When it comes to creating an email campaign, it’s important for your email deliverability to be in good standing as it plays a key part in determining its success.

In our Email Deliverability series, we’re sharing best practices and tips on how to improve your – you guessed it! – email deliverability to ensure you’re reaching and engaging with the right people and help you build relationships with great prospects and potential clients.

In this post, we’ll explore three key ways to maintain good email hygiene to improve your email deliverability.

1. Build your email outreach list

When creating your email outreach campaign, it’s important to know who your target audience is to ensure you’re reaching the right people. That’s why it’s essential to build your email outreach list organically. While it might take some time upfront to create a targeted email list, this is an efficient and effective way to connect with great prospects.

Sending non-targeted emails can cause the recipients’ inbox to mark your email as spam, making your outreach attempts ineffective. This can happen when you purchase or rent an email list, so should therefore be avoided. If you use an email list that you didn’t create, it poses the risk of damaging your sender reputation and email deliverability long term, which can lead to being permanently banned from sending emails.

That’s why when it comes to your email list, quality matters more than quantity for proper email hygiene.

2. Check your data sources

To reach the right people, it’s crucial to double-check your data sources to ensure that the information provided is accurate and up to date. This is especially true if you’re using various data sources to import contact information into your email campaigns.

If you send messages to invalid emails that then bounce,its can negatively affect your email deliverability. Information from data sources can become outdated when people change jobs, switch email providers or stop using old email addresses. That’s why it’s necessary to review and scrub your data sources every three to six months to maintain good email hygiene.

If you’re looking to verify emails, Interseller offers an email verification tool. Interseller verifies emails before they’re sent out to ensure you’re sending emails to valid email addresses, drastically reducing the amount of bounces.

By cleaning your list frequently, you can greatly reduce unsubscribes, bounce rates and spam complaints while improving your email deliverability as well as the all-important open and click-through rates.

3. Maintain a good email reputation

Maintaining a good email reputation is critical as internet service providers (ISPs) are becoming more attuned to what recipients want to see in their email inbox. ISPs monitor how email recipients are engaging with your content to decide whether or not your emails will continue to be delivered to their inboxes.

In order to maintain a good reputation with your email recipients, you’ll need to send them relevant information that they’ll likely read so they won’t delete them unread. Additionally, you’ll want to send emails regularly and remove any inactive email addresses from your email list.

If you have disengaged recipients on your list, it can have a negative impact on your email deliverability and sender reputation. For instance, if you send irrelevant content to people who aren’t engaging with your emails, ISPs can penalize you for poor email hygiene.

ISPs use sender reputation to gauge how trustworthy you are as a sender. These are some of the criteria that they use to evaluate your sender reputation:

  • Blocklists

  • Bounce rate

  • Complaints from recipients

  • Domain reputation

  • IP reputation

  • Quality of email content

  • Spam traps

That’s why it’s essential to monitor how your email list interacts with your emails since even your most engaged readers can become uninterested over time.

With Interseller, it’s easy to monitor your email campaign and how people are engaging with it through email metrics such as clicks, opens, bounces and replies.

Stay tuned for the next blog in our Email Deliverability series, focusing on email copy best practices so you can learn how to craft personalized and engaging emails to build relationships with prospects and potential clients for current and future opportunities.