All too often I hear from marketers the following statement, "My bounce rate was 4 percent, so my deliverability rate was 96 percent, right?" Answer: Wrong! Consider the number of emails that were indeed delivered but went directly to the spam folder or a corporate firewall holding tank. You don't see these delivery occurrences in your automated email campaign reports, but they are in fact occurring every time you send an email campaign.

Just because you are using a reputable email service provider to deploy your email campaigns does not guarantee the delivery of your emails to the inbox of prospects and customers. What can you do? Use third-party deliverability firms like Pivotal Veracity to regularly monitor deliverability of your email campaigns. It's critical that you gain visibility into your true deliverability rates so that you have advance notice to resolve discrepancies in a timely manner. Sending emails these days without using a deliverability monitoring tool like Pivotal Veracity's PVIQ is like speeding down the highway without a radar detector. Not smart.

Use the above waterfall analysis to quickly demonstrate how significantly email deliverability failures adversely impact clicks and conversions. Doing so will help you gain immediate attention from C-level executives and, ultimately, support for time, money and resources to resolve outstanding issues. They, like you, don't like leaving money on the table.

In addition to working with a third-party, you can also empower your email audience to help you help them by providing clear instructions on how they can add your sending ID (email address) to their "safe sender" email address book. This assures you relatively safe passage to their inbox.

Ideally, you will develop a formal plan to step up customer communication around "safe-listing." Of course, timing is everything in marketing, so don't delay -- get in action today. Start by providing clear instructions and support to customers opting-in for email communications. Include a prominent call-to-action via an "add to safe sender list" direct response button or textual links on all email sign-up confirmation pages and welcome emails. Support the call-to-action with a landing page that provides ISP instructions to help subscribers complete the process. This is quintessential, as the average consumer does not know how to do this on their own. Your email service provider should have private-label pages you can use for this project. For a best-in-class example, see Allstate's email confirmation thank you page below.

 
Hungry for more best practices? For additional tips to maximize your email deliverability, scan a recent iMedia article written by Kirill Popov, titled, "Don't Get Shut Out of the Customers Inbox."