Deliverability best practices

Good deliverability is no coincidence. High delivery and open rates are mainly a result of the general email marketing strategy and the associated adherence to industry best practices. After all, what is the point of fancy features if the email is not delivered and the recipient never sees it? The following is an overview of best practices as represented by internet service providers (ISPs) and valid in the email sector.

Clean contact acquisition process

Take notice of the articles in the section Opt-In, and especially the article Best practices for contact acquisition.

List hygiene

• Each contact should be sent to at least once every 6 months to sustainably clean up the database and avoid a high number of hard bounces.
• Exclude recipients who were not active in the newsletter in the last 12 months from regular mailings. These email accounts might be converted into spam traps by the ISPs after that amount of time.
• Legacy data often results in low open rates and, related to that, a loss of good deliverability performance.

Focus on engaged recipients

Your email marketing activities should focus on your active recipients because they are responsible for good open and delivery rates, and also form the basis of your revenue generation. These include contacts who were recently active in your emails, on your website and other channels; recipients who opened and clicked several times; and users who browsed your website and bought products from your shop. Only they should receive email from you regularly.

Exclude and reactivate inactive users

Exclude from the regular newsletter contacts who do not open for a long period of time. Lack of feedback leads ISPs to believe that your emails are uninteresting or even unintentional to the major part of your recipients, and they may punish you with spam folder delivery.

Inactive recipients, however, may occasionally be sent to with winback campaigns.

Relevant content through segmentation and personalization

• Take advantage of Optimizely Campaign's segment feature and work with as many target groups as possible.
• You can generally apply filtering to many areas, such as user engagement, regions, interests, purchased products and age groups.
• Do not only send the same mailings exclusively to the complete database. Variation leads to more relevant content and thus better email performance KPIs.
• Irrelevant content causes poor open rates, unsubscriptions, and spam complaints in the long term.

Transparent mailing content

Your emails aim to build a relationship of trust with your brand. Therefore, they should contain an unsubscribe link, a link to the privacy policy, and a full legal imprint.

Email content should look trustworthy not only to the recipient but also to the ISP and its spam filter. Therefore, make sure your emails are not empty, do not contain any phishing-like links, and that you have an appropriate HTML / text ratio and identical HTML and text versions.

Adequate frequency

Adjust the sending frequency to your business model, but do not overwhelm your recipients. Bombarding recipients with emails can lead to high levels of spam complaints, unsubscriptions, and public complaints in anti-spam forums, which have a negative impact on your sender reputation and deliverability.

Be clear about how often your newsletter will be sent, comply with it, and give your recipients the opportunity to adjust frequency according to their needs.

Stable sending volume

Heavily changing sending volume is a typical characteristic of spammers. Since the emails of ordinary senders might be also misclassified in such cases, avoid large irregularities of the volume sent. If you need to send much larger quantities of emails due to seasonal requirements, a slow and steady increase is recommended.