When you’re sending emails to clients or fishing for new sales, how confident are you that your email will be delivered? As it turns out, after reviewing 130 million IP addresses that sent nearly 20 trillion emails, Return Path, an email certification and reputation monitoring company, found that over 85% of those messages are classified as spam.
 |
According to the 2012 Return Path Sender Score Benchmark report, “every ISP uses different criteria to determine whether email should be delivered to the inbox, filtered to a spam folder, or blocked altogether.”
So how do you make sure your email isn’t lost in the deadly shuffle of spam? According to the report, there are several steps you can take to ensure optimized email deliverability.
The first is to reduce your complaint rate. According to the report, companies can sign up for feedback loops with their ISP address, “this service, provided by nearly every ISP, lets you know every time a recipient marks one of your messages as ‘spam’.”
Once you get the analytics, take a look at your complaints and try to locate patterns of subscriber unhappiness. You might be able to tell if certain offers or subject lines perform badly. Once you see a trend you can fine tune your emails to see what works best.
It’s also good to practice “good hygiene” when it comes to your email lists, according to the report. Start collecting good, clean data about your email subscriber base, track your bounce rates and remove any unknown users.
The report also recommends implementing a win-back and resting strategy to deal with inactive subscribers.