For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

(Updated July 2018) So, you’ve crossed all your email marketing t’s and dotted all your email marketing best practices i’s with a targeted, relevant offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns.

Then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address due to spam complaints. Before you know it, your email deliverability is plummeting and you can’t get an accurate sense for how effective your email marketing campaign was.

How could this be? Your subscribers opted-in, after all!

Well, the reasons are multiple-fold. Sometimes, an email subscriber will forget opting in and rather than clicking “Unsubscribe,” they may just opt to hit that pesky “report spam” button, without an awareness that your beautifully crafted email marketing message is indeed a message they chose to receive. The reasons behind this have a lot to do with failing to obey email marketing best practices (and listening to your subscribers’ preferences) in the first place. In the meantime, your email deliverability starts to suffer.

The best thing to do now is to take a good hard look at your email list, take a deep breath, and start cutting. It’s hard. You don’t want to voluntarily trim the increasingly large (and growing) subscriber list you’ve worked so hard to cultivate with all of your email marketing genius. Oftentimes, making a cut can yield higher email deliverability rates. In the case of email deliverability, it’s not always quantity that matters. Consider focusing certain ad campaigns only on subscribers who have made a purchase. In other similar case studies, this strategy has consistently yielded close to 100% inbox delivery.

Emailing to fewer, but more engaged, subscribers can be the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from the subscribers who really are interested in your email marketing messages. Because the other alternative is that your valuable customers may never see your email due to failed email deliverability.

In navigating today’s world of email marketing and email deliverability, be prepared to face the choice between reaching some valuable customers, or reaching no customers at all.