking on the Unsubscribe link. The average unsubscribe rate for ecommerce is 0.2%, but you should strive to reduce this number even further.
Bounces indicate the number of emails that were not delivered due to permanent reasons, i.e., your customers' inboxes are full or no longer exist. The average bounce rate for ecommerce is 0.3%.
Spam reports indicate the number of Spam complaints your customers have reported. The average rate of such reports in ecommerce is 0.03%, meaning that your emails should barely have any spam reports.
When examining the numbers, remember that your metric may take a little time to reveal the changes. If you are testing, make sure to check it with different email providers. Something that works well for Gmail may not have the same effect for Yahoo or other providers.
Deliverability reports
Deliverability reports under the Reports tab is a place where you can find all of our best deliverability practices for your account. You will see different colors and labels based on your store's current setup. This page will state precisely what you should do at this specific moment to get better deliverability results.
Here, you'll find stats for three main deliverability results. You will see different labels that define the status of the separate parameter.
Email list hygiene labels definition:
Good: when the percentage of high or medium-risk contacts is low;
Fair: when the percentage of medium-risk contacts is high;
Poor: when the percentage of high-risk contacts is high;
No status: when you have less than 100 contacts in your audience.
Sender domains label definition:
Good: you are sending campaigns and automations from verified custom domains;
Fair: you are sending campaigns, automations, or both from our shared domains;
Poor: there are problems with SPF and DKIM record configuration for the custom domains you chose to send from, and action is needed.
Sender email address labels:
Good: you have at least one verified sender email address that contains a custom domain (not Gmail, Yahoo, etc.);
Fair: you have at least one verified sender email address, and that email address contains a public domain (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.);
Poor: there's no verified email address;
No status: there's no email address added.
Email list hygiene means regularly removing fake and unknown email addresses from the audience. It helps you cut costs for inactive contacts and improves your engagement rate. Based on the received result, you can go and clean your audience directly from the report. Read more about list cleaning here.
Sender domains will define stats for domains you set for campaigns and automations at this specific moment. You will be prompted to take the following steps based on the state of your sender's domain. The steps are defined by the labels described above.
Read more about the sender's domain and how to set it up in our Guide.
Depending on the quality label of your sender's email addresses, you'll be prompted to take the following steps. Once your sender's emails have good quality, you'll be able to review them from the report directly.
Learn more about the sender's email addresses here.
Finally, if you experience any problems with the delivery of your emails or need any recommendations, feel free to reach out to our Support Team via chat line or email us at [email protected].