The typical return for email is almost $36 for every dollar spent. Email marketing not only survives, but flourishes in the digital environment where marketing methods change at rapid speed. It’s about ensuring they land exactly where they should be (the recipient’s inbox) and not only about messaging.
For businesses using Constant Contact, understanding deliverability best practices is essential to maximize engagement and minimize wasted marketing efforts.
Poor deliverability can lead to emails being blocked or sent to spam, negatively impacting your sender reputation and campaign results. In this article, we’ll explore the best practices and tools for improving your Constant Contact deliverability, helping you ensure your emails are delivered, read, and acted upon.
Essential measures of email deliverability
Several important criteria together provide a whole picture of how successful you are at getting your emails to land in inboxes.
- Delivery rate: This gauges the percentage of emails that were received by the recipients’ servers. However, it does not ensure that the email landed in the inbox. Even emails that land in the spam folder still get tagged as “delivered.”
- Bounce rate: Emails that “bounced” are emails rejected by receiving servers. Hard bounces are permanent issues caused by factors like invalid email addresses. Meanwhile, soft bounces are temporary and caused by issues like full inboxes.
- Open rate: While it isn’t a direct indicator of deliverability, the open rate provides insights into how many emails are potentially reaching the inbox instead of the spam folder. For example, if your open rates suddenly decreased by a significant percentage without any drastic changes in strategy, it’s likely that some emails are being rerouted to the spam folder.
- Spam complaint rate: Deliverability and sender reputation may be impacted by how often your emails are marked as spam by recipients. The spam complaint rate is a strong indicator of how your recipients perceive your emails.
- Unsubscribe rate: High unsubscribe rates can mean your content is not connecting with your audience. This can cause email service providers to take a closer look at your content and sending behavior.
How Constant Contact tracks and reports deliverability metrics
Constant Contact uses sophisticated tools and methods to ensure accurate tracking and reporting of these metrics. Its features include:
- Real-time analytics: Constant Contact provides real-time insights into how your emails are performing through an engagement report. The report contains information on whether your email was received, opened or deleted, and if the links inside were clicked.
- Data-driven comparison: Constant Contact allows senders to select up to five campaigns for an in-depth comparison and analysis.
- Mobile vs desktop data: Constant Contact can help users track whether their emails were opened on mobile or desktop, providing data on how your target recipients behave.
Common issues affecting deliverability
Several important criteria together provide a whole picture of how successfully emails are reaching their intended targets, therefore indicating email deliverability.
Generic issues impacting email deliverability
- Poor list hygiene: Lists loaded with obsolete or invalid email addresses usually have significant bounce rates, therefore compromising a sender’s reputation.
- Inclusion of content, words, or phrases commonly associated with spam: There are some specific keywords or formatting patterns like caps lock and multiple exclamation points which may activate spam filters, increasing the possibility of emails ending up in the spam folder.
- Low engagement rates: When your emails aren’t opened often, or when there are very few interactions, Email Service Providers (ESPs) may take this as a hint that your emails are not wanted by your recipients. To protect their users, they may decide to send your next emails straight to the spam folder.
- Sudden spikes in email volume or overly high email frequency: This type of behavior may irritate your recipients, leading to higher unsubscribe rates and spam complaints. Both of these can severely compromise deliverability.
- Poor configuration of authentication protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are crucial contributors to deliverability. Not setting these up or setting them up improperly can cause errors in email authentication. ESPs may decide to reject or flag you as spam as a safety protocol.
Issues specific to Constant Contact
- List management practices: Constant Contact provides tools to manage email lists effectively, but misuse or neglect in maintaining list hygiene can lead to problems. For instance, not regularly removing unsubscribed or bounced email addresses can hurt deliverability.
- Over-reliance on automation: While Constant Contact offers automation tools to streamline email campaigns, excessive reliance without personalization or segmentation can lead to lower engagement, affecting overall deliverability.
Why do significant drops in deliverability happen?
