6 Simple Ways to Increase Email Deliverability for Ecommerce

You will use a wide range of marketing strategies in your journey to market and promote your eCommerce business. While some of them will work right for your business, some of them might even fail.

But there are some marketing strategies that are just inevitable for your business.  eCommerce businesses can maximize their revenue and growth if they can get their email marketing strategy right.

With that in mind, let us now understand the concept of email deliverability – a crucial parameter for the success of your email marketing strategy – and how to increase the probability of your email landing in your customer’s inbox.

Understanding Email Deliverability

As an eCommerce store, using email marketing is crucial and for the success of this strategy, you should ensure that your email is delivered to all your customers in the first place. This is where email deliverability comes in – the ability of your email to reach the recipient’s inbox instead of being treated as spam or getting blocked.

Email deliverability depends on a combination of factors such as the reputation of the sender, quality of the content within the email, authentication, your email frequency, and usage of spam words in the subject line or email content. Since emails are the preferred medium for your customers to receive offers, updates about products, and even the specific email marketing campaigns that they signed up for, email deliverability is important.

You can have a great email marketing strategy, but it will not matter if you have poor email deliverability or an inadequate mechanism for ecommerce error resolution when customers actually do land on your website.

6 Ways to Increase Email Deliverability For Your eCommerce Business

Now that you know the definition and importance of email deliverability, here are a few simple ways you can successfully attain it for your eCommerce store.

1. Have a Clean Email List

The foundation of a strong email marketing strategy is building an equally strong and high-quality email list. It is recommended that you utilize permission-based marketing, and obtain consent from users to receive your emails – marketing or otherwise. 

By ensuring that you set the expectations from the get-go, you will have lesser bounce rates and complaints, and higher engagement. You will also be able to ensure that your subscriber list consists of people who are genuinely interested in your content.

An important consideration that you should keep in mind is to not buy email lists, as doing so can hurt your campaign results and even brand reputation if you are not careful. Instead, building your email list from scratch increases your odds of getting success through it. Ensure to purge your email list frequently, and leverage them for re-engagement and to weed out inactive emails.

2. Invest in Personalized Content

You may have heard a lot about personalization and the many ways it can benefit your eCommerce brand. But very few tell you that the key to benefitting from personalization is to integrate it in various processes seamlessly. When it comes to your email marketing campaigns, personalization should start from the segmentation process itself and go all the way to your order fulfillment system.

You should work on segmenting your audience so that you can send highly personalized and targeted messages to them. Personalized segmentation can boost the traffic and revenue you generate through your emails. Moreover, your audience or customer base is also more likely to open a personalized message than a generic message that looks/sounds like a template.

With these steps, you will be able to boost open rates and clicks you are able to get on your emails.

3. Utilize Double Opt-In

Another important aspect you should remember for your email marketing campaigns is to always have a double opt-in process for the subscribers that sign up to receive emails from your online store. Gone are the days when you could trick people into subscribing for your newsletter and get away with it.

Following a double opt-in process for your email list means a potential subscriber that has signed up for your emails should also be sent a confirmation email that they can then use to confirm their subscription. Depending on the region in which you operate and are catering to, you should also ensure that you are compliant with any spam-related laws and regulations while building your email list. Deploying this method for attracting sign-ups also ensures that you build an engaged email list.

4. Purge Hard and Soft Bounces

When email marketing is a key strategy for your business, you should know about soft bounces and hard bounces. An email bounce back refers to the rejection of an email by your subscribers’ email server, and is broken down into two primary categories: hard bounce and soft bounce. 

To keep your email list clean and optimized at all times, you should purge it often, and especially the hard and soft bounces. The soft bounces refer to temporary delivery issues that can get resolved by the time you send an email again. On the other hand, hard bounces refer to the emails that will never be delivered, and are returned to the email server.

In either case, you should focus on identifying reasons behind your email bounces and purge them regularly to improve email deliverability.

5. Avoid Spam Traps in Emails

You might find yourself in a subscriber’s spam folder, even if you do not send a lot of spam emails. How, you ask? Well, even a single email containing words that may be deemed spammy by your subscriber will lead them to mark your email address as spam, so that they never have to receive such messages again. These spammy words could be within your email, your subject line, or even your pre-header text.

You see spammy words can often trigger spam filters and send signals that your email contains spam content. This lands your email in the junk or spam folder of your subscribers. Here are some of the most common spammy phrases you may have come across and should avoid using in your emails:

• Jackpot
• 100% FREE 
• Purchase NOW!
• Claim Your Discount ASAP

You get the idea, right?

6. Use Anti-Spam Mechanisms

To maintain your reputation as a credible sender of marketing emails, and to ensure that you are able to improve your email deliverability, you will want to have at least a few anti-spam mechanisms in place. Depending on the region you cater to, you will have a bunch of policies and regulations to follow so that you can ensure delivery of your emails.

In order to increase email deliverability, it is now required that you implement policies such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC so that your emails are authenticated properly. Additionally, you should monitor and manage your email authentication and anti-spam mechanisms so that you can ensure effectiveness and deliverability of your emails.

Concluding Remarks

As an eCommerce store, email marketing is a marketing tool that you simply cannot ignore. But your strategy will be of no avail, if you do not ensure that those diligently planned and designed emails are reaching your subscribers’ inbox successfully. Utilize the right combination of the tips mentioned in this article to increase your email deliverability and keep your failure rates low.