Optimize your E mail Deliverability: A Have a look at Heinz Advertising

By Lisa Heay, Director of Enterprise Operations at Heinz Advertising

I’ve spent the higher a part of 2023 to this point writing about electronic mail deliverability and optimization. We’ve been on fairly the journey collectively – investigating how who you ship to, what you ship, and the way you ship it all add as much as decide how (or if) an electronic mail is acquired by your reader. 

The place it All Started

What began me down this path within the first place was some actually unhealthy electronic mail metrics. Embarrassingly unhealthy. We’re a advertising consulting agency – it’s not an excellent look if we will’t grasp this primary advertising channel.

However the bizarre factor was – our deliverability hasn’t all the time been unhealthy. Traditionally, it had been fairly good for a very long time with above business common open and click on charges. However one thing modified alongside the way in which and our supply, open, and click on charges have been inching down additional and additional every month.

And worse but, our emails have been touchdown within the Promotions tab each time. Generally even within the dreaded spam folder. We would as nicely have saved ourselves a while and never despatched any emails in any respect—nobody was seeing them.

Add on a tricky market and tight advertising budgets – we wanted to make sure that our electronic mail advertising channel was working for us. So I made it a objective of mine in Q1 of this yr to determine why we continued to see a decline in engagement. 

Trial and Error

It was gradual going at first. I researched all the pieces electronic mail optimization, learn blogs and articles, watched webinars, and spoke to consultants over the course of months. 

Our expertise settings regarded good— I checked Mail-Tester, MX Toolbox, and E mail on Acid. I cleansed our database often, we segmented our lists in varied methods, and we tried numerous variations of topic traces, CTAs, content material codecs, and even revamped our publication template. It felt like we had tried all the pieces, however it doesn’t matter what we did, our electronic mail metrics weren’t enhancing. 

We got here up with all kinds of the reason why – perhaps our record was getting stale. Possibly our CTA’s aren’t attention-grabbing anymore. Possibly we have to strive sending on a unique day of the week. Oh, it’s the vacations – nobody is within the workplace. We justified each excuse to elucidate away our unhealthy numbers.

The Drawback – Our Publication

As you’ll be able to see from the graph above, our April publication was the straw that broke the camel’s again. We hit all-time low that month with a CTR of two.2%. 

Paradoxically, we featured the beginning of my E mail Deliverability weblog collection in that April publication electronic mail, however heard some feedback from CMOs in our community that our publication electronic mail landed of their spam folder. Oof – that’s embarrassing.

I used to be feeling like a fraud. I’d began scripting this weblog collection to share my learnings earlier than we even discovered what was unsuitable with our personal sends. I had realized a lot from the analysis, however what good was it doing? I nervous our readers had this imaginative and prescient of us in an ivory tower, preaching to the individuals how to do that, however we have been very a lot within the trenches studying and attempting to determine this out, too.

So it was all arms on deck to show this ship round. We set to work prepping the Could publication and began working extra checks. Initially, it scored a 4.5 out of 10 in Mail-Tester. Yikes.

My teammate, Win, scoured our Mail-Tester outcomes and located a line of javascript code in our new publication template that was flagged as a problem—harmful code.  

He eliminated it and examined once more—7.4. An enchancment from 4.5, for certain! However nonetheless not adequate to land us within the major inbox.

I used to be about able to throw within the towel on electronic mail advertising altogether, however after some extra tweaking and testing, he found in Mail-Tester that DMARC failed for our reply.heinzmarketing.com area that we had been utilizing to ship emails for years. This was a curious discovery as a result of different instruments, like MX toolbox and Google itself – had all the time stated that our DMARC handed. I had extra instruments telling me it handed then failed, so it was a simple error to dismiss.

Nevertheless it was the one path we may comply with at that time, and after additional investigation, we found that our bulk electronic mail administration software program license had been terminated with out discover, and we had been sending our emails from a non-existent electronic mail area for who is aware of how lengthy. 

The Resolution

We sprang to motion and created a brand new sender and reply-to electronic mail tackle to make use of utilizing our managed @heinzmarketing.com area as a substitute. We shortly adjusted all of our nurture emails and newsletters to the brand new sender tackle and eagerly awaited the subsequent ship.

Positive sufficient – that subsequent Could publication electronic mail scored a 9.4 out of 10 in Mail-Tester and ended up in my PRIMARY electronic mail field in each Google and Outlook. Hooray!!! Not solely that, however our click on to open price went from 2.2% in April to 14.1% in Could! It was the very best Publication CTR we’ve seen since September of 2021.

It’s taken just a few weeks however our electronic mail engagement throughout all of our campaigns are inching increased and better. We all know our emails are touchdown in our recipient’s inboxes now, but it surely’s seemingly they’re seeing us there for the primary time (or not less than the primary time in a very long time). 

We have to preserve exhibiting up, present value-added content material, and earn again the belief we misplaced over all that point. Our work isn’t completed.

Key Learnings

It has been fairly a journey this yr. After all the pieces I’ve realized and thru our personal troubleshooting expertise, there are three predominant takeaways I’ll depart you with:

1. E mail optimization doesn’t need to value some huge cash. There are lots of free instruments on the market that must be a part of your testing course of. Google Postmaster, MX Toolbox, and Mail-Tester have been essential in diagnosing our points.
2. Hold digging. When you’re seeing low engagement, make investments the time to determine why. The problems didn’t come up for us instantly. And a few instruments checked out whereas others flagged points. Don’t ignore those flagging the problems. Don’t depart any stone unturned.
3. This isn’t a set and overlook sort of factor. Every electronic mail you ship is exclusive. Take a look at all of them and don’t ignore the errors. You may as nicely not ship it in any respect if you happen to’re not touchdown in your recipient’s major inbox.

These things isn’t straightforward, and I’m no skilled. Nevertheless it feels nice seeing our emails land proper entrance and heart within the inbox every week. Make investments the effort and time to make sure you aren’t losing time in your electronic mail advertising.