The concept of email marketing predates the big data phenomenon by at least 20 years. However, data-driven insights have clearly played a profound role in the future of email marketing.
Companies need to find new ways to use big data to embrace new email strategies. One of the most important things that they should do is find data-driven approaches to enhance email deliverability.
The Evolution of Email in the Age of Big Data
For decades, email has been the go-to communication channel for businesses, and rightly so. From cost-effectiveness to speed and security, email offers a myriad of benefits. But with spam filters becoming more active than ever, low email deliverability has become an issue.
While email providers are using AI and other big data technology to filter spam, smart businesses can use data strategies to improve email deliverability on their own ends. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can improve email deliverability with new data technology to boost your business.
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Email for Businesses: A Crucial Channel
Regardless of the type of your business, email is likely your most-used communication channel. You can use big data to utilize it even more effectively. Whether it’s internal communication or reaching your customers, email provides lightning-fast communication opportunities. It is even more reliable in the big data age than it was around the turn of the century. Besides being affordable, fast, and convenient, here are some reasons why every business should use email.
- Email is excellent for customer acquisition – even better than social media. Studies have suggested that email could offer a customer acquisition and retention rate of 81% and 80%, respectively.
- Email is personal and customizable. You can use it for highly personal internal communications, extremely public email campaigns, and everything in between. Machine learning and other big data technology has made this even easier. They can learn to customize emails better by learning from past interactions.
- Email is measurable through sophisticated data analytics. You can track everything with big data – how many people saw your email, how many of them opened it, and how many took the desired action.
- It’s action-oriented. You can use email to make direct sales by adding direct links to purchase pages.
- Email offers seamless mobility. You can access email from your mobile phone or tablet anytime and from anywhere.
Poor Email Deliverability Can Hurt Your Business
Email is a lucrative channel for business. If used strategically, it can drive your brand awareness and sales like no other channel. But to leverage email, you would want to make sure your emails land where you want them to – your consumers’ inboxes.
But with close to 50% of global emails being marked as junk, spam filters have become increasingly aggressive. This has increased as services like Gmail use machine learning to better identify spam. And their top target is automated emails. This leads to low email deliverability, which can hurt your business in many ways.
If you have low email deliverability, most of your emails will end up in the spam folder. This will ruin your reputation as a company. Besides, your email return on investment (ROI) will also plunge if a majority of your emails land in spam.
Easy Data Driven Approaches to Boost Email Deliverability
The good news is that increasing your email deliverability isn’t a difficult thing to do. If you maintain good email etiquette, you will likely never experience low email deliverability. But since spam protection has become aggressive and automated, businesses are facing deliverability issues.
Here are some easy ways to use big data to boost your email deliverability.
1. Improve Your Email List Hygiene
Always choose quality over quantity when it comes to maintaining an email list. You may have 10,000 subscribers on your list, but if 7,000 of them are inactive, your emails will bounce back. As a result, your email reputation will decline, and so will your email deliverability.
To avoid this, be sure to monitor and review your email list every now and then. You can decide a period – one month, three months, or six months – to filter your email list and remove inactive contacts.
There are several ways to identify inactive contacts. One way is to send out messages to every email asking for an active response. Besides, you can also deploy automated tools to identify and remove inactive contacts.
2. Optimize Subject Lines and Email Design
Delivering emails can be a hurdle if your emails have a low open-rate. If people aren’t interacting with your emails, it indicates that your emails aren’t useful. Thus, the recipients’ email service provider will push your emails to the spam folder.
To avoid this, optimize your email subject lines and design. Use catchy subject lines that encourage your recipients to open the message.
Once your recipients open your email, they should get an unparalleled experience. If your message is a chunk of text with no visuals or brandable elements, the readers will immediately press the back button.
Make sure your messages follow a template specific to your brand. Also, ensure that your emails feature a responsive design and are compatible with all devices.
3. Keep an Eye on the Metrics
Email service providers offer a ton of metrics to analyze the success of your email campaigns. Keep an eye on parameters like click-through rate (CTR), call to actions, and recipients’ reactions to tailor your email campaigns accordingly.
4. Use a Dedicated IP Address
You probably won’t need a dedicated IP address if you send a handful of emails every week. But if your email campaign comprises more than 100,000 messages, it’s better to ditch a shared IP and use a dedicated IP.
When you send emails from a shared IP, the quality of emails on the entire IP address is monitored. In the case of a dedicated IP, only your emails will be monitored.
Data Technology is Key to Improving Email Deliverability
Low email deliverability can be detrimental to your business’ reputation. Fortunately, data-driven insights can help boost your deliverability rates. By following the steps discussed above, you can use big data to improve the deliverability of your emails and generate better outcomes.
