Subscriber engagement data is crucial, not only in the overall strategy for email marketing but also for deliverability specifically. Your email list should be clean and segmented out by subscriber engagement including your most active data. Segmenting IPs and domains helps prevent potential reputation issues or mixing brands. The goal of successful email distribution is to send emails to people who want to receive them and to entice new subscribers to opt into your email program. Here at Blueshift, we want to make this easy for you as you start using our platform.
Understanding Segments in Blueshift
Active vs. Inactive
Who You Should Be Emailing
Active
You want your subscribers to be engaged! An active audience is made up of subscribers who engage with your emails intermittently; this is considered the core of success in deliverability. They are more likely to click and open emails, which, as a result, produces higher engagement. One of the ways to break this down is to include your most engaged subscribers to see who has opened your emails within the last three months.
Whether you are sending to re-engage or a brand new campaign, you will want to target this list to improve your overall deliverability to maintain great IP and domain reputation. More on that below, but understand that depending on your industry and demographics, that number can shift based on seasons (e.g., swimwear brands, outdoor clothing, department stores, etc.)
Inactive
Now for the subscribers who are less engaged. They typically haven’t opened or clicked on an email for over three months, which shows you that they are either less engaged with your content or and you will have to re-engage this audience. To win back these subscribers, you should consider strategizing campaigns to re-introduce them to your brand. It’s important to have a strategic plan when implementing this tactic and start with a re-engagement campaign, as stated above.
New Subscribers
Optimizing Your Opt-Ins
Deliverability is the identification of emails that reach your recipients’ primary inboxes. It excludes emails that were bounced, blocked, or placed in the spam folder. To optimize deliverability, you want to begin with an opt-in/double opt-in process to have subscribers join your marketing list.
Implement Double Opt-Ins
You will need to look into all the areas you have for signing up and double-check that there is a double opt-in in place. This will help with future errors of users who didn’t sign up. This form should either be on your website or when people register their account. They need to have a secondary email confirmation before an account is enabled, so that bad actors don’t take advantage.
How Opt-Ins Affect Deliverability
It’s all about real vs. fake emails and engagement, as we mentioned above. Some people will have their real email addresses to opt-in for a coupon code, for example. Now, if you send a newsletter that they didn’t want, subscribers will often then use a fake email address, which is why you always want to make sure your list is up-to-date and valid.
As this relates to IP warming, we can use this same logic to create the segments per ISP. There are two options to build segments in Blueshift — a basic segment and an advanced segment. Both are very user-friendly and easy to create in the UI. You are also able to run counts on each segment layer, which will give you a better view and understanding of the subscribers to whom you are sending.
The main reason you want to create segments is to help you build a positive reputation by increasing engagement and introducing your domains to the major ISPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, etc.) to identify you as a sender. This will help you track your sending metrics, but if you have assisted onboarding, the deliverability team can help monitor, strategize, and guide you to make sure your emails land in the inbox. Our goal is to help you get your emails delivered to the right inboxes and improve your overall email deliverability.
Here’s an example of how to build your segments in Blueshift:
Blueshift’s Hot Take
Higher Engagement = Better Deliverability
The best deliverability practices are pretty cut and dry, but implementing these methods in your particular organization may not always be. Because mailbox providers don’t give direct insight into inbox placement to senders due to spammers benefiting from this information, privacy and security concerns play a big factor.
In the world of email marketing, deliverability is a core issue. Algorithms and outside filtering are combined to make decisions on each message that comes into their own mail servers; protecting customers is their number one priority. Building more advanced segments will boost email engagement and help you strategize not only your content but also your deliverability overall.
To become an expert in email deliverability, take our Email Deliverability Fundamentals course on Blueshift Academy (it’s free!). Then, contact our team to schedule a demo of our platform today.
