Every business has an online presence and a large part of that presence lies in digital marketing strategies. One of the main ways to reach customers and potential consumers is by email, and here is where today’s retailers often encounter problems. To make a sale, your marketing email has to reach the customer; it needs to have a high deliverability rate. Your deliverability rate is not the same as your delivered rate. Your delivered rate simply means that your email hasn’t had a hard or soft bounce. That does not mean it hasn’t found its way into your target’s spam folder.

Deliverability refers to the amount of marketing emails that make it to your customer’s inbox and is a crucial issue for all retailers. Having poor deliverability means that only a small amount of your emails are reaching your target market.  Fewer emails are being opened and there’s less consumer engagement. Short term, this won’t be too big of a problem but long term this is will affect your profits.

Basically your retail business needs very good deliverability. Here are some ways to increase your emails chances of making it through.

1 – Keep up to date

To make sure their emails have top deliverability, retailers need to be aware of the standards that are constantly evolving around what is classified as a spam email. Content creators need to be up to date with these tell-tale signs. Getting an email delivered depends upon the cooperation of the ISPs and email providers that let mail through gateways and they are very alert to spam emails.

2 – Check your sender reputation

Every business has a sender reputation and this can be the biggest reason your emails aren’t getting through. If you have a low sender score, ISPs automatically reject any information you try to send. Your sender score is produced by Return Path. A number is assigned to every outgoing mail server, and the score is calculated by amalgamating the amount of ‘unsubscribes’ and spam reports you receive. The scores are from 1-100, with a higher number being a better score.

3 – Confirmation

One way to make sure that your sender score remains high is to make sure that any marketing emails you send out have been confirmed as wanted by the receiver.

The most common way of opting in is the single opt-in, where a user agrees to receive an email by ticking or not ticking a box which seems like a good way of getting confirmation as its automatic. The reality is that many people forget that they’ve checked or not checked a box and report your email as spam. An ISP can start to block sending servers after as little as 2-3 spam reports per 1000 emails.

So what can you do? You can use the double opt-in strategy. Send a confirmation email to the customer to gain their consent and to validate their address this stops your marketing from being labelled spam and your chances of engagement are much higher.

4 – Schedule
Another factor that affects your sending score is random sending activity which creates sending spikes. If you send regularly scheduled emails, you are less likely to be labeled spam and your emails will be allowed through by the ISP.