Deliverability: Getting your emails where they're supposed to be.

Posted by Melissa Summers on Tuesday, January 24, 2012

This post is written by Matt M., Product Manager on the Product Innovation team here at ePrize. He comes to us from Moosejaw where he climbed mountains, fought a mountain lion* and optimized their marketing emails.

The ePrize Insiders is our website and monthly newsletter for fans of our clients and their promotions. Users enter for a chance to win daily prizes and a $10,000 grand prize. They also have the opportunity to opt in to a newsletter that lets them know about some of our fantastic promotions. What's most remarkable about our fans and opt-in list is our fantastic email delivery rate.

An email newsletter generally sees only 81% of permissioned email making it to the inbox (*Return Path Deliverability Study 2011) but ePrize sees a 99.5% delivery rate to our ePrize Insiders. How do we get that many people to pay attention to our email you ask?   It's the right combination of:

• Engagement
• Relevancy
• Permission & Respect

The ePrize Insider list is comprised of people already excited about our promotions, wanting to know about more of them and they signed up for that explicit reason. This gives us a highly engaged audience seeking the information we're delivering.

By using our Insiders list for just one thing, sharing promotions, it's easy to maintain relevant content that provides value and keep a regular schedule of email frequency that respects our audience's inbox.

Here are a few ways to improve your delivery rates.

Permission and respect are two keys for improving, and keeping, a high deliverability rate. Make sure you have permission to email your subscribers, being CAN-SPAM compliant is not enough to ensure deliverability. Even CAN-SPAM compliant messages can and will be filtered by ISPs. Along the same lines, respect your subscribers - consider why they engaged with you in the first place and give them what they're looking for. Be transparent about email content and frequency by setting expectations early in the subscriber process.

Unqualified subscribers can greatly reduce your deliverability rates. Purchasing a list of email addresses is a way to grow your list, but it's not an effective way to reach your target market if they don't believe you are relevant to them. Additionally making assumptions about what your subscriber is or is not willing to have delivered to their inbox will rapidly affect your deliverability rates.

Outside tools can also help you narrow in on the blanks in your email protocol. The delivery metric from your ESP is a good first step. Using tricks like sending a seed list to multiple email addresses at a variety of ISPs in order to check deliverability and inbox placement will provide you good insight. Email marketing services like Return Path or Pivotal Veracity are also tools to measure deliverability.

Keep your email on point, build a list of engaged opt-ins, respect their inbox and watch your deliverability increase exponentially. You worked hard to create that email, now make sure people have the chance to read your genius.

*didn't really fight a mountain lion, they exchanged harsh words though.