The Ins and Outs of Email Deliverability for Marketers

Successfully delivering marketing emails to consumers is becoming even more difficult than it has been in the past.

In the first half of 2011, 81% of global marketing emails sent to consumers were delivered, but in the second half of the year, that number dropped to 76.5%, according to a study by Return Path. People on email lists weren’t hesitant to mark company emails as “spam” either — that number increased by 24%.

In a recent post, HubSpot Blog catalogued 19 helpful email deliverability terms that every marketer should. Maybe this handy guide will help marketers learn some of the tips and tricks to increasing deliverability rates.

Some key words on the list include:

• Black list, which “denotes a sender as a spammer, making it difficult for the sender to get future emails into an inbox.”
• Hard bounce: when an email can not be delivered
• Soft bounce: an email that experiences temporary sending issues

Aside from the terms, marketers need to look to other strategies that increase the chances that emails are actually read. According to Business Email Lists, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best times to send a marketing email. While Mondays and Fridays are not “business mode” days, the other three are likely times for people to check messages.

As for time, the site suggests sending emails between 10-10:30 a.m. and 1-1:30 p.m. “The majority of marketers try to ensure their email is not just sitting stagnate in the recipient’s inbox first thing in the morning, especially after a holiday,” the author writes. “People tend to have a morning ritual of ‘cleaning’ their inbox from any spam that arrived overnight.”

Before starting an email marketing operation, it is crucial, in a time when people are increasingly less receptive to getting company emails, to do the research. To launch a successful campaign, marketers need to learn the terms and find out how and when to send emails to make sure customers are reading the content.

Image courtesy Flickr, RambergMediaImages