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Why email deliverability matters to you

Do you need to worry about email deliverability? No. Should you understand why it’s important to your business? AbsolutelyWhether you’re well versed in email marketing or just starting out, just know that email deliverability is important to successfully generating online reviews. Consistently reaching your customers email inbox ensures your review requests are being read, which increase response rates. Let’s get started.

 

Email delivery vs. email deliverability

Although it may seem simple, let’s start with a basic overview of two key terms:

 

– Email Delivery measures how many of your emails reach a customers servers

– Email Deliverability measures how many of your emails reach a customers inbox

 

So, if you score well on email delivery, but suffer on deliverability it’s likely your campaigns will be unsuccessful. Let’s dig in a little more.

 

Delivery

Email delivery rate is the % of emails that are received by the gateway servers of your subscribers’ internet service providers (ISPs), and not returned as a hard or soft bounce. A hard bounce occurs when a domain doesn’t exist, an email address is invalid, or your internet protocol (IP) is being blocked. With a soft bounce, the email can be valid, but the contacts inbox is likely full.

 

That being said, even if a contacts ISP receives the email, and your delivery rate is high, your email still may not make it to a customer’s inbox. Instead, the emails may be blocked by spam filters, which means your review request may never be seen. That’s where deliverability comes into play.

 

Deliverability

The previous step, delivery, is just the first step in an email’s journey to a contacts inbox. Although we cannot tell exactly how many emails arrive in a contacts inbox, there are a few key data points to reference that will provide a more clear picture of your overall deliverability.

 

Open, click through, bounce, and unsubscribe rates, provide insight as to how contacts are engaging with your emails. Over time, you can use these data points to monitor and reveal trends in audience activity and engagement….and engagement is key. It’s the primary factor in email deliverability since it influences sender reputation. A stellar sender reputation score is key to great email deliverability.

 

3 reasons email deliverability matters

 

  1. Successful delivery = Successful marketing
    It’s pretty simple. If your review request emails don’t reach a customer’s inbox, they can’t read your email or respond to your call to action. Deliverability is the foundation of email marketing, and with an average return of $42 on every $1 dollar spent, it’s safe to say working to maximize deliverability is time well spent.

  2. The inbox is a battleground
    With over 250 million registered email addresses in the U.S., it’s no secret that your local competitors are battling to reach the same target audience. Taking the proper steps to ensure high deliverability, like consistently updating your contact lists and removing unengaged contacts, will help your emails top the inbox.

  3. Customers expect you to care
    A golden rule of marketing is to always keep the customer in mind. When messaging a customer it is important to consider the target audience’s point of view. In other words, message others how you’d like to be messaged. Here are a few tips that will help ensure you’re being a considerate marketer:

    Update your contact lists. You only want to connect with customers that engage with your content. Messaging unengaged contacts impacts your sender score and can damage your overall deliverability. By periodically reviewing your lists health and removing contacts who haven’t opened an email in many months and consistently adding new contacts to your list will keep your emails from going into customer’s spam folders. Luckily, Signpost allows you to upload fresh contact lists or even connect your existing business software in order to automatically add new contacts to your account. By keeping your contact list fresh, you’ll increase your deliverability and supercharge your review request campaigns.

    Provide timely content
    When requesting reviews, timing matters. Once people complete a task, they move on to the next thing quickly. We’ve found when contractors who send a personal review request after a job are 25 times more likely to receive an online review. Whether you have a team of people working for you, or you’re a one-man shop, make sure whenever a happy customer completes a transaction you send a review request immediately.

    Consider frequency
    You know how it is when you receive messages from a company every day. Over-messaging any given customer can cause inbox fatigue and even worse, frustration. Setting up a schedule with a reasonable cadence, will set your email marketing up for success. By monitoring your send limits, you’ll keep customers engaged which will result in better open, click and response rates!

 

In the end…Signpost has you covered

 

It’s clear, deliverability is key to a successful email marketing effort. If your review requests don’t make it to your customer’s inbox, you’ll never generate adequate online reviews. Just remember:

 

Keep your Signpost contact list fresh

It’s easy! Either upload new contacts or connect an existing software to automatically add  contacts.

 

Send personal review requests after every sale

Have a happy customer? Go to Signpost and click the new ‘Request Reviews’ button.

 

Request a Review!

 

Don’t worry, we’re here for you. It’s great that you’re now aware why deliverability matters to your business. But, our experts are monitoring your account and making ongoing updates to ensure review request emails reach your customer’s inbox.

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