Email Deliverability Consulting (Getting Started)

Email marketing provides one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel today. That said, emails landing in spam or bouncing is going to hamper your efforts and reduce your ROI.

With a newsletter, deliverability is the lifeblood of your business. If your newsletter emails aren’t reaching your audience’s inbox, there isn’t anything to fall back on. This makes email deliverability absolutely essential.

Sending emails at scale is not as straightforward as sending a personal email to a friend. Arriving in your reader’s inbox can be challenging, and it takes effort to ensure your emails are being received by the vast majority of your audience.

One way to ensure good email deliverability for your newsletter is to hire an email deliverability consultant.

What Is Email Deliverability Consulting?

An email deliverability consulting service ensures your emails reach your audience’s inboxes.

An email deliverability consultant will achieve high delivery rates through technical expertise and strategy. The consultant will review your current email strategy, analyze your workflow and software tools, and provide recommendations for any problems they identify.

At beehiiv, we are constantly striving to provide key strategies to help all our customers. Also, our Enterprise customers get dedicated strategy sessions each quarter to help tackle the issues that naturally come with sending to lists of 100,000 and beyond.

How Can An Email Deliverability Expert Help?

Email deliverability seems so simple on the surface. This is likely due to our experience with personal emails we’ve sent to friends and family. There is no concern that our emails will end up in our mom’s spam, so we don’t give it any thought.

When you’re sending emails at scale, as you would with a newsletter, you need to ensure your emails are landing in inboxes at as close to a 100% rate as possible. And that’s where an email deliverability expert comes in.

There are several ways for a deliverability expert to help:

• Audit the current email-sending strategy

• Email reputation management

• Warming of IP addresses

• Addressing issues with Internet service providers (ISPs)

• Analyzing email performance

An experienced email deliverability consultant will help in all these areas, and these tasks will help to secure your place in the reader’s inbox.

Key Variables Affecting Email Deliverability

There are several key variables you need to consider to maximize the deliverability of your emails. An email deliverability expert will have a handle on all of these already, but hopefully, this section will help you understand what to ask a prospective hire or help get you started if you decide to improve your email performance yourself.

Tyler Denk, our beehiiv CEO, has also put together an Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability for you to go even deeper into these factors.

Email Deliverability Factors

The following sections are the largest factors in determining the deliverability rate of your emails. Keep an eye on these and you should see high performance from your email sends.

Your Subject Lines

Subject lines are incredibly important. A good subject line means you’ll see high open rates and get your emails read by your audience.

Bad subject lines will see your open rates decline, and may also trigger spam filters and prevent delivery altogether.

Spam filters are like detectives. They are looking for clues that an email is spam. These are some spam trigger words you should try avoiding. For example, adding things like “free,” “earn money,” and “lose weight” could trigger a spam content filter.

IP Reputation

Every email sender has an IP address which is assigned a reputation score by email inbox providers and spam filters. This reputation changes over time depending on the actions taken by the sender.

Receiving too many spam complaints, malicious attachments, and previous spam filter catches all reduce your IP reputation.

IP reputation becomes important because if your reputation gets too low, email inbox providers and spam filters will begin banishing your emails to the spam box, never to be seen again.

Email Volume

Large volume senders will have a higher difficulty in maintaining a good standing with inbox providers. A sudden increase in the volume of email sends will trigger bounces from service providers.

Planning becomes incredibly important. You want to ramp up to a large email campaign instead of suddenly sending a large campaign. If you know you will be sending a large campaign for a Black Friday sale, for instance, you’ll want to start slowly increasing your volume for at least a month before that campaign starts.

Engagement Rate

Potentially the largest single factor in email deliverability is your engagement rate. Inbox service providers keep track of open rates, clickthrough rates, spam reports, and unsubscribes. If your newsletters are seen as being unwanted by your list, your sending reputation will decrease. With enough negative signals, your newsletters will eventually become flagged as spam.

To keep your engagement rate high, be sure to constantly monitor your list for subscribers who don’t interact with your email, and segment your audience where possible. Segmented emails increase open rates by 14%, and clicks by 100%, which will drastically improve your engagement rate metrics.

If you were wondering about the best times to send your newsletter to boost your open rates, Jacob here at beehiiv has written about just that in his article, Boost Your Open Rate: The Best Time to Send Your Newsletter.

Bounce Rate

Email bounces are when your email returns because the email address is not currently active or the inbox is full.

Bounce rate is an important metric to inbox providers because a high bounce rate indicates that your list is not being managed properly. To avoid bounces, be sure to limit cold email outreach at scale, do not buy email lists, and monitor your list for those who don’t interact with your content.

Top Tips For Managing Email Deliverability Factors

We’ve discussed the factors impacting email deliverability, so let’s review the best practices to ensure you stay in good standing with inbox providers and keep your IP reputation high.

Segment Your List

Segmented emails increase open and clickthrough rates dramatically. By segmenting your list you will increase your engagement rates, which improves your engagement metrics and your IP reputation.

Maintain and Clean Your List

Keep an eye on subscribers who are no longer interacting with your newsletter emails. If you’re seeing a pattern of no open rates from a subscriber, you could attempt to win them back with an email sequence. If they still don’t want to engage, it’s time to let them go.

By removing subscribers who won’t interact no matter what you do, you are increasing your open rate percentage overall - which is more important than another number on your list of subscribers.

Before sending a large batch of emails, verify the email addresses on your list. People change companies, and data that you once had won't be accurate forever. Hunter did an experiment on 1,000+ email addresses, and the results were stunning.

Around 5.5% of email addresses aren't valid after 8 weeks. Sending emails to invalid addresses will result in bounces which can ultimately create issues for your deliverability.

Keep Things Professional

Be sure to show your brand name and stay away from spam trigger words. Send useful content that members of your audience have subscribed to see.

This will reduce spam complaints - the largest red flag to inbox providers - and keep your IP reputation healthy.

Make It Easy To Unsubscribe

Nobody wants their audience to unsubscribe. But if a member of your list no longer wants to receive your newsletter, it’s time to let them go.

By making it easy to unsubscribe from your newsletter you’ll receive fewer spam complaints, which can significantly harm your sending reputation and overall email deliverability.

Double Opt-In

Enabling double opt-in for your newsletter is another method of keeping a high-quality list.

Double opt-in is adding the step for new subscribers to confirm their email after signing up on your website or landing page. By doing this, you’re ensuring the accuracy of the email and that the new subscriber is invested enough to check their email and respond to you.

You may lose a few subscribers off your number count with this method, but the quality of your list is far more important than the quantity of subscribers you have. Having a high-quality list will ensure higher engagement metrics.

Wrapping Up

Hiring an email deliverability consultant can help ensure your newsletter lands in as many inboxes as possible. We hope you’ve found the above information helpful for you to conduct interviews from a more knowledgeable perspective - or, if you wish to improve your deliverability factors yourself, you have the tools to start doing so.

If you choose beehiiv for your newsletter, we will handle many of these factors for you! All that’s left for you is to write your content, craft engaging subject lines, and segment your list - which we provide the tools for.

So if you’re ready to get your newsletter started and ensure it reaches your audience’s inbox, sign up for your free beehiiv account today.