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How to Improve Email Deliverability & Engagement

Last updated: October 13, 2024

Is your overall delivery below the Omeda average (97%)? Are your open rates low (<14%)? Do you have corporate domains that are reporting 0 bounces, 0 opens, 0 clicks, 0 unsubscribes? Have recipients complained that they don’t see your emails?

Learn how to address these questions and improve deliverability to corporate domains, build back email sending credibility after an IP block, and improve overall engagement from your email universe in three steps.

Step 1: Define Engagement

Before you see improvement in deliverability and engagement, you need to define what an engaged reader is. Too many unengaged readers on your list receiving emails over time is one of the more common causes of an IP block and why readers may not see your emails in their primary inbox (if it’s in their inbox at all).

Stay ahead and read our Q3 2024 email engagement report to uncover trends & best practices for success:

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Common criteria for an audience query that the Omeda team uses to measure email engagement is:

• Anyone who has received “X” number of emails in the last three months and HAS OPENED at least one of them.
• It will also INCLUDE new subscribers who have signed up in the last three months, even if they haven’t received “X” number of emails (so that new people aren’t accidentally flagged as unengaged).

On the flip side, you’ll also need to determine what your criteria is for un-engagement – the opposite of whatever you have set for engagement. Common criteria for an un-engagement audience query, building on how engagement was defined above, would be:

• Anyone who has received “X” number of emails in the last three months and HAS NOT opened a single one of them.
• It will EXCLUDE new subscribers who have signed up in the last three months, even if they haven’t received “X” number of emails (so that new people aren’t accidentally flagged as unengaged).

In light of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) release, some Omeda clients are starting to look at a combination of clicks and opens, or just click data, to measure engagement. Feel free to reach out to your Client Success Manager if you’d like insight into what the best approach may be for you and your company.

Step 2: Target Your Audience Strategically

Primary inbox placement is ideal for engagement, and when more people open and interact with your email content, the better your overall inbox placement will be.

While there’s no magic formula for how many people need to interact with your email to ensure everyone sees it (if we find that formula we promise to tell!), there are a few ways to trick the system.

One tip is to divide your audience and target your engaged audience separately from your unengaged audience. You can send the same content to both groups, but the mere fact that one group – your engaged audience – will have overwhelmingly better metrics helps tip the scale in your favor and benefits your sender reputation. It also helps in reporting, as you’ll start to see where some of the biggest pull on your list is coming from.

Step 3: Develop Re-Engagement Efforts

The process of creating a re-engagement series is easily an entire blog all by itself. Part of the reason why we have these resources is because re-engagement is crucial to maintaining overall deliverability and engagement on an ongoing basis.

You can define your engaged and unengaged readers and split them out to skirt around some deliverability issues, but without commitment to list maintenance and data hygiene, the efforts fall a bit shy of long-term results.

The key to a successful re-engagement effort is consistency and cleansing. Commit to a consistent outreach campaign – Odyssey is a great way to set up a drip campaign that runs automatically. Also, recognize at a certain point that if your audience remains un-engaged, they will do more good off your list than if you keep sending them emails they don’t open.

Conclusion: Measuring Success

If you want to improve email deliverability and engagement metrics, you already have a baseline of where you are, and some idea of where you want to be. Omeda offers several resources to help track success and see how you stack up against industry averages.

• Summary Stats Report: This will allow you to see your individual sending metrics individually, monthly, quarterly, and annually. It’s an excellent tool to use when you want to measure change over time.
• Delivery by Receiving Domains Report: This report will help highlight any corporate domains that may not be delivering your emails. If there are zeros across the board then your emails most likely are not making their way to recipient inboxes.
• Quarterly Email Reports: These reports look at Omeda averages so you can see how you measure up to average deliverability, opens, clicks, etc.
• Omeda’s Email Deliverability Team: Our team actively works to spot trends that may cause future deliverability issues and monitors all IP health stats – including IP blocks – to help you maintain your email deliverability.
• Omeda’s Client Success Managers: Your CSM works closely with the Email Deliverability Team to ensure your email health is maintained. They can work with you to define your engagement metrics and build custom re-engagement campaigns for long-term success.

For examples of email deliverability success stories, visit our customer success stories.

For more about how Omeda can help you reach your audience engagement goals and improve deliverability rates, contact our team at sales@omeda.com to learn more about our award-winning solution!

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