Email Deliverability Drives Revenue

Annuitas Blog Team

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Getting to the inbox means at least you have a chance at driving revenue. However, most marketers don’t think about email deliverability and what that means to the ROI of their demand generation programs when creating them. The reality is that the best content or coolest offer in the world can’t be effective if the email containing the content is never received. 

What does deliverability mean for a B2B marketers?  Simply put, it’s a way to measure if the email was accepted by the mail server. Deliverability enables you to measure open and click statistics, and from there, track activity to closed revenue. Did you know that typically B2B marketers only have a deliverability rate of 78 – 86 percent?  For the record, that is not a great percentage if you are in the business of generating demand and driving revenue.

If you don’t even get to the inbox – kiss revenue goodbye. The tough part about deliverability? It’s always changing, so this means marketers must always be testing and be aware of changing laws regarding CAN-SPAM and other compliance and privacy related issues that affect digital marketers.

Testing can help improve deliverability viability, so don’t despair.  Here are a few tips you can follow to get on the right path to maximum deliverability.    

• Subject lines and message body: Test These First!
• Images: design email content with ‘images off’ for best inbox experience
  -Never have a Call to Action or unsubscribe as an image
  -Maintain 70/30 ratio with graphics

• Segment by target audience
  
• List hygiene: maintain exceptional list hygiene always! Especially focus on…
  -Unsubscribes
  -Complaints
  -Bounces
  -Use caution with list append and acquisition companies

• Volumes: smaller volumes work better
  -Major ISPs publish rate limits and connection settings

• Spam filters: they change thousands of times a day.  Filters watch out for…
  -Recipient engagement
  -Authentication
  -Reputation of the sending IP address
  -Sender’s domain reputation
  -Characteristics of the email content
  -Digital fingerprint

Marketers must have a consistent and proactive approach to email deliverability to run programs that drive revenue. Keep the list above to remind yourself what to watch for. Need more information on how to get better with deliverability? Watch out for part two on Deliverability Drives Revenue with a focus on list hygiene best practices.

Chris Arrendale, CIPP/US  @arrendale, Director, Email Deliverability and Privacy