For every crafted email, there’s always uncertainty around its intended destination—the right inbox. You’d think that after crafting the right words, getting them approved, reworking, dropping the messaging into your branded template, and testing, the email would get to the right place. But we all know this just isn’t always the case. So how do we ensure that the effort we’re putting into our emails isn’t getting lost?
In short, email delivery ultimately comes down to two things— clean data and consistent engagement.
Sending to clean data and engaged audiences preserves the integrity of your domain reputation. Since your domain reputation can permanently impact your brand and follow you wherever you go—even if you change servers or switch email service providers—it's important that you keep a clean house. With this in mind, let’s review delivery best practices and dig into the meanings of good and bad data.
Email degrades at an estimated rate of around 22% per year as people switch jobs, change addresses or otherwise disappear from the digital space. It is important to conduct a regular data cleaning routine where you can weed out any problematic addresses and prevent unnecessary damage to your reputation.
A note about those contacts who are unsubscribing. Schwedelson from Worlddata said in 2019, that 92% of people who unsubscribe from email lists have not opened or clicked in over 12 months. Meaning that, who cares about those who are unsubscribing at that point. Finally, the average unsubscribe rate across all verticals is 0.15%, so 150 out of 100,000 people; a very small pool of already unengaged people.
It’s important to send to audiences who are engaging with your content. Filter out contacts who have not opened an email from your organization in over a year―or six months―for even more meaningful metrics. Pooling your most engaged audience will boost your email reputation so that your communications make it to the right inbox. Here are some important data points to consider according to Jay Schwedelson from Worldata:
Each system, whether email marketing, email automation, or marketing automation, defines the constraints for a bounced email slightly differently. In Adestra MessageFocus, for example, an address is categorized as a bounce when three or more hard bounces occur over 16 consecutive days, with no soft bounces or successful deliveries in between. Should a contact bounce three times over 16 days with no successful deliveries, Adestra will add them to an automatic suppression list. Email systems have these algorithms in place with varying degrees of number of emails over a number of days to help maintain a good reputation both at the email software level and at your individual sending reputation level. Having these bounced emails suppressed from your sends automatically is a good thing for your sending reputation. If there were no mechanism in place to identify bad emails and then to automatically suppress them, you could be sending to bad emails and this is where your email sending reputation could take a major hit.
A hard bounce is an email message that has been ‘returned to sender’ because of invalidity. There are four types of hard bounces:
A soft bounce is a direct response to your campaign, which could be automated. There are six categories for a soft bounce:
Now that we have talked about best practices in terms of engagement and clean data, let’s talk about what can happen by following bad practices. If you continue to send to bouncing emails, you could experience decreased email deliverability. As your deliverability rate lowers, so does your reputation with internet service providers (ISPs). A poor reputation will lower your deliverability even further. It quickly becomes a downward spiral.
Another bad practice is sending emails that are going to get caught in the junk folder. If your company becomes known for sending to unresponsive, closed or inactive email accounts then there’s a higher chance that your emails will get flagged and redirected to the junk folder. You can also hurt your reputation when you don’t practice ongoing data cleaning habits. Lastly, not cleaning your data and sending to bad emails means increased costs because you are sending to contacts who have switched jobs or changed addresses. You’ll be paying to send to accounts that are no longer active.
By regularly cleaning up your data, removing bad emails all together, and sending to engaged audiences, you are set up for a high sender score. Think of your sender score as your credit score. The higher it is, the more mailbox providers are going to trust you. And the more mailbox providers are going to trust you, the better position you will be to engage even more with your audience.