You’re sending emails out the way you normally would, but things just aren’t performing the same. You’re just not seeing the volume you want – the volume you need. Reduced clicks and fewer orders equals decreased revenue.  This is, literally, an email marketer’s worst nightmare.

Not to worry. This sounds like it could be a deliverability issue, for sure.

Email deliverability refers to your ability as a business to deliver emails to a subscriber’s inbox. If your deliverability is bad, your emails might only be making it to a junk or spam folder instead of the user’s inbox. In some cases, the email doesn’t even make it to spam. 

While it might not be hard to diagnose email deliverability, it is one of the harder issues to solve because there are so many things that could have caused it.

Elements that could hurt deliverability could be things as simple as:

• Making it difficult for your users to unsubscribe
• An overall lack of engagement with your emails over time

It could also be caused by something slightly more technical like:

• The use of single opt-ins
• Sending from a free domain email address or using URL-shorteners for your links

Then there are the server-related issues that could cause problems with your deliverability. Too many emails coming from one server can result in deliverability issues. 

Fortunately, there are email marketing best practices that can help you avoid deliverability issues. 

First things first, maintain your list hygiene. Create lists of users who receive messaging that speaks to them. Someone who hasn’t purchased from you in six months might need more of a win-back email than a direct response email. This goes hand-in-hand with keeping an eye on inactive subscribers. Too much inactivity can hurt your deliverability. Engagement is probably the most important factor for the email service provider and the sender’s reputation. Reputation health will have a direct impact on the deliverability of your emails.

Make it super easy for your email recipients to unsubscribe if they want to. If someone doesn’t want to receive your emails, it’s OKAY. Let them unsubscribe.

You also want to avoid using URL-shorteners.  Any time you mask the URL, you’re risking deliverability issues. These types of URLs are often misused, so it is not uncommon for emails that use these type of URLs to get flagged as spam.

Once you get your list hygiene in check, you can focus on your address book. If you happen to need help keeping your email list up to date and organized, consider Evercontact – your nifty set-it-and-forget-it solution that extracts contact information from email signatures and syncs the information directly to your address book. If someone updates their information, Evercontact automatically updates it for you.