It’s easy to see that email marketing is essential when nearly 60% of marketers say it is their most significant source of ROI. So it’s 100% worth it to do it right. However, crafting regular emails to your subscribers can be pretty time-intensive for the already busy entrepreneur. You put in a lot of hard work, and you want to make it count. If those emails land in your potential customers’ spam folders, you don’t have much of a chance of making a sale or building a relationship with them. 

Here are four simple strategies that will help ensure that your emails make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

1. Use A Reputable Marketing Automation Platform

Using a reputable email marketing provider is the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of avoiding spam folders. Companies like Klaviyo, Mailchimp and ConvertKit work hard at making sure they are white-listed with the big Internet Service Providers and email providers like Gmail. In addition, most providers will list their delivery stats, providing analytical insights that are useful for future campaigns. The good ones will also ensure your emails are compliant and keep you out of hot water.

2. Set Expectations and Keep Them

Your chances of staying in the primary inbox are high when your subscribers regularly open your email. The best way to ensure that – outside of providing great content that your subscribers are looking for – is to set expectations from the beginning. You can set these expectations during mailing list opt-in sequences or your welcome email. Letting people know what value they will receive when joining your community will keep them coming back for multiple opens. 

Let your subscribers know when and how often they can expect an email from you early on and what kind of content they can expect to read. While the number of emails sent to subscribers per month varies for each business, a good rule of thumb is to schedule a bi-weekly campaign. 

You can even use “foreshadowing” in your messages. For example, toward the end of your current broadcast email, mention that they can look for another email from you next Tuesday. Once you’ve set those expectations, do what you can to meet them. Yes, things happen every once in a while. However, it’s best practice to do your best to keep your promise and communicate with your readers when expected.

Consistently doing this will improve your open rates and thus your overall deliverability.

3. Scrub Your List Regularly

Another good habit is to clean up your list regularly. Yes, our egos hate it, but if subscribers haven’t been opening your emails for the past six months, chances are good they are no longer interested in what you have to offer. So instead of looking at it as a loss, think of it as increasing bandwidth for followers who are really into the knowledge and information you’re dropping for them. As suggested by the marketing gurus over at Hubspot, the best practice is that this process will vary from company to company; however, if you’re newly building your list, do this every six months to a year. 

If you’re seeing a large number of inactive members on your list, consider adding a double opt-in process on signup. It’s also a good idea to make it easy for your audience to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested. These two tactics will make it easier for you when it comes time to comb through your contact list.

4. Segment Your Lists & Throttle Campaigns

According to datainnovation.io, “One of the best practices to increase email deliverability is to segment the mailing list into different segments based on user activity.” While this takes a bit more front-end work, the payoff is undoubtedly worth it. Dividing your audience into demographic segments such as location, interests, age, etc., will ensure that the content they are receiving applies to them. 

Segmenting becomes essential as your mailing list grows and your audience demographics widen. It helps reduce the overall number of emails sent on each campaign and ensures relevance to each audience member. This strategy also makes it easier to throttle your delivery times. 

Throttling your delivery times is vital to ensure your content doesn’t fall into an internet black hole. Essentially, ISPs, otherwise known as Internet Service Providers, will limit the number of emails you can send out in a specific timeframe. If you overload this quota, your campaign will likely return a “mail undelivered” or “user is receiving mail at too great a rate right now; please try again later” error. 

Some ESP’s like Mailchimp offer this service when you send out your campaigns. Before sending out your email, you can select to batch your mail-outs in smaller groups over a suggested time frame. Thus, avoiding reaching the quota & linking back to the demonstratable value of using a reputable email marketing service provider for your business. 

To learn more about what throttling is and why it happens, check out this post by Benchmark for a deeper explanation.

Following these four tips and keeping an eye on email deliverability, in general, will make sure your subscribers are reading your emails, and that’s the point of email marketing, isn’t it?