email marketing best practices

Quality Content Is The Key To Email Deliverability

One of the main reasons you have an email marketing program is to add to your organization’s bottom line.  Whatever this means to you and your organization, generating email marketing ROI is every email marketer’s ultimate goal. Successful email marketing programs come in many “flavors”: they can increase sales, develop brand awareness and brand loyalty, grow new relationships, increase customer engagement, or even increase awareness of issues and raise support for social causes.

But as an email marketer, it can become all too easy to emphasize one message repeatedly in your emails: selling. Even if your main goal is to increase sales, consistent sales or deals messages could work against your overall email deliverability, which will definitely undermine your ROI.

How does this happen?

Unhappy email recipients report emails as spam, which teaches the ISPs to start blocking emails from those senders. Even if they aren’t technically spam, since “spam is in the eye of the beholder” (i.e., your unhappy subscriber), your reputation and ultimately, email deliverability, becomes damaged. Your subscribers probably signed up for your email list in the beginning because they did want the special offers, insider-exclusives, promotions, and limited time deals that you are offering. But too much of one thing starts to get monotonous – and people forget that they even signed up for something in the first place, if they are repeatedly deleting these messages.

As the old idiom goes: “Variety is the spice of life.” So it holds too, with email messages. Your email marketing mix should definitely contain a good amount of special offers and deals; but even more important than the deal is the kind of content you’re providing. Are you occasionally providing useful information? A helpful hint? Is the content fresh? Are your subject lines informative and intriguing (leading to increased email open rates)? Are your deals written well (fun, interesting, specific, and clear)?

When you start paying attention to the quality of your content (instead of quantity of emails that get sent), you’ll start to see less unsubscribes and decreased spam reports, thereby increasing your email deliverability and ultimately, conversion rates.

Consider focusing on creating quality content as an email deliverability best practice. Increase engagement with your email messages by offering your subscribers more than a discounted deal. Make an effort to make the content interesting and fun, such that your subscribers will look forward to receiving your emails and then forward or even share them to their social networks. Engaging content will help you make it to the inbox, and maybe beyond, when people like it enough to share it.

To protect or even improve email deliverability, focus on great content as much as you focus on great offers.

About the Author: Sharon

Sharon Ernst from BetterFasterWriter.com is on a mission to improve the business and marketing writing skills of today’s workforce with her blog, newsletter and online classes. Her newest class on intermediate email copywriting covers 19 tips and techniques non-copywriters can put to use right away for better results. The class has real-life examples and before/after comparisons to make the lessons stick. Find her class at www.betterfasterwriter.com/intermediate-email-copywriting-class. When she’s not busy helping employees, managers and marketers master their writing skills, she and her husband are busy raising pigs, cows, chickens and vegetables on their 20-acre farm.

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