How to Increase Inbox Rate by Sending the Right Message to the Right Audience
When email marketers find out that they have deliverability issues, they ask a million questions: why did my open rate and click-trough rate drop? Why do my emails go to Spam? Why are my emails blocked or deferred? What did I do wrong, etc.? When such questions arise, we always recommend answering the two key questions:
- Who are you sending emails to?
- How are you sending emails?
If you answer honestly, you’ll understand what the core cause of your deliverability issues is.
Who are You Sending Emails to? Identifying Your Targeted Audience
In most cases, the list you are sending to determines your sender reputation and Inbox rate. Email marketing has evolved far away from blind email campaigns when you press ‘Send’ and forget. Email filters at ISP use a lot of signals to decide where the email is to be delivered: Inbox or Spam. Among such signals are user engagement, bounce emails, user complaints, and spam trap hits. They help ISP create a reputation for each sender.
Engagement-Based Segmentation
Email service providers give good statistics about user engagement: open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and complaint rate. All these metrics should be analyzed and taken into account when preparing an email program.
When we talk about list segmentation by user engagement, we look at how long a subscriber has been on the list and when they clicked a message the last time. Why should you care? Remember user engagement as one of the factors determining an email placement. The more recipients interact the better sender reputation and deliverability.
With that said, you’ll want to think about different approaches to different subscribers’ segments. A subscriber who opted in but has never opened or has not opened for a long time and a subscriber who has recently opened should be treated differently.
You’ll want to choose a time frame to use for segmentation, for example, the last 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days depending on your sending frequency. The most active group who engaged with your emails during the chosen time frame is your golden audience. They are likely to open, click and buy again. You can send them more content, offer things that complement their purchases or downloads.
When you send a followup series, you may think about setting up different campaigns for the subscribers who opened the last message and who didn’t open.
The inactive group should be sent a re-engagement campaign. The subscribers who don’t re-engage should be treated as unsubscribed users and removed from your database.
Read more: How to Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers
It may sound redundant but micro-segments are key to being successful in maintaining a long-term email program.
The benefits of engagement-based segmentation are:
- allows you to increase ROI by targeting the right group with the right messages;
- helps manage email list properly by detecting and suppressing inactive subscribers;
- helps keep and restore sender reputation by sending emails to active recipients.
Often times, email senders just dump everything together and send the same campaigns to everyone or segment the subscribers based on other things that are outside of email-like customer behavior. But if you are really focused on driving reputation up and maintaining reputation, you have to watch who’s opening and engaging in emails the most frequently and who is not and build your email program using different approaches to different subscribers’ segments.
User Reported Spam
Another good source of data that helps understand if you send emails to the right audience is the data collected by mailbox providers: Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS).
Google Postmaster Tools shows the reputation data for the IP address and domain. You’ll want to make notes of all the ebbs and flows in your reputation and correlate them with the email campaigns that you sent those days. You’ll also want to watch your user-reported spam rate. Note the days when it is higher than normal and think about what could be causing it. Did you send irrelevant content? Did you send it too quickly? Did you send to an inactive list?
Read more: Gmail Puts Emails to Spam. How Can I Fix It?
Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) work for dedicated IP addresses. You can signup with SNDS and get reports about email traffic coming from your IP address. The things to pay attention to are filtered messages, complaint rate, and spam trap hits. This data helps you understand what you could be doing wrong if your deliverability to Outlook and Hotmail subscribers worsens.
Read more: Email Marketer’s Guide: What You Need to Know about Outlook
With that said, identifying your targeted audience is the first thing you should focus on when you start having deliverability issues. Everyone is not the right answer. Although you want to send to everyone, it’s not a reasonable approach if you want to maintain a good reputation.
When creating engagement-based segments, you focus on the recent opens and clicks. The best audience is going to be from zero to six months openers. Of course, people who engaged during the recent 14 or 30 days are going to be your strongest audience but it would be a very small segment compared to the volume most email marketers desire to send.
To prevent yourself from being confused by looking at too much data, focus on the key email metrics: opens, clicks, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. You may be sending emails in circles trying to resolve an issue that could simply be resolved by addressing who you are sending to or focusing on the ISP you may have deliverability issues with.
How are You Sending Emails? Setting up Sending Infrastructure
Email marketers normally don’t have issues with setting up their domains and IP addresses for sending email campaigns. However, there are a few things you’ll want to make notes of and implement if you are concerned about sender reputation.
Read the full story at GlockApps blog.
