Improve Email Deliverability With Relevancy, Segmentation And Testing

You will hear the word “relevancy” used frequently in the email world as it relates to email deliverability. Relevancy is key to delivering email to the Inbox. But what really is relevancy and how do you achieve this holy grail?

mail notice with white letter and red sheet

What is Relevancy?

A relevant email is one that matters to the recipient. Relevancy means “sending the right person the right message at the right time”.

Email marketing is effective when customers respond. Customers respond when they receive targeted messages from companies they care about. They like when they’re emailed about things they have already shown an interest in.

So, what is the key to relevancy in the email? The answer is to think like your customer. Find out what they are interested in and why. Then you can use what you know about your subscribers so you can send them exactly what they want when they want it. A key to increasing relevancy is through segmentation.

Now, what is Segmentation?

Knowing that relevancy and segmentation are so important, how do you segment to increase relevancy and engagement rates? Let’s discuss

1. Choosing the Right People

You can break down the remaining subscribers into 5 categories:

• Inactive – No opens or clicks in the last 6 months to 1 year: Use win-back (reactivation) campaigns to wake up lapsed subscribers or direct them to other channels to receive your messages.
• Fading – No opens or clicks for 3-6 months – You may want to decrease the frequency of emailing these recipients or use a strong special offer.
• Active – Have opened or clicked a message in the last 3 months but have not purchased in the last 60 days.
• VIP – Have purchased in the last 60 days – Treat your very best customers as VIPs with exclusive offers and content.
• New subscribers – consider an auto-responder sequence to deliver a sequence of your best-performing messages to new subscribers before adding them to the Active group.
• Track the click and open rates for each of the above categories, and use that data to improve your messages.

2. Sending the Right Message

• Use a preference page to allow your recipients to tell you exactly what categories they are interested in when they sign-up. For example: “Special Offers” and/or “Industry News” and/or “Tips”.
• Your content and design should be short and sweet, and your offer clear and straight-forward. Use personalization and “dynamic-content” based off of tracked data such as first name, location data, past purchases, etc.

3. Choosing the Right Time to Send the Message

• A plethora of statistics has claimed that the emails which have sent between Tuesday to Thursday have been shown to receive the highest open and click-through rate, as the mindset towards emails tends to drift Friday through Monday, with emails getting lost or ignored.
• Automate your behavioral
• Send an email that is triggered by real-time events such as a welcome email immediately after subscribing or other relevant messages based on the subscriber’s activity on your website.
• Don’t numb the reader. Subscribers who have been on your list longer will tend to respond less frequently, specially if they are inundated with too many emails. They may even unsubscribe because it all looks the same. Decrease the frequency to these readers or pause for a while.

4. Test

• A/B testing: Track what worked and what didn’t work particular to each segment.
• Test for reaction (open rate, click through, and conversion) as well as Inbox delivery, complaint rates and unsubscribe rates.

With attention to relevancy in your messaging and timing, mailing list segmentation and the results of your testing, you will see the better delivery of your messages, and greater success with your email campaigns.