Getting your marketing emails into your recipients' inboxes and making sure they actually get read are vital to the success of your email program.

You can't guarantee 100% delivery, but you can take steps to boost your chances: Focus on improving engagement, avoiding spam complaints, and maintaining a good sender reputation.

You'll also need to ensure your emails are effective once delivered. And the only way to ensure your emails are acted on is to test what works and what doesn't.

Strong Email Deliverability

There's no way to absolutely guarantee the emails you send will always make their way to their intended recipients—or never end up in the spam folder—but there are steps you can take to minimize either occurrence.

The best thing you can do is ramp up engagement—specifically, how often subscribers open and click—and avoid spam complaints, because doing that helps support a strong sender reputation, which the email providers consider when deciding whether to direct your email to the inbox.

Specific tactics for optimizing opens, clicks, and engagement generally are discussed at length in the e-book How to Make Email Work Even Harder for You by Acoustic and MarketingProfs. In the meantime, here are some of the other things you can do to keep your deliverability rates high:

• Keep your email domain registration current
• Authenticate your email with SenderID or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Email)
• Monitor your sender reputation and IP address reputation regularly through sites like Sender Score and aim for a score of at least 90
• Sign up for spam complaint notifications from all the major email provider platforms and immediately suppress any reported addresses from your list
• Configure your email-sending infrastructure to provide customized delivery to each major email platform in alignment with their best practices and formatting
• Avoid sudden spikes in your email volume—if you're planning a heavy-hitting campaign, start ramping up your frequency ahead of time
• Refrain from using spammy tactics in your subject lines, such as ALL CAPS, excessive exclamation marks, or spam triggers like $$$ and XXX
• Run every email through a spam filter before sending
• Take extra care with any purchased lists, and be willing to purge all of the entries associated with a purchased list if your deliverability tanks soon after sending to that new list for the first time
• Ask your subscribers to whitelist you by adding your sending address to their contact lists
• Follow the laws of the countries where your subscribers reside—for example, the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, CASL in Canada, and GDPR in Europe
• Take immediate action if you end up on a blacklist: clean up your list and resolve any issues before requesting to be unblocked—that includes ensuring all addresses that have unsubscribed, bounced, issued complaints against you, or become inactive are suppressed from your list

Cuisinart Case Study

When Cuisinart's IP address was blacklisted because of mail blocks and bounces, its email marketing program's deliverability rate plummeted.

To remedy the situation, the company paused all its email marketing efforts and quickly got to work. It...

• Conducted an in-depth analysis of a year's worth of emails
• Investigated its sending practices to determine what had been triggering spam filters and spam abuse reports
• Live-tested all its email templates and analyzed how each one appears in the inbox
• Evaluated its data collection and maintenance practices
• Migrated to a new, dedicated IP address
• Created and launched an email preference center
• Developed a new centralized database to maintain tight control over subscriber preferences
• Implemented a master email template that adhered to all CAN-SPAM requirements and offered a flexible layout to ensure a consistent brand experience across all device types, including mobile and desktop

The results: a 99% increase in deliverability with 24% higher open rates, 6% more clickthroughs, and a 193% year-over-year leap in website sessions originating from email.

(For more details, check out the full case study.)

Rigorous Testing: The Foundation for Email Success

Because email has been around for a while, plenty of best-practices have been identified and shared through the years. But that doesn't mean those email best-practices will work for your emails.

The only way to know for sure is to test. The following are the email elements marketers tend to consider as being important to test:

When you adopt a testing mindset, every send becomes an opportunity to learn more about what performs well (and what doesn't) with your subscriber base—and its various segments.

And, in truth, there is no end to the testing process: Subscriber preferences evolve, and last year's innovative strategies can easily lose their novelty and charm. It's your job to keep up, and ongoing testing empowers you to do so.

Before each test, determine the following:

• The variable you're testing: focus on one element at a time, keeping everything else the same with regard to both your email and the landing page you're directing people to with this campaign, so that you can discern the exact impact that one change makes.
• The measurements that will determine a winner: which KPIs truly matter in this test, based on your overarching goals for the campaign and the potential contribution that the element you're testing can make.
• Your benchmarks: how this type of email typically performs based on your past results—that benchmark is what you will be trying to beat, not industry averages
• Your target group for this test: if your list is large enough, consider testing on a sample group before rolling the test out to your entire base, always ensuring that your test sample is both randomly selected and representative of the larger population, and that you involve enough subscribers to generate statistically viable data (ideally, at least 1,000 subscribers, or 100 conversions over the duration of the test)
• Your tracking and tagging strategy: especially important if you'll be measuring conversions or any other metrics that deal with activities beyond the email itself, such as those that take place on your website

Once you've conducted the test and collected the results, drill down into your chosen metrics to identify whether certain segments within your sample perform better or worse with regard to the change you've tested.

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Boosting email deliverability and effectiveness isn't complicated—it just takes a bit of strategy and testing. Keep your sender reputation solid, follow best practices, and stay compliant with laws like CAN-SPAM.

Cuisinart's story shows how a few smart changes can dramatically improve deliverability and engagement. And testing different email elements helps you keep up with what your audience likes.

By following the tips in this article, you'll make sure your emails not only reach the inbox but also get the attention they deserve.

This article is part of a series on email marketing based on the comprehensive e-book How to Make Email Work Even Harder for You by Acoustic and MarketingProfs. The 70-page e-book is available for download (reg. required, but it's free); it's written by Kimberly Smith, whom you can reach at dtkgsmith@gmail.com.