You’ve worked hard to create beautiful campaigns – now how do you make sure they get delivered? Having a list of subscribers is a good start, but only guarantees that your email will be sent – not received. Our guide about Understanding Email Deliverability lays out the steps you need to take to get your campaigns into your subscriber’s inboxes. This excerpt outlines the steps you need to follow to run successful email marketing campaigns:
The Basic Delivery Model
- Assemble the right list
The ideal audience wants to receive your email, has given you consent to email them and most important, is expecting you to send it. The list you send to should be targeted at a specific segment of your market, and it must contain accurate, current contact information. Generally speaking, this list will be an audience you’ve grown over time. - Create great content
No marketing campaign can be a success if the content isn’t well written, compelling, and of value to the recipient. You know your audience best; now share content with them that they’ll want to read and keep them engaged. - Transmit the message cleanly
This means respecting delivery rates and complying with ISP guidelines – ensuring that the maximum number of messages reach your recipients’ inboxes. These—and many other— factors govern your reputation as a sender. The more credible and legitimate you are, the more likely your messages are to reach their intended destination. - Deal with recipient issues
If an ISP thinks your email is spam, they will defer or block it very quickly. If an individual thinks your email is spam (or doesn’t recognize you) they will flag your email as spam, which registers a complaint. Both of these issues can harm your reputation and should be dealt with quickly and fairly. - Track the results
Every campaign has success rates that you can learn from, particularly if you’re testing several messages against one another. Results of each campaign allow you to compare success over time and discover trends in both your content and the behaviour of your list that allow you to better tailor your future content and messages. - Manage list hygiene
Recipient issues such as complaints, unsubscribes, and hard bounces should update your list immediately to ensure that it remains clean. Emails that soft bounce repeatedly should be removed from the list, as should people who have not registered a click or open for the last few mailings. At the very least, you should send an email to those who haven’t opened your emails or clicked links recently asking them to confirm that they wish to remain on your list. - Fine-tune content
The results of a campaign should lead to improvements in future messages – meaning that you’re constantly optimizing what you send in order to maximize the outcome.
Of course, each of these steps is far more detailed than just what’s included in the list above. Some of the steps are the responsibility of marketers, while others are the job of an email marketing platform (like Cakemail). Read our Understanding Email Deliverability Guide if you want to learn more!