In its most basic form, email marketing seems like a simple task. Acquire email addresses, send subscribers well-crafted emails, include some form of call to action for subscribers to download a piece of content or buy your product and so on. But as email marketers well know, there are a plethora of hurdles to overcome in order to get subscribers see your message and take action on it.
One such hurdle is the spam folder. From banks and department stores to dating websites and electronics, no email marketer can elude the spam folder forever. And once your email lands in spam, it’s entirely up to your subscribers to save you from the damaging effects of being labeled a spammer. To rescue a message from the spam folder, a subscriber must go out of his way to click a This is Not Spam button to notify his mailbox provider.
The good news, according to a recent study on MarketingProfs, is that some subscribers will, in fact, rescue their email marketing messages from the spam folder. The study, conducted by Return Path, examined This Is Not Spam (TINS) rates of more than one billion email messages received during the first quarter of 2013.
Among the study’s key findings was that high TINS rates correlate with good email deliverability. “Although a message cannot be rescued unless it’s in the spam folder,” MarketingProfs says, “senders whose mail was most frequently delivered to spam were the least likely to earn TINS reports.”
In fact, senders whose messages reached the inbox more than 97 percent of the time had TINS rates of 0.44 percent-nearly triple the average of all other senders, according to MarketingProfs.
So what do these numbers mean for email marketers? Simply stated: Improve your email deliverability and increase your chances of being rescued from the spam folder.
How to Improve Your Email Deliverability
There are a number of ways in which email marketers can improve their overall deliverability. For example, improving deliverability can be as simple as prompting your subscribers to add your address to their senders list or lightening up on graphics and HTML tags. Other tactics, like warming up a new IP address to send email, can take more time.
But email marketers don’t have to go about improving deliverability on their own. There are services that can help drastically improve deliverability, including:
- Email Validation: A verification and correction service recovers what would be lost leads and can stop bounces, spam traps and fraudulent emails from getting on your list and damaging your email reputation.
- Email Intelligence: While email validation rids your list of invalid and fraudulent email addresses, email intelligence enables more personalized communications by providing information about the subscribers on your list. It also allows you to replace outdated emails with current addresses.
Click here to speak with us about how TowerData’s email validation and email intelligence services can improve your email deliverability.