How To Improve Your Newsletter Delivery Rate
Updated: Aug 19, 2019
Tips for improving the delivery rate for beginners and advanced practitioners.
A good delivery rate is one of the cornerstones of successful email marketing. Only if emails can be delivered successfully, they have the opportunity to be opened and work at all. If emails cannot be delivered, even the most carefully prepared newsletter cannot be read if it does not arrive.
What is delivery rate in email marketing?
Specifically, the delivery rate describes the proportion of all sent emails that reach the recipient's mailbox. How can an unsatisfactory delivery rate be improved? In this
post, I'll show you different things you can try to achieve perfect delivery rates.
1. Which factors determine the delivery rate?
2. 4 tips for a high delivery rate
3. 5 efficient tips for advanced users to optimize the delivery rate
Which factors determine the delivery rate?
The delivery rate in email marketing is calculated as the total number of emails sent minus the bounces. The following points affect the delivery rate of your mailings. Pay attention to these features when sending your newsletter and you will soon see the results.
The reputation
The delivery rate is closely related to reputation. Reputation is the "reputation" of a sender, in other words how trustworthy it is rated by the email providers. A good reputation ensures good delivery rates in email marketing, but poor delivery rates make the reputation suffer. On the one hand, it is determined by the reputation, but it also influences it.
Delivery architecture
One measure that can dramatically improve the delivery rate is the use of a professional delivery architecture. The server of a newsletter software can send emails much more reliably than the private e-mail account.
Senders who send with with an address that is intended for private use, are quickly classified as spammers when sending to major distributors and thus achieve very low delivery rates between 30 and 50%. With professional software, on the other hand, delivery rates of over 99% can ideally be achieved technically.
whitelisting
The biggest factor is whitelisting .
Servers that are listed on a whitelist are generally trusted by the email providers. This greatly reduces the risk of being categorized as spam. Send newsletters as a "normal" e-mail via the private address and you will often land on blacklists. The delivery with some Providers becomes thereby completely blocked. In any case the email delivery rate with the next dispatch will be even lower. Whitelisting is therefore indispensable for sending to large lists.
Spam filter
Also spam filters fall under this topic. Quite clearly: Anyone who ends up in the spam filter cannot reach the mailbox and cannot interact with the emails. Spam filters jump to certain features that spam emails have in common. These features are deposited on lists such as SpamCop's and reviewed before delivery by the provider. The rule here: If your emails bear spam features too often, you will quickly find yourself on a blacklist.
Spam complaints
A particularly important factor is spam complaints. If an email is marked as spam by a recipient, or even worse, reported, it has a very negative impact on reputation. A very
low complaint rate will enhance the reputation in return.
The number of bounces
Difficult to influence but also significant is the number of bounces or bounce rate. The more emails cannot be delivered for technical reasons, the more questionable is the sender. A low bounce rate is interpreted by the email providers as a quality feature. If many bounces occur regularly, this can lead to the sender or even the whole IP being punished.
Software providers may therefore be forced to block senders with permanently high bounce rates.
4 tips for a high delivery rate
Now you are familiar with the key features of newsletter delivery and can dare to optimize your delivery rate in email marketing. Here are some tips for improving your delivery rate:
1. Professional server
The first step should be self-evident: Be sure to use professional servers for sending. These are already whitelisted and there is no danger of being caught by spam filters.
Important whitelisting providers include:
https://certified-senders.org/
https://www.isipp.com/resources/what-is-an-email-whitelist/
Depending on the target group, the registration on different whitelists is worthwhile.
2. The bounce management
Another decisive factor is effective bounce management . Hard bounces (permanently unreachable addresses) should be removed immediately from the recipient list. Be careful
not to rewrite these recipients. Good email marketing software and automation tools automatically handle the sorting out of hard bounces for you. Soft bounces are not so sensitive but can affect your delivery rate too much. Many of the above email marketing services sort such addresses after three failed delivery attempts.
3. The cancellations
In addition to the bounces, the cancellations should also be managed well and, above all, legally secure.
If you do not pay attention to newsletter unsubscribes, you run the risk that your emails will be rejected and reported as spam. This negatively affects the reputation. To contact email addresses with legal certainty always use a double opt-in procedure from the outset.
4. Avoiding spam terms
In the newsletter content, you should be careful to avoid spam. To find out if your newsletter is endangered by spam filters, you can conduct a spam test before sending. Obvious spam factors include links shorteners such as bit.ly hidden links or an unbalanced text-to-image ratio.
5 Efficient advanced tips: Optimizing the delivery rate
If, after you have tried improving delivery rate with these aforementioned measures, there is still scope for improvement, not all hope is lost. With these professional tips , you can further improve your delivery rate in email marketing:
1. Dedicated IPs
By default, email marketing software uses shared IPs. These are shared with multiple senders and therefore have no sole impact on the reputation. You are solely responsible for the reputation of a dedicated IP. Especially with high sending volumes and special requirements (eg medical industry) such an IP can be worthwhile. The IP is best "warmed up" by the software provider before you send it yourself. This service is included with all dedicated IPs of most professional email service providers.
2. Sender signatures
Sender signatures are a verification process. Emails can be assigned to a unique sender using a signature. This is to prevent unauthorized senders from sending on behalf of
other emails. Known methods are DKIM and Sender ID. These are checked by most email providers and, if available, rated positively.
3. DMARC
An increasingly important authentication protocol is DMARC. The peculiarity is that if the authentication fails, the recipient's response will be retransmitted. Among other things, DMARC is used by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and thus brings better delivery rates for the mailboxes of these providers.
4. Sender Score
The free tool from Return Path represents the reputation in the form of a score. This score can be between 0 and 100. A score over 91 ensures good delivery rates. The Sender Score can be enhanced by reducing the complaint rate, eliminating spam traps, and minimizing bounces. The Sender Score is just an indicator of the email delivery rate and does not equate to it.
5. Set up receiver blacklist
If recipients repeatedly report their emails as spam, you should consider enlisting those recipients on a blacklist . This will allow you to decide that the recipients will no longer receive emails from you. In this way you avoid spam messages and improve your reputation.
For a high delivery rate, it is worthwhile to pay attention to the points I discussed above. With a professional email marketing program and bypassing the spam filter you increase your delivery rate.
A good reputation also contributes to a higher delivery rate. Try the tips and make your newsletter more successful.