First, a note about Deliverability

You probably won’t find the word deliverability in your handy pocket dictionary, but here’s a definition for you.

de·liv·er·a·bil·i·ty (dih-liv-uh-ruh-bil-i-tee), n.

A measure of success at which an email marketer gets an email campaign into subscribers’ inboxes.

- MailChimp.com

A lot of different things can harm your deliverability rate.  Here are a few:

• Sending too many emails to non-valid email addresses (ISPs start blocking you)
• Having too many people click the spam button on your email in their inbox (you will start getting blocked)
• Sending too often (people get annoyed)
• Not sending often enough (people forget they signed up)
• Using spammy words in your emails (blocked again)

Keep Your List Clean and Lean

The gut instinct for most people is to try and grow their email lists as big as they can.  The shotgun effect.  The problem with this approach is that sending to large amounts of people that didn’t really ask or expect to be hearing from you can severely harm your deliverability rate.

With lots of people marking you as SPAM, fewer of your emails will make it to your customers that do want to hear from you – the ones that will give you much higher conversion rates.

Keep your email lists clean and focused.  Make sure you only send to people that specifically opted in to your list.  Keep your list clean of unsubscribes and bounces (bad addresses).  Your list will be much smaller, but you will likely see your conversion rates go up.

This entry was filed under Online Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.