Improving deliverability after the open

Why good emails lead to better deliverability

If there is one key piece of advice for marketers in this deliverability report, this is it:

If people look forward to receiving your emails, they’re much more likely to open them. When you provide relevant content, offers, and interactivity, people are more likely to click. That’s why understanding your audience and delivering value is so important, and that’s what smart email marketers do.

In addition to creating engaging emails, you must make it easy to engage with what arrives in the inboxes of your customers and contacts.

Here are four areas of focus:

1. Mobile responsive emails: Do your campaigns look and function as expected on all devices and screen sizes? 

2. Email client rendering: Do you know how your email designs and code end up looking in different inboxes?

3. Dark mode emails: How will your email designs look if recipients have dark mode settings turned on?

4. Email accessibility: Is it easy for everyone on your list to read and interact with what you’re sending?

Let’s find out more about how each of these factors impacts the inbox experience and how you can optimize your emails for success.

Mobile responsive emails

In the early days of email, people logged on to the internet with desktop computers and, after the modem stopped screeching, heard the phrase “You’ve got mail!”. Those days are long gone. Most people check their email on smartphones. Consumer research from The path to email engagement confirms this.

We found 71.5% of global consumers primarily use a smartphone to view emails while just 16.7% use a web browser and 7.8% use a desktop application for email.

Despite this, it’s not uncommon to open emails from brands that are nearly impossible to read on mobile devices or fail to adapt to your screen size. It can also be tough to tap call-to-action (CTA) buttons or email template layouts are broken on mobile, bringing your email engament metrics down.

Even if you follow best practices for “mobile-friendly” emails, that doesn’t mean your campaigns will adjust for various device screens. That’s where responsive email design comes in.

If you work with an email developer (someone who codes emails from scratch), they are most likely using CSS media queries for mobile responsiveness. But there are many companies that don’t have an email developer at their disposal.

Email layouts often stack elements on mobile devices

If you’re an email developer, or you’re lucky enough to work with one, our email coding experts recommend taking a mobile-first approach to email development.

“With a mobile-first approach to email coding, you are thinking about designing for the smaller screens first and then expanding the designs for desktop viewing. One advantage is that your mobile design will still look fine on desktops, but you can’t say the same for desktop email layouts on smartphone screens.”

Megan Boshuyzen

Sr. Email Developer, Sinch

Most smaller businesses and marketing teams are handling email communications on their own with a drag-and-drop email editor. If that’s your situation, you need to be sure the templates you design and use are mobile responsive. That means choosing the right tools.

Email client rendering

Email clients are applications that allow users to access, send, and receive messages in one location. They include Gmail, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo/AOL, and other smaller email clients.

These may be mobile or desktop applications as well as web-based email clients (webmail) accessed through an internet browser. Mailbox providers have email clients, but not all email clients are mailbox providers. For example, Apple Mail is only an email client. You can’t get an email address for Apple Mail. It aggregates emails from other sources.

Here’s a fact about email clients you may not know:

Here are just some of the email client rendering discrepancies that cause challenges:

• Gmail has very limited support for different fonts, including Google Fonts.

• Apple Mail can have issues positioning and scaling CSS background images.

• Hyperlinks may default to blue when you want them to be a different color.

• Outlook turns off image downloading by default.

• There are often unexpected white lines in Outlook emails.

Older desktop versions of Microsoft Outlook are the most notorious troublemakers among email clients. That’s because they use Microsoft Word as a rendering engine. Because email clients have their own rendering engines, emails render differently across clients.

Email client rendering issues can drive people to close, delete, and even mark an email as spam, which can impact your overall deliverability. The best way to prevent these issues is to run tests that provide email previews. These are screenshots of emails inside of various inbox environments. They help you catch and fix rendering problems before you hit send. Sinch Email on Acid provides previews as part of a comprehensive email testing platform. Sinch Mailjet users on paid plans also get a monthly allotment of previews.

Dark mode emails

A trend that often complicates email campaign design is the popularity of dark mode settings. When someone uses dark mode, black becomes white and white becomes black. That’s a simple way of putting it, but what happens behind the scenes is more complicated.

Dark and light mode email design examples from Nike

Email clients (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc.) handle dark mode in unique ways. So, for example, the way an email looks in dark mode on Gmail could look very different when opened in Apple Mail. Some clients invert all colors in an email, others only invert some. Gmail ignores code that allows you to specify styles for light and dark mode. As you might imagine, all this can get frustrating. Here are some common problems with dark mode emails:

• Black logos disappear when backgrounds switch in dark mode.

• Text becomes unreadable in dark mode.

• Colors invert and mess with branding/style guides.

• CTA buttons, backgrounds, and other elements switch to an undesirable color.

• Non-transparent graphics no longer match the background color.

Sometimes dark mode problems simply mean unsightly emails. Other times it’s more serious. It’s easy to see why problems with dark mode emails could reduce engagement metrics. You can’t read or click on what you can’t see. Thankfully, there are some simple ways to make dark mode less scary.