One of the most often occurring causes of a rapid drop in deliverability is running into spam traps. Service providers use email addresses assigned for spam traps to identify spammers. Though these addresses are not used for correspondence, they resemble standard email addresses.
Sending to these addresses lets ESPs know the sender is not maintaining a clean and updated list—which can rapidly cause a damaged sender reputation.
🔖 Related Reading: What is a Spam Trap & How to Avoid It | Warmy.io
Another major problem is being blacklisted. Different companies keep blacklists to warn recipients and service providers of suspicious senders and possible spammers. If an IP address or domain of an entity is included on a blacklist, their emails could be blocked right away or directed straight to the spam folder across various providers.
🔖 Related Reading: Top 10 IP Address Blacklist Removal Tools [Cons & Pros]
Deliverability problems can also stem from technical shortcomings. These could be issues with the email server, faults in the email sending system, and DNS configuration errors including invalid SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records.
🔖 Related Reading: Why Do You Need to Configure SPF, DKIM, DMARC and How To Set Them
To find and fix the underlying reasons of deliverability failures, an extensive audit of email practices, technical settings, and list management techniques must be conducted. You can easily do it with Warmy’s Free Email Deliverability Test.
How Warmy can help improve your Constant Contact deliverability
Although navigating email deliverability might be intimidating, with the correct tools the process becomes controllable and successful. Warmy.io provides a complete answer to address typical deliverability problems directly—therefore improving the general effectiveness of email marketing efforts.
Designed specifically to improve email deliverability and promote your sender reputation, Warmy provides the following features and capabilities to improve your Constant Contact deliverability:
AI-powered warmup. Warmy gradually increases the volume of emails sent to establish your domain’s credibility. Since it can actually send up to 5,000 warmup emails per day and cater to over 30 languages, it is quite a robust warmup tool.
Warmy’s Free SPF Record Generator helps you generate a valid SPF record in seconds—just enter your domain and email provider.
Warmy.io’s Free DMARC Record Generator helps you create a valid DMARC record based on your email security needs.
Template Checker. Yet another free tool from Warmy, the template checker analyzes your email to ensure that it complies with best practices for avoiding the spam folder. Additionally, Warmy offers a Chrome Extension version of the template checker. With this extension, you will be able to better determine whether your email will be recognized as spam and make tweaks before implementing a large scale campaign.
Final thoughts: Maximize Constant Contact with Warmy
Keeping great deliverability with Constant Contact (or any email marketing tool, for that matter) comes with a lot of difficulties. The stakes are high since success depends greatly on the ability to reach a customer’s inbox directly.
Here’s where Warmy comes in. Sign up for a free trial to experience how Warmy can transform your email game.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Constant Contact deliverability?
Constant Contact deliverability refers to the effectiveness with which emails sent through Constant Contact reach the recipients’ inboxes. It measures how successfully the platform navigates through spam filters and other barriers to ensure emails are delivered as intended.
How can I improve my deliverability with Constant Contact?
To enhance your Constant Contact deliverability, regularly clean your email list, ensure your content is engaging and not spam-like, use segmentation to target your emails better, and make sure all technical settings for email authentication are correctly configured.
What tools does Constant Contact offer to help monitor deliverability?
Constant Contact provides various tools to help monitor email campaign performance, including real-time analytics for open rates, bounce rates, and spam reports. These tools help identify deliverability issues and guide improvements.
Are there specific types of content that affect Constant Contact deliverability?
Yes, overly promotional content, the excessive use of links or images, and certain trigger words can negatively impact deliverability. Constant Contact advises adhering to content guidelines that favor engagement and relevance to avoid spam filters.
How does Constant Contact handle emails that end up in spam?
Constant Contact has mechanisms in place to minimize emails landing in spam, such as compliance with email sending best practices and providing tools for proper list management. However, if emails do end up in spam, analyzing feedback loops and adjusting strategies accordingly is essential.
