Digital marketing strategies are evolving rapidly, and it is essential to keep up with them. There are almost 4.48 billion email users worldwide, and 81% of businesses use email as part of their digital marketing strategy.

Marketers invest time, money, and effort to craft enticing promotional and informative emails with appealing designs, subjects, and templates. These precious efforts go down the drain if the email reaches the audience’s spam folder instead of the primary inbox.

Businesses must understand the significance of email deliverability, inbox placement, and ways to avoid the spam folder. Let’s know what strategy will improve email deliverability and increase engagement rates.

What is the Inbox Placement Rate?

Inbox placement rate is the percentage of business emails that reach your audience’s primary inbox. If your marketing email reaches the primary inbox, the probability of customers seeing and opening it is high. Email service providers have algorithms to recognize a high inbox placement rate and boost your email deliverability accordingly.

Calculate the inbox placement rate by dividing the emails delivered to the primary inbox by the total number of emails sent and multiplying by 100. The ideal IPR is 95% and above.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the percentage of emails that reach your customer’s inbox. It highlights how well your emails are received. Such email marketing metrics can help you understand how well your email campaign is going, and you can take the necessary steps to improve it accordingly.

Factors Contributing to High Email Deliverability

Here are some factors to consider:

  • Unsubscribes or spam reports influence your sender score.
  • Creative subject lines and quality content encourage higher open rates.
  • A well-formed email prevents your emails from being suspicious.
  • You must deploy top-notch email infrastructure like mail servers, agents, and IP addresses.
  • Schedule your campaigns at regular intervals.

How to Avoid Emails Going to Spam and Enhance Your Inbox Placement?

Wondering what strategy will improve email deliverability? Here is a list of the best practices that will help you maintain high email deliverability:

1. Avoid Buying Email Lists

Purchased email lists have people who have never interacted with your business. This increases the spam risk because high-quality email addresses are hardly available for purchase.

Grow your email list and encourage sign-ups through your website or social media channels to ensure a genuine audience

2. Authenticate Your Domain

Email authentication is crucial to ensuring recipient servers recognize your emails. Implement the following protocols:

  • Sender Policy Framework: It ensures that your emails are from authorized servers.
  • DomainKeys Identification: It ensures that the email content is not altered during transmission.
  • Protection Against Cyber-Attacks: Domain-based authentication, reporting, and conformance protect against cyber-attacks.

3. Ensure Higher Conversion Rates

  • Double Opt-In: Use double opt-in to maintain a healthy email list. This gathers confirmation from new subscribers before adding them to your list, ensuring that your recipients genuinely want to receive your emails.
  • Remove Bounced Emails: Sending emails to addresses that fail to deliver due to invalid IDs can damage your sender’s reputation. Regularly modify your email list to remove bounced addresses.
  • Re-Engage: Implement re-engagement email campaigns by addressing “graymail.” This is a category that your audience has subscribed to but does not engage with. Rekindle their interest by sending them personalized offers or surveys.
  • Personalize: Approximately 33% of emails are opened based on an attractive subject line, while 45% are opened because of the sender’s name. Personalize the sender’s name to enhance business credibility.

4. Start Small to Maintain a Healthy IP Address

Initiate your strategy by sending small volumes of emails to engaged users before using a new IP address to send emails. You can increase the volume as engagement rates improve.

5. Mind the Subject Lines

Here are some integral considerations that you must look into before framing email subject lines:

  • Using all caps in subject lines can look aggressive and may reduce engagement.
  • Too many exclamation points or punctuation can make your emails unprofessional.
  • Avoid spammy words like “free” or “urgent.” Focus on maintaining an engaging language that is clear to your audience.
  • Avoid stuffing your emails and subject lines with keywords. This can deteriorate the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
  • Personalized subject lines gather more attention and are 26% more likely to be opened.

6. Monitor Sender Reputation and Block Lists

Regularly check your sender’s reputation, influenced by spam complaints, bounce rates, and email history. Keeping track of your status helps ensure your emails are not flagged as spam.

You must know that legitimate emails enjoy a 90% inbox placement rate.

7. Offer an Unsubscribe Process

You must allow your audience to opt out of your email list. Deploy an unsubscribe link to your emails. This will improve overall deliverability, enhance user engagement, and mitigate the possibility of your emails being marked as spam.

8. Skip Attachments and Enhance Visuals

Attachments are often considered suspicious and could be flagged in spam folders. Add links to your website and social media channels instead of emailing files.

Adding alt text to images promotes accessibility and scalability. Many email clients block images by default, meaning many cannot see pictures without changing their settings. Alt texts for your images ensure recipients understand your message even if the pictures do not load.

Emails with excessively large images or videos can be flagged as spam. Avoid using images as the primary content of your emails and rely on solid background colors.

9. Use Valuable Content

Create emails that captivate and provide value to your readers. A positive email engagement rate means your emails will be delivered to inboxes. Use interactive elements, surveys, quizzes, or personalized content to engage customers by giving them unique emailing experiences.

Additionally, ensure that your emails are free from spelling and grammar errors for enhanced readability.

10. Monitor Important Metrics

It is essential to use data analytics to review key KPIs related to your email campaigns. Pay attention to metrics such as:

  • Subscribe or unsubscribe rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Spam complaints.

Additionally, the brand reputation of your sending IP address affects email deliverability. Regularly monitor and check if your IP is blocklisted or flagged.

11. Testing for Ease-of-Use

  • HTML and Plain Text Versions: Offer HTML and plain text versions of your emails to ensure they are accessible, visually appealing with formatting and design, and less likely to be flagged as spam. Ensure your HTML code is clean to prevent issues.
  • Test Across Different Platforms: Use A/B testing to evaluate your emails’ performance across various clients and devices. Preview your emails in multiple environments to ensure they display correctly and perform as expected.

12. Use Clear Calls-to-Action

A well-defined call-to-action in your emails guides your audience toward desired actions and instructs them on what to do next. Effective CTAs positively influence your inbox placement rates and improve your email marketing efforts.

Conclusion

Delve into the most lucrative strategies to enhance your inbox placement and email deliverability and reduce the chances of emails landing in your spam folder. You need a dedicated approach to implement high-converting email campaigns, which will lead to improved deliverability.

Email marketing is one substantial way for businesses to strengthen their reach and reputation. Use best practices and proactive tactics to ensure higher visibility for your email campaigns.

Partner with experts at Crazy Domains to transform the way you connect with your audience using email campaigns. Explore our email solutions and discover how we can help you achieve exceptional inbox placement and engagement.

Want to skyrocket your email marketing? Contact us today!