Our Go-To Email Marketing Techniques to Increase Email Deliverability and Conversions
Have you ever wondered how an email ends up in spam rather than your inbox? Sometimes email service providers like Gmail will flag an email sender as spam because their email deliverability has poor health, meaning their subscribers do not interact with their emails enough to prove to the email providers that subscribers want to see their content.
If you or your clients are sending email campaigns, you’ll want to pay close attention to your email marketing health. Having a healthy email marketing account will ensure that your subscribers see and interact with your content, leading to more brand awareness and ultimately sales. Read on to discover our go-to email marketing techniques to keep your emails in front of your subscribers.
HOW DO I KNOW MY EMAIL MARKETING ACCOUNT IS HEALTHY?
Before optimizing your strategy, let’s first assess your emails’ current standings. Email marketing account health boils down to four key metrics:
1. Open Rates
Open Rate is the percentage of subscribers that open your email. You should strive to have an open rate between 15% - 25% or higher. This is the best metric to tell whether or not your email marketing strategy is working or not. Typically, if you have a higher open rate, that means your subject line resonates with your audience, making them want to open your email.
2. Click Through Rates
Click Through Rate or CTR is the percentage of subscribers that have clicked on one or more links in your email. A solid CTR per email is between 1.5 % and 2.5% or higher. Having a solid click-through rate means that your content is resonating with your audience and moving them further down the marketing funnel.
3. Unsubscribe Rates
Unsubscribe Rate is the percentage of subscribers that unsubscribe from your email list once they receive an email. A healthy unsubscribe rate per email is between 0.2% and 0.5%.
If your unsubscribe rate is higher than 0.5%, here are some things to consider:
How often are you sending emails? Sending too many emails is the number one reason people unsubscribe from a brand's email marketing.
Was the content in the email relevant to what your subscribers are looking for? You can utilize segments (specific lists of subscribers) to target your subscribers' specific email marketing wants.
Have you recently cleaned up your subscriber list? Deleting unengaged profiles can help keep your unsubscribe rate down, since you’re taking those subscribers off your regular sending list and moving them to an unengaged segment, so that you can retarget them.
4. Bounce Rates
Bounce Rate is the percentage of email addresses that did not receive your email in their inbox because their email service provider could not deliver it. Your bounce rate should stay between 0.4% - 0.8% or lower.
If your bounce rate begins to increase, you may want to take a look at the content you’re sending to determine why the email service providers won’t deliver your emails. Factors could include that your overall email marketing health is poor, your content contains prohibited content, and/or subscribers have marked your emails as spam.
Keeping a close eye on these four key metrics will help you monitor your email marketing account and ensure that you are creating and sending content your subscribers want to see.
To track these metrics, we use the email marketing platform Klaviyo. Within its platform, it offers comprehensive analytical tools for both your individual email campaigns and your email automations, such as a welcome flow. When creating an analytics report for our clients, we take a look at each of our weekly email campaigns to determine what resonated well with our client’s subscribers and where we have areas of improvement.
EMAIL MARKETING TECHNIQUES TO IMPLEMENT INTO YOUR STRATEGY
There are four key email marketing techniques you and your team can do to guarantee your email marketing will continue to resonate with your subscribers:
EMAIL MARKETING TECHNIQUE #1: Set Up Email Automations Based On Subscribers Engagement
Have you ever opted into a specific email marketing campaign (ie: you signed up to get a discount)? Having specific email automations set up for different scenarios will help regulate what content your subscribers are seeing and not seeing. For example, if you don’t want to opt into a brand's weekly emails, but you do want to be notified of sales, you’ll be added to a sales segment and automation so that you will only receive emails related to the brand's sales.
How To Set Up An Automation Based Off Subscriber Behavior:
Navigate to your email marketing platforms automation or flow section
Choose your trigger. A trigger begins the automation process. Some triggers could be:
The customer purchased a product
The customer left items in their cart
The customer opted in to learn more about a product or offering
For specific topics like this, we recommend creating an opt-in form like this one on your website. Create a landing page with details about the topic and then embed a form that subscribers can opt into. Make sure the form subscribes them to the specific list for that topic, so they will fall into the automation trigger.
Design emails within the automation. You can have as many emails as you’d like and you can customize the subscribers' journey based on how they interact with each email. For instance, if someone makes a purchase from the first email, they may split off into another part of the automation to be targeted with different messaging, while someone who didn’t make a purchase may continue down the automation until they do.
As a result of subscribers only seeing content they want, email automations are a great tool to improve your existing deliverability rates and reputation as a sender.
EMAIL MARKETING TECHNIQUE #2: Clean Up Your Email Subscribers
When was the last time you cleaned up your subscribers list?
List cleaning consists of making sure all unengaged subscribers are being removed from your list. In order to see which subscribers are unengaged, create a segment that is defined as “when someone has opened an email zero times in the last 90 days”. This definition would trigger subscribers to be added to the segment when they haven't been engaging with your emails over a 90-day period.
You can then take this segment and unsubscribe those subscribers from your email marketing. We recommend completing your list cleaning every 2-3 months to ensure your email deliverability stays healthy.
EMAIL MARKETING TECHNIQUE #3: Use Sending Cadence Best Practices
Pro Tip: Create a sending schedule that works for your brand!
We typically send weekly email campaigns for our e-commerce clients. Sending too often can overwhelm subscribers; whereas, sending too infrequently may cause them to lose interest in your messaging. As you begin your email marketing journey, try different cadences to see what works best for your subscribers.
EMAIL MARKETING TECHNIQUE #4: Set up a Sunset Flow
When subscribers have not engaged with your emails for a long period of time, it may be time to remove them from your list to ensure your email health stays positive. But hold tight before removing them!
There is one last flow you can set up to try and get subscribers to stay engaged with your content. This is known as a Sunset Flow. A sunset flow is the last step in the customer journey before you (potentially) remove someone from your list. This flow is triggered by a segment of your least engaged subscribers (i.e. people who haven’t opened or clicked an email from you in a long time). See below for an example of what the segment definition would look like.
Remember: the goal of this flow isn’t meant to drive revenue or site traffic. Its goal is to get your unengaged subscribers to open the email and make sure your deliverability stays strong overall. Our key tips for engaging subscribers is to:
Have a clear and eye-catching subject line.
Offer a discount. We recommend offering 10-15% off!
Make them feel like the email is personalized to them.
The number one way to make an email feel personal is to include the subscriber's first name in the email design or subject line. You can do this by using your email marketing platform templates for adding customized fields to text.
If they still don’t engage with your email, then you know it’s officially time to remove them from your list.
Regularly implementing these three email marketing techniques can help ensure your email marketing health will lead to success.
We hope you found this blog post on email marketing techniques helpful! To hand over the reins on your email marketing, check out our email marketing services. For more social media tips, be sure to follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our digital marketing newsletter. Chat soon!
xx,
The Homies