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Wikus Engelbrecht is a writer, journalist and digital poet at GraphicMail, an international email and mobile marketing service provider. His professional career in language and media has traveled the film, print advertising, magazine publishing, food theatre and online content industries since 2003.

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Three Reasons for Email Delivery Failures

Written on
Sep 22, 2011 
Author
Wikus Engelbrecht  |
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Three Reasons for Email Delivery Failures

ADOTAS – When you send a marketing email to your mailing list, not all of your subscribers are going receive it. Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of hurdles each email must overcome before reaching its intended destination — and hopefully avoiding the spam folder. Email deliverability is really important, after all — nobody can click on a link in an email they never see.

According to Return Path’s Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report for 2011, only 81% of global email reaches the inbox. Email deliverability in the Unites States is the highest (with about 86% of emails making it to the intended recipient) but we can move the needle a lot higher by understanding delivery process and by taking responsibility for where emails land.

If you don’t care about your deliverability it damages your online reputation as a spammy sender and decreases the amount of revenue you can generate from the email channel.

By creating newsletters that are highly relevant to your subscribers, you will develop a loyal following.

1. The most important thing to keep in mind is the number of emails that are actually arriving successfully. Some people continue to believe that whatever gets sent and doesn’t bounce must be reaching the inbox.

This isn’t the case. Senders are only notified when their email is a hard bounce, not if it’s fallen in a junk or spam folder. To really start improving your deliverability, you have to sort fact from myth and figure out what your true delivery rate is.

2. Deliverability failures cost businesses money, but these failures can sometimes also be masked by revenue generation from email campaigns. It’s a mistake to assume that a campaign which generates revenue or gets a reasonable response is being delivered to every subscribers’ inbox. You can lose a lot of money from email that goes undelivered and even if you are already turning a profit from your email campaign, you need to take failures more seriously.

3. Many senders are still resistant to applying the best practices that make email delivery more consistent. It’s shocking that such a high percentage of brands are still missing the basics, like using spam-checking tools to test how an email’s structure and content looks to popular spam filters.

Even when email filters become stricter, marketers who have focused on segmenting their subscribers, having hygienic contacts lists and good content won’t see any dramatic shifts in their campaign deliveries.

Here are more email marketing tips from GraphicMail in an easy-to-digest visual format:





Reader Comments.

The three reasons why your email fails to get delivered to the recipient’s inbox are Bounces, Spam Complaints, and Spam Traps.

Posted by Craig Swerdloff | 10:19 am on September 23, 2011.

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