There is a pressing issue that all email marketing professionals are facing, Gmail deliverability. There are various factors that contribute to your email landing in Inbox and not in junk folder. One of those factors is engagement, and Gmail especially pays a lot of attention to the engagement rates that you are get for your marketing emails.
Get in touch with our experts to get 100% Gmail deliverability. Read on to know more about various factors that affect it.
Why Engagement Matters
Gmail follows a certain algorithm, unknown to anyone, based on which it identifies which email messages to send to Inbox and which ones to consider spam.
Gmail doesn’t have anything against the marketing folks, they just want to make sure that spammers don’t take advantage of this channel to spoil the user experience of their product, Gmail.
No company in this world would want their product to be abused by unscrupulous people, so is the case with Gmail and other Internet Service Providers.
Hence, Gmail considers Engagement level as one of the important factors to figure out the relevance of an email message to a user. If engagement is not there, Gmail will not deliver the email message to the user’s inbox.
How Google Measures Engagement?
Gmail has never revealed the factors which they consider in their algorithm to assess engagement metrics of emails coming from specific senders. However, through exhaustive analysis and after digging deep into thousands of rows of campaign data of our customers, we have been able to confidently decipher these factors:
Email Opens
This is a no brainer, open rate definitely falls under the engagement bucket defined by Gmail.
Clicks
Click through rate is again an important indicator that gives Gmail a sense of the importance of an email to its user. Any kind of click inside the email message is good. Higher the CTR better it is for us, marketers.
Moving an email to a different folder, tagging or starring it
You would only move an email message to a different folder when you feel it’s important for you. Same logic goes for starring an email message. Such activities of a user on your email message gives a positive signal to Google, giving us brownie points.
Marking an email as “Not Spam”
In some scenarios, Google inadvertently lands your email in spam folder. A user’s action of marking it as “Not Spam” sends high relevancy signal to Gmail, making them know the importance of the email message.
Replying to a message
Again, this goes without saying, users replying to your email message sends a strong signal to Gmail about the importance of your email. You should always have reply based email campaigns in your kitty to drive positive engagement levels for your emails.
Adding an Address to a Whitelist or Address Book
Getting this action done from your user is an ideal case scenario for us. But these days, very few people add someone to an address book or whitelist them.
Deleting Without Opening
This definitely gives a negative signal to Gmail about your email message. If people do it consistently, it has a negative impact on your sender reputation.
Reporting Spam
Usually through the traditional feedback loop that ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL & others use, ESPs can get information about who clicked on spam button.
Unfortunately, Gmail does not provide that information and ESPs end up sending emails to people who have clicked on “Report Spam” button. It affects your overall engagement levels, as emails are never delivered to the inbox of people who have reported your email as spam.
How To Get Better Gmail Deliverability
Stay Consistent
Making sure that your users identify your emails is very important. Keeping a consistent “From Name” can help them spot your emails easily.
I have seen brands use multiple “From Names” to drive engagement. What they do not understand is that they are unknowingly hurting their chances of getting better open rates. People might fall for this tactic once but it will never give positive results in a longer run.
Don’t Send Too Many Emails
It is a universal fact that emails are the cheapest and the most effective way of driving positive ROI for your marketing efforts.
I have seen brands who believe that if right now, by sending 1 million emails in a day they are generating $600,000 as revenue. So by doubling the email volume to 2 million emails, their revenue would also jump in the same proportion i.e $1200,000.
Going by that logic would do more harm than good to your email marketing efforts. It will cause list fatigue.
Send To Properly Verified Emails
Whenever you send an email campaign to a new subscriber list, make sure that you are sending emails to valid email ids only.
Gmail keeps a close eye on the bounce rate that you are getting for your email campaigns. Anything that goes above the threshold limit, triggers an alarm for Gmail. Eventually affecting your sender reputation.
It’s always advisable that you use a list cleaning service to clean your subscriber list.
Clean Your List of Inactive Emails
You should make sure that you are cleaning out your inactive users from user email list at regular intervals. These would be email addresses that have been inactive (no opens) in your database for almost over 6 months.
Sending emails to inactive users lowers your overall engagement rates.
Try To Re-engage One More Time
As a best practice, run some re-engagement campaigns on your inactive list before abandoning those users.
Trust me; re-engagement campaigns have done wonders for our clients. You have spent time, resource and money in acquiring users. He signed up for your emails because he was interested in your product. Somewhere, something did not work out, leading him to become an inactive user.
It’s always worth a try to execute engagement centric campaigns for such users.
We, at OKEmails can help you improve your email deliverability for Gmail and other ISPs. We have done it consistently for our other clients and we would love to serve you as well. You can be assured of getting 100% Gmail inboxing rate. Get in touch!