Getting Through: 5 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability
There’s one final hurdle to get over before hitting send on your medical marketing email campaigns: internet service providers (ISPs).
Even after you test and optimize your email messages, ISPs may route them to spam or block them altogether if you violate their guidelines. ISPs put filters in place to defend against junk email. The filters use algorithms to detect features in emails that display traits that increase the probability that messages are spam.
What steps can you take to make sure your emails score well on spam tests, so they actually make it to your recipients’ inboxes?
1. Keep code clean
Extra tags, messy code and code pulled from word processing software can trigger spam filters. Make sure your code is clean or, even better, use templates that are already tested for deliverability to create your emails.
2. Use optimal image size
To avoid triggering spam filters, make sure that image file sizes are optimized. In general, it’s a good idea to keep the total sum of images in an email between 600 and 800k.
JPEG images work well for photos that don’t contain text because they are the most compressed. PNG images work better for images that contain text or have sharp edges, but this file type is larger than the same file saved as a JPEG. The GIF file format enables you to animate your images but doesn’t show as many colors as other file types.
Most readers won’t notice a loss of image quality, so it may be better to choose the lower-quality format to save data usage.
3. Follow ideal text-to-image ratio
Spam filters block email messages that are heavy on images or images only. Ideally, your text-to-image ratio should be close to 80:20. There should be enough text in your message so that recipients understand the purpose of the email even if they have images turned off.
4. Use quality lists
Work with a trusted partner to assemble email lists that are targeted and clean to minimize bounce rates. Ask them what steps they take to ensure good list hygiene.
It’s important to cultivate and manage opt-in subscribers and remove inactive email addresses from your lists.
5. Send emails on a consistent bases
Spam filters compile data over time to assess email messages. It helps to send messages on a consistent cycle rather than in bursts. As you begin an email marketing campaign, you may want to start with a lower volume and slowly increase the size of the list over time.
The MMS way
MMS knows that healthcare email lists are your link to engagement. That’s why we work so hard to keep our lists up-to-the-minute current and accurate.
We achieve this goal by:
· Insisting on double-permission opt-ins
· Conducting daily scrubbing
· Performing weekly updates of American Medical Association (AMA) data
· Running monthly validation of all email addresses in our database to fix typos/misspellings, domain errors, syntax and formatting issues
Email marketing campaigns work only if the emails are delivered. To maximize engagement, it helps to ensure that you have explored all the ways to improve email deliverability as part of your overall campaign strategy.