It can be frustrating when you send off your campaign emails and get very little engagement, such as clicks or purchases; worse yet, you get spam complaints and unsubscribes. These tips should help with the negative responses to your email campaigns and increase your deliverability.
Delivery vs. Deliverability
Delivery means that Mailchimp successfully sent your email to the recipient server and passed all the appropriate steps. Deliverability refers to the ability of your email to arrive in your contacts’ inbox.
Sender Reputation
The third term to be aware of is the sender’s reputation. A sender reputation is a score assigned to your account based on how your contacts interact or engage with your emails, including positive and negative interactions. Improving your sender reputation will also improve your email deliverability. So, how do you do that?
So, how do you do that? Here are six tips to help you.
Tip #1 – Don’t Buy a List
Don’t buy a list and assume that all will be good. Firstly, MailChimp’s Omnivore system can sniff out paid lists and shut your account down for violating its terms of service. Secondly, your spam complaints and unsubscribes will be very high, significantly lowering your sender’s reputation.
Tip #2 – Verify Email Address
Tip number two, verify your email domain address and authenticate the domain associated with your email address.
Now, this is probably a little bit more technical part of this but verifying your email address is very straightforward. To send email through MailChimp, you need to confirm that you are using a valid “from” email address hosted at a domain you can access. This helps keep your campaigns out of spam folders and protects your reputation by ensuring others can’t use your part without permission. You only need to verify a domain once; then, you can send it to any email address at the verified domain.
A more technical component to this, and it is optional, is to authenticate your domain. Domain authentication helps your emails reach your recipient’s inboxes. Adding authentication to the part you send emails can help you maintain and grow an engaged audience. Although this process is optional, it is recommended for MailChimp users with domains registered and managed outside of MailChimp; authentication can only be added to domains you or your business ownership and control. Email addresses at public email services like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL cannot authenticate through MailChimp.
Tip # 3 – Maintain a Healthy Audience
It’s best to organize one audience with tags, groups, or segments rather than maintain multiple audiences in your account. MailChimp treats all audiences in your account separately, and billing is based on the total number of contacts across all of your audiences, except archived and clean connections. If you have duplicate contacts across audiences, having one audience could save you money. One audience is also easier to manage and keep clean.
Another step to keep a healthy audience is to reengage your subscribed, inactive subscribers. MailChimp recommends that you periodically reengage fixed subscribed contacts to confirm their interest in your business or product. If your inactive subscribers don’t respond to your engagement campaign, it’s best to unsubscribe from them. For example, you can use this segment to filter out those who haven’t opened any of the last campaign emails sent. Another step to a healthy audience is to send tailored campaigns. When you send it to segments in your audience, subscribers receive the content they’re most interested in. You can send email campaigns to subscribers based on their open-and-click behavior, subscriber profile preferences, and e-commerce purchases, among other variables. If you use tags to organize your audience, you can send directly to your tagged contacts or create segments based on the tag data in your audience.
Tip #4 – Use Personalized Merge Tags
Using the merge tag for the first name of your contacts in your email helps avoid spam filters and increases engagement.
Tip #5 – Send a Personalized Welcome Email
When someone signs up for your email marketing, it’s an opportunity to make a great first impression, set expectations on what type of content to expect and frequency, send your new contacts a welcome email to introduce yourself, says thank you, or even offer a special promotion. It’s also an opportunity to ask your contact to whitelist your sender email address; meaning add your email address to their list of contacts. Also, ask if they’re using Gmail to drag your email from the promotions tab to their inbox.
Tip #6 – Avoid Spammy Subject Lines
Avoid using all caps and extensive punctuation in certain words like buy now, earn cash, double your income, et cetera. And a bonus tip, how do you know what emails are connecting with your audience? View the email reports. Specifically, when it comes to deliverability, look at the spam complaints and the bounce rates.