You can’t inspire customers to act if they never get your message. If you can keep emails out of the spam folder, it’s a big deal—especially if you’re investing tons of time, energy, and strategic resources into personalization.

Unfortunately, today’s email marketing ecosystem is more competitive than ever. And that means outside factors are likely working against you in your attempt to reach the inbox. Email deliverability is far from a guarantee, even for email messaging that someone has specifically requested.

The average deliverability rate for most companies falls somewhere between 83% and 88%. But if you’re sending personalized emails to thousands of potential buyers at a time, that means hundreds of sales go down the drain as soon as you click send. Not to mention all the work spent writing, designing, testing, and optimizing it, too.

If you’re not seeing at least 95% of your emails reach their target, you need to rethink your approach. Fortunately, staying out of the spam folder forever isn’t as tough as you may think. To get your emails into every customer’s inbox, start by overcoming two primary deliverability challenges: poor list hygiene and impersonal content.

The key to preventing poor email list hygiene?

Sending to a “dirty” mailing list is one of your email sender reputation’s top threats. ISPs will block your emails from ever reaching a targeted inbox if you rack up too many spam complaints, include undeliverable addresses on your list, send to long-term inactive accounts, use an ESP that appears on global blocklists, etc.

A two-step approach, however, can help you avoid these issues and keep your email lists squeaky clean:

• Audit and improve your acquisition sources. Never buy or exchange lists of email addresses, and be super-cautious about using co-registration. Review your acquisition sources for any unusually high complaint levels and bounce rates. Add real-time email validation and correction at any user opt-in step to prevent mistakes down the road by identifying potential problem sources before something goes wrong.
• Have your email list professionally cleaned. Your email platform should automatically remove undeliverable and complaint-generating addresses every time you send, but the process is not foolproof. If your list hasn’t gone through a full cleaning to remove problem addresses in more than a year, it’s time to make this a priority—or to ask an expert for help.

Create personalized email content your customers love

Your sender reputation and inbox placement also takes a hit whenever unopened emails pile up in customer inboxes or get deleted right away. But there’s an easy solution: Make your messages more valuable (a.k.a personal) to your customers. That way, they’re more likely to open and click on them.

Instead of blasting one batch of undifferentiated emails out to everyone on your list, use real-time data and advanced personalization to create unique messaging. Because the closer you get to a one-on-one, conversational feel, the more likely your emails are to be successful. Whether it’s reaching the inbox or making an impact on your bottom line.

• Using moment-of-open location data, your customers have your nearest store, its hours of operation, and live product availability at their fingertips. Or, you can share a weather forecast to make content and product recommendations as relevant as possible.
• Dynamic content updates mean your customers never receive an expired offer or sold-out product alert again. Because outdated offers can be automatically updated and switched out for fresh messaging to avoid negative customer experiences.
• Unveiling a new product collection or launching a big sale? A one-click, add-to-calendar function is an easy way to add interactivity into your emails. By making it easy for customers to add an event and receive automatically generated alerts as the date draws closer, you can dramatically increase online conversions and sales.

Don’t believe us? NASCAR uses an interactive “peel to reveal” function as a mystery discount to build engagement and increase sales among its birthday email recipients. And it’s a small step that’s delivering big-time business potential.

Compared to a default email, these campaigns are experiencing a 19.2% increase in CTR and a 2.9% increase in clicks. Year over year, NASCAR is increasing email conversion rates by 94% and revenue generated through personalized birthday emails by 308%!

Wrapping up

Email deliverability success is a long-haul proposition. But the steps you take today will pay off in higher revenue, stronger customer relationships, and personalized messaging that’s always in the right place at the right time.

Check out Liveclicker’s latest Email Innovators case studies to learn how advanced personalization can help you drive customer engagement through email like it already is for global brands like NASCAR, Rover, and BrandsMart USA.