Email marketing is the digital marketing instrument with the highest ROI and the most optimization possibilities. Mostly the conversion rate, the click rate or the opening rate are optimized. However, before all these measures take effect, an email must first reach the recipient. If you take a look into your spam folder from time to time, you will find that spam filters always filter out legitimate, desired emails. In this blog post we will show you how to prevent this and optimize your delivery rate.

The “classic” way to guarantee the delivery of emails is the so-called whitelisting. Whitelists are positive lists that attest a listed sender a special reputation and ensure that his emails receive preferential treatment by email providers. If you count on the artegic Delivery Network for you email dispatch, we take care of whitelisting. However, even whitelisting does not offer a one hundred percent delivery guarantee. Whitelisting increases the barriers to spam classification, but does not eliminate the risk completely. The level of the hurdles depends on the respective email provider. And not only providers such as GMX or Gmail filter spam. Some email clients have their own spam filters, many IT security solutions in the B2B area as well and last but not least there is a large number of different (additional) spam tools for private users, which often do not even consider whitelisting. In addition: To be included on a whitelist at all, you also have to meet various criteria.

We’ve put together three tips to help you get around spam filters and improve your email deliverability.

1. Pay attention to the addresses

Hardly anything harms your reputation as a sender more than sending emails to non-existent email addresses. There are three main reasons for non-existent (or no longer existing) email addresses:

  1. The interested party has given the wrong address: It is possible that prospective buyers make a mistake during registration. Some tools for creating forms automatically detect incorrect email syntax and/or the lack of availability of an address and inform the prospective customer. However, if someone enters an existing but incorrect email address, these tools are powerless. Use multi-level forms to ask your prospects to check their data again. In the first form you only ask for the really necessary data. If the interested party submits the form, a second form is displayed where they can check and/or complete their data again. This method is also very effective for obtaining additional data (for example, address, telephone number or company). Important: The second form must always be optional. Registration takes place as soon as the first form is sent. Either you build in a short delay to allow the interested party some time to check the data. Or you build in a mechanism that counts the sending of the second form with a different address as a new registration. There are several possibilities. If it is not about registering for a newsletter, but for example for a service for which you do not need a double opt-in, you can ask the interested party to check the data again within the service. Interested parties who do not notice their mistake are otherwise unfortunately lost.
  2. The recipient has changed the address: Sometimes recipients change their email address without informing you of this change. Include a way to customize the profile data in the footer of each of your emails. Also, if the recipient has multiple addresses, it may be useful to know to which email address the email was sent. Otherwise, you should send regular mails with the request to check their profiles. Modern email marketing technologies like ELAINE can automate those processes and tie it to criteria  such as inactivity or a low score.
  3. The address has been deleted: Most home users use the same email address for a very long time. Many never change their address. In the B2B context, however, it is common practice for recipients to leave the company and their email address to be deactivated. This is where comprehensive bounce management is important. If a sent email is not delivered, for example because the email address is incorrect, it generates a bounce that is played back to the sender. As part of the bounce management, modern marketing automation solutions like ELAINE can identify and remomove incorrect email addresses automatically from your dispatch lists. Alternatively, they can notify an employee so that they can check this address and follow up if necessary.

2. Choose the right dispatch frequency

Recipients quickly feel annoyed if they receive too many emails from you. In that case, they either unsubscribe or even mark your emails as spam. Almost all email clients now offer such “mark as spam” functions. But also spam filters recognize too high dispatching frequencies partly as spam criterion. But what does too high mean? This depends on your business model, of course. A news site is expected to provide information about the latest developments at least once a day. For a mechanical engineering company, on the other hand, a daily newsletter would probably be rather unusual. A B2B provider that communicates every day or more often would as well be  rather unusual. With these three tips you can optimize your mailing frequency:

  1. Be transparent: Inform the prospective customer already before registration how often you will contact him. That way you avoid unpleasant surprises. Communicate to the user right from the start how often you will contact him.
  2. Offer a self-service center: Allow your recipients to choose how often they want to be contacted by you.
  3. Optimize successively: Start with a low frequency and increase it slowly. Email marketing solutions like ELAINE can adapt the dispatching frequency automatically to the recipient’s activity. For example, a recipient who opens and clicks on every email might receive more emails than a recipient who almost never opens the emails received.
Example of a self-service center, users can complete their data

3. Communicate consistently

Stay consistent in your communication. This does not mean that you should not dare to experiment or activate your receivers by surprise. But don’t overstrain your receivers by doing too many experiments at once. A newsletter whose design, address, or thematic focus changes every few days is more a sign of chaos for your recipients than an exciting experiment. This is especially true for the delivery time. A recipient who has gotten used to a monthly newsletter and suddenly receives several newsletters per week will probably find this change annoying. In addition, some spam filters also react to such sudden frequency changes. Always test significant changes to your communication in a test group before rolling out the change to your entire mailing list or larger segments.