How To Improve Broadcast Email Open Rates and Deliverability

December 20, 2017 Dawn-Marie

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I remember when I started my first email list with GetResponse I was sending tons of emails but realised that my open rates were pathetic.

Absolutely pathetic.

I started with a small email list size of 500 but only about 1.5% of my emails were being opened. At the time I knew very little about the science of email marketing.

I was also too lazy to even bother researching why I was getting low email open rates when someone mentioned that my email list is my biggest business asset and I should learn to nurture it and treat it with care.

From that day onwards I started testing every strategy that I learnt to improve my email open rates and deliverability so I could get the best out of my email marketing.

I want to share these strategies with you because if email marketing does not work for you, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Related Articles:

Here’s What You Will Learn

Why open rates and deliverability matters
What can affect your email deliverability
What can affect your email open rates
5 things you can do right now to improve your deliverability
4 things you can do to improve open rates
Other metrics you should be testing to improve your email marketing

Why Email Open Rates And Deliverability Matters

If you have started email marketing, then open rates and deliverability matters because that’s how people see your content.

If no one is opening your emails or if your emails are not being delivered, then your marketing message is going unheard and you are wasting your time.

If you have taken care of your email list by giving them content that helps and adds value to their lives or businesses then chances are they are more likely to listen to product recommendations and this is how you can make money from your email list.

But first you have to overcome the challenge of having your emails delivered to your subscriber’s inbox.

Once it gets to their inbox it would be even better if the email gets opened so that the subscriber knows about your product or what you have to offer.

But I don’t want you to be so consumed by trying to increase your email open rates. It’s not all that matters. The objective of this post is to help you improve your email open rates and deliverability but if you stay to the end I will share with you why this should not always be your core focus.

What Can Affect Your Email Deliverability

There are many things that can affect open rates and deliverability. If someone subscribes to your email list for the first time and your welcome email lands in their junk mail then there are a few things you can look for to see why that happened.

Blocked Domain

Everyone starts with a clean slate but if you started off on the wrong foot by making email marketing blunders, then you may find that your domain has been blocked thereby registering any email you send to be listed as spam.

If you think that you might be a victim of those spam filters then a great way to see if your domain has been blacklisted is to run an MX ToolBox blacklist check.

This tool checks whether your domain has been blacklisted and is a good indication as to why your emails to your subscribers are performing poorly.

Here is my result after checking my email domain.

You can also check your sender reputation and see what your score is. If you have a low sender score then this explains the possible reason for your emails not performing well.

Free Email Addresses

If you are sending bulk marketing emails but do not yet have a private email address and you’re still relying on a free email address by Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or the like, then you run the risk of your emails being delivered to the spam box. This is because free email address hosts recognise any bulk emails using their domains and being sent from outside their servers as spam.

For example, if you are using Aweber as your email autoresponder but your From email address is @gmail.com, then any subscriber who also uses an @gmail.com address more than likely will not receive your email.

This is because Google will establish that your email is spam as it did not come from their server but from Aweber’s server.

Lack of Content Customisation

Another thing that affects deliverability rates is when your email content is not customised but similar to other marketing messages. If you have copied your email content from someone else who already has problems with email deliverability, it is likely that you will encounter the same problem.

The reason for this is that email service providers have already marked the content as spam. Therefore any words that you use that is similar to emails that have already been marked as spam, will trigger the spam filters.

Banned URLs

As an affiliate marketer you may be using URLs that trigger spam filters.

Think about this. If many people are including the same URL in their emails, email service providers see this as spam and therefore will mark your email as spam landing it in the junk folder.

What Can Affect Your Email Open Rates

Relationship Lost

Some bloggers and marketers are guilty of collecting email addresses but do nothing with them. When you collect an email address you need to start building a relationship with your subscribers immediately.

When you build a relationship they look forward to your emails and therefore are more likely to open your emails.

When they hardly hear from you, they’re like that one long lost friend you have that turns up at the most opportune time to sell something to you. Guess what?! They don’t want to hear from you.

So treat your subscribers like your best friend.

Opting for Single Opt In

You may also have opted for single opt in instead of double opt in. When you are using single opt in for your marketing, you may be at risk of getting lower quality subscribers.

People opt in for many reasons. Some are curious and not really interested in what’s on the other side of the page so whilst they provide an email address, they may not be bothered with what comes next which are your emails.

Others do not even provide their real email address. So if a fake or unused email gets through to your email list then even though your email may land in their inbox, it is unlikely to get opened.

Unappealing Subject Lines

Do your subject lines evoke excitement or curiosity? If they are boring and uninteresting then that’s an obvious reason why people are not opening your emails.

Take a look at Digital Marketer’s best email subject lines for ideas on how you can improve.

Unengaged Subscribers

There are many marketers with thousands of email subscribers but when you ask them what type of engagement they get, it is probably a small fraction.

If your subscribers have lost interest in reading your content then they are not going to open your emails.

If you purchased an email list and you are trying to engage those subscribers then it is likely that you will have difficulty in doing so.

When you purchase an email list you have not been given permission by those subscribers to email them. Therefore they will not open your emails unless they have to unsubscribe.

Time of Delivery

Sometimes the timeliness of an email can affect open rates.

