How to Improve your Email Deliverability with Segmentation

If an email gets sent, and no one sees it, does it make money?

Spoiler alert: probably not.

Email deliverability is sometimes like the 10,000 pound pink elephant in the room. Everyone knows it is there, but prefer to ignore it and focus on other sexier email marketing strategies.

That's because email deliverability, on the surface, appears to be incredibly technical. After all sending images and words across the internets involves a lot of fancy Matrix codes. But there are a few simple strategies I like to implement with clients that are effective and demystify the process.

My main strategy / philosophy with email marketing is to write engaging emails that people actually enjoy reading. Why? Well it's a great way to make the cash register ring, but it also is what Email Service Providers (ESPs), like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook want too.

Their main goal as an ESP is to give their users the best experience possible so they keep using their service. They don't want them harassed by actual SPAM, scams, or anything that will cause users to switch platforms.

One way ESPs determine how reputable a businesses' sender reputation is by how their users interact with your email. Do they instantly delete your email? Do they mark it as SPAM? Do they open and click it? Do they reply to the email and get a response back?

Guys. Don't ever forget what email was created to do. Allow people to quickly send digital letters back and forth. It's meant to be a two-way commutation channel. If you treat it that way, you'll be rewarded with amazing deliverability as well as a fat bank account. If you don't, the deliverability Gods will strike thee down with great vengeance and furious anger.

The Gmail Gods smote this email campaign.

Ok. Now that we've got that out of the system lets talk about one of the simplest ways to quickly improve your deliverability: list segmentation.

As of this blog post it's 2022. And I'm still shocked at the number of businesses that are still emailing their ENTIRE EMAIL LIST AT ONCE. These are usually the same people that refer to email marketing as "email blasts".

Let's get something out of the way right now. In this day and age you cannot email your entire email list at once. If you do this regularly, you will tank your deliverability and end up on an email blacklist.

Sorry Mr. CEO, but that's just how it is.

Look, it's kind of counterintuitive. Most people think ok, I have 250,000 people on my email list, if I'm not emailing all of them I'm leaving money on the table. You're not wrong, but this scorched earth email strategy makes you look like Walter Sobchak, from the Big Lewboski.

Emailing your entire list angers The Dude

So what can we do?

We develop a rock solid segmentation strategy. We focus on sending our email campaigns to the most engaged segments of your list. We also implement list hygiene automations, to "cull" the herd so to speak, and remove unengaged users who are long gone.

Whenever I see a big drop in email engagement (especially in Gmail) for a client that normally has strong open rates, I know we probably did something to anger the Deliverability Gods. I don't sit around and spend hours trying to figure out why, it's a total waste of time.

Houston, we definitely have a deliverability problem…

The next campaign we send out is always to a smaller, more engaged segment. We want those ESPs to see people opening, clicking, replying to our email campaigns, so that's what we give them. And in turn we are rewarded with better placement in the inbox. Do this for your next couple of sends, then try opening up your segment a little wider. No huge drop in engagement? Then try going back to your main segment.

In almost every instance this simple strategy has fixed deliverability for my clients. Give it a try and you should see the same results.

If you don't.... drop me a line and we can put on the latex gloves and give you a thorough deliverability audit.

Until next time.