Have you seen a low email deliverability rate despite your brilliant email campaign strategy? This is especially disappointing because your target audience is missing out on an opportunity to see your email that is designed to be visually appealing and offers relevant content. Let’s dive into two steps to take to increase your email deliverability rate.
Let’s first define the deliverability rate. This is the key metric determining how successfully your email is delivered to your audience’s email inbox. It is calculated by the number of delivered emails divided by the total number of sent emails. In North America, the average deliverability rate was 83% in 2019¹. It means that one in every six emails failed to reach the customers’ inbox. Deliverability rate is impacted by many factors such as the cleanliness of your email list and the bounce rate.
Here are two tips on how to clean your email list and improve the bounce rate.
1. Clean your email list before execution
This might sound obvious but having a clean list is the first thing you want to check before you run any email campaign. Using stale lists will only result in a high bounce rate and a low deliverability rate. It’s advised not to use any third-party software to clean lists due to privacy concerns. However, you can clean your list by creating a record of hard bounced or unengaged contacts from your past campaigns and excluding it from your new campaign.
2. Keep an eye on hard bounces after campaign execution
Feeling good that you have a clean list? Unfortunately, you can’t relax just yet. To maintain a healthy deliverability rate, it’s important that you constantly monitor the bounce rate throughout your campaign.
Bounce rate is composed of hard bounces and soft bounces. To improve your deliverability rate, you need to remove any hard bounces (i.e., contacts with invalid email addresses) from your email list. We recommend keeping the bounce rate lower than 1% at the minimum.
Many EMPs (Email Marketing Platform) such as Mailchimp or HubSpot provide data on hard bounces that help identify invalid email addresses to be removed from your email list. You can also automatically remove them by setting up a trigger in your email workflow.
Oftentimes, we measure metrics like open rate and click-rate, but the deliverability rate cannot be neglected to measure how successful your email campaign is. You should have a clean list to work with prior to execution and constantly remove any hard bounced contacts to maintain your deliverability rate higher than 88%² minimum as best practice.
Feel like an email pro now? Not quite. While we recognize there are many other elements of a successful email campaign, taking these two fundamental steps will take you on the right path to email campaign utopia. Okay, maybe not utopia but definitely more open rates.