They say that there is a good time and bad time to send an email. The best thing you can do is to check your email reports to see if there is any pattern to your subscribers opening their emails. If you see a pattern over a period of time then it’s a good idea to stick to that schedule.

5 Things You Can Do Right Now For Improved Email Deliverability

Get Off of Blacklists

When checking the MX Toolbox and if you find that your IP or domain has been blacklisted, then be proactive and work on getting yourself removed from the list.

MX Toolbox explains how to do that here.

Use a Private Domain

If you are using a free email address then it’s time to use a paid one. You can actually set up private email addresses using domain providers like Namecheap, Bluehost or Godaddy.

Many email autoresponders do warn you against using free email addresses in any event and some may not even let you use a free email address as a sender’s email address.

Customise and Personalise Your Content

This particularly applies to affiliate marketers.

If you are an affiliate marketer, then avoid copying email scripts that affiliate managers provide to you when you are promoting their product.

Instead be unique and creative in your content. This will not only make you stand out from the rest but will help you bypass spam filters as your email content does not resemble thousands of others.

Also pay attention to your subject lines and be sensible. Some things that affect delieverability include subject lines and content that have all capitalisations (FREE), symbols (R@t3 Th1s N0w), repeated punctuation marks (!!! Or ???).

Check out this huge list of email spam words from Automational to avoid.

Pro Tip: It’s also a good idea to make your content appear genuine and relatable so that you can make that connection with your subscribers.

Use Cloaked URLs

As an affiliate marketer you will be given URLs that look long and ugly. Most of the time, email service providers can recognise these URLs within your emails and will block them.

Using a custom domain to wrap around your affiliate link will help you avoid this problem.

Whilst there are link shorteners that help you to make your affiliate links look pretty, be careful of using them in your emails as they are notorious for being used by spammers and will only help your email land in the spam folder.

Clickmagick is a handy tool that allows you to create a custom domain for every and any affiliate link you may be promoting.

Install An SPF Record

This is a crucial part of having successful email deliverability and not many people know how to do it. An SPF record is a sender’s policy framework which verifies with email service providers that you are who you say you are.

In the video below I show you how to set up your SPF record.

4 Things You Can Do To Improve Open Rates

Keep In Touch

There are many times I will receive an email from someone that I subscribed to a long time ago, but because their emails were infrequent, I forgot I subscribed to their email list and have lost interest in knowing what they have to deliver.

Don’t be like that.

If have built an email list be sure to keep in touch with them regularly. Sending an email once a week is sufficient.

Pro Tip: Try to avoid sending emails everyday as some subscribers may find it annoying causing them to unsubscribe from your email list. According to Get Data Research, 46.4% of email unsubscribes were due to receiving too many emails.

Use Double Opt In

There is a great debate about whether double opt in is better than single opt in. Marketers use single opt ins to get as many email addresses as possible but what this does is lower the quality of the list.

In some cases people may not use their everyday email addresses causing your open rates to be lower.

In other cases they may not even use a real email address which may lead to high bounce rates.

Therefore when marketing I would recommend double opt ins as by asking your subscriber to take the further step of confirming that they want to receive your emails confirms that they are genuinely interested in your content and their email address is real.

Split Test Subject Lines

If you find that open rates are low it may be because of unappealing subject lines. Which is why it is necessary to split test your subject lines to see which ones get higher open rates.

To split test an email subject line start by sending an email to your list with your first subject line.

If you find that your open rate was low then consider segmenting your list for those people who did not open your email and send the same email but a different subject line.

This was how I was able to increase my email open rate by over 50% from 34.4% and my click through rate by over 8% from 3%.

Clean Your Email List

Some people say that you should not clean your email list as inactive email subscribers can become active again over a period of time.

But realistically how long should you wait for them to become active again?

As a rule, I generally clean my email list every three months. This helps to ensure that only people who want to read my content remain on my email list.

It makes no sense to have over a thousand email subscribers when only a tenth of them are opening your emails.

When you clean your email list you will generally improve your open email rates and your senders reputation. This tells your email service provider that you are responsible and people love engaging with your content which helps to increase deliverability in the future.

You are also likely to reduce the cost of your email subscription by paying only for worthy email subscribers who want to open your emails.

Here is an example of a recent email that I sent to a segment of my email list that had not opened my emails for three months.

When I did not receive any feedback from them, I simply removed them from my email list.

Other Metrics You Should Be Testing To Improve Your Email Marketing

Whilst email open and deliverability rates do matter, they are not indicators of a successful email marketing campaign.

It is also important to measure click through rates, sales derived from emails, whether subscribers reply to your emails, how many website pages were visited as a result of your emails.

These are all part of determining whether you have a successful email marketing campaign and can be measured by using various tools like Clickmagick which tracks the traffic through any links that are placed in your email to see if those links generated sales.

You can also use Google Analytics to track your email marketing campaigns.

Wrapping Up

If your email deliverability and open rates are poor like mine was, I hope you will find this list of tips useful to help you improve your email marketing campaigns.

Certainly if you want to make a good return on your investment then email deliverability and open rates are key and you should be focusing on these two things when you start.

What other things do you do to improve email open rates and deliverability? Tell me in the comments.