Email developers often use media queries to define specific styles for dark and light mode, but if you’re unfamiliar with coding, there’s only so much you can do. While you may not have complete control over the dark mode experience, what you can do is design email campaigns that look good no matter the mode.

The best way to understand how your designs render in both dark and light mode on various email clients is to test and view previews before you launch your campaign.

Email accessibility

If you want to maximize email engagement, everyone on your list should be able to read, understand, and interact with what you send. But if you aren’t thinking about email accessibility, that may not be happening.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says there are more than 2.2 billion people with some sort of vision impairment. Vision and mobility tend to be the biggest issues for digital communications, which is why email accessibility centers around making it easier for people to read and click or tap.

Our friends at the Email Markup Consortium (EMC) conduct an annual study on email accessibility. Over the last few years, their evaluation shows more than 99.9% of emails they tested failed to address accessibility factors considered serious or critical. Something needs to change.

The good news is there are some very simple things you can do to dramatically improve email accessibility. There are also accessibility testing tools you can use to evaluate everything from websites to applications to emails. Many of the adjustments you make help optimize emails for screen reading software, which interprets digital content for its users.

There are many other adjustments that support accessible email design, some of which involve correctly coding HTML emails for screen readers. While improving email accessibility will take some time and effort, it’s worth it. 

Not only does it improve the experience for people with temporary or permanent disabilities, but better accessibility makes it easier for every contact on your list to engage with email campaigns. Above all, designing with accessibility in mind is the right thing to do.

Deliverability means doing the right thing

While there are some technical factors involved, the most important aspects of deliverability come down to doing what’s right for your customers and contacts.

It’s not rocket science. Mailbox providers want to make sure people get the emails they want to receive. So, the best thing you can do is make sure people want to receive your emails.

Let’s recap some of the big ideas and findings from this report.

List building and hygiene

Getting consent to contact people before you start sending emails is an absolute must. Permission is at the foundation of an ethical email marketing strategy. After you win over new contacts, you need to make sure your database stays clean and up to date.

Key findings:

• 1 out of 10 senders use questionable methods to acquire contacts without permission.

• 39% rarely or never conduct email list hygiene.

• 40% of senders use a double opt in to confirm new contacts.

Deliverability advice:

• To manage the health of your contact list, use a double opt-in process, a sunset policy, and email validation tools.

• Use email signup forms strategically to grow your contact database the right way.

• Segment unengaged subscribers and send to them less often.

Avoiding spammy sending behavior

You don’t have to be a spammer to get emails marked as spam. Most people don’t think of spam as unsolicited email. They think spam is unwanted or annoying email. A high spam complaint rate will quickly cause deliverability challenges.

Key findings:

• Only 32% of respondents actively monitor their spam complaint rate.

• Nearly 70% of respondents don’t use free services to monitor their sender reputation with mailbox providers.

• To measure deliverability, 57.4% of senders monitor the email open and click rates.

Deliverability advice:

• Find the right frequency for sending email. Too many emails will annoy contacts and lead to spam complaints. Too few emails and they’ll forget why they subscribed.

• Use Google Postmaster Tools and other free services to get detailed information about how recipients respond to what you’re sending.

• Make it easy to unsubscribe so people are less likely to make spam complaints if they get tired of your emails.

Improving email engagement

Good email engagement rates send strong, positive signals to mailbox providers. It shows that their users want to receive your emails, and those emails shouldn’t be filtered into spam. The best way to keep people engaged is to send meaningful emails that enhance the customer experience.

Key findings:

• Less than 15% of respondents chose increasing email engagement as a top way to improve their sender reputation.

• A combined 45% believe the biggest benefits of prioritizing deliverability are connected to a positive customer experience.

• A combined 37.8% of respondents say marketers are at least somewhat responsible for their organization’s email deliverability.

Deliverability advice:

• A/B test email campaigns to increase opens and clicks and learn what’s most likely to encourage high engagement rates.

• Segment your list and use personalization to support relevant email marketing efforts that add value for subscribers.

• Because transactional messages are crucial to keeping customers informed and get higher engagement, consider separating them on different subdomains or IP addresses than your promotional emails.

Delivering quality email campaigns

Remember to put the needs of your customers and contacts at the center of your email program. Your strategy should be inclusive, accessible, and include interesting ways to surprise and delight subscribers through the inbox. If people don’t think your emails are junk, they’re less likely to end up in the junk folder.

Key findings:

• 71.5% of consumers primarily view emails on mobile phones.

• 99.9% of brand emails the EMC evaluated had serious or critical accessibility issues.

• 37.5% of respondents in our deliverability survey say the biggest problem with landing in spam is that people miss important information in emails.

Deliverability advice:

• Make sure your email templates are responsive, so they look good and work well on mobile devices.

• Follow best practices for email accessibility so every contact on your list is able to read and engage with what you send.

• Test and preview email campaigns before you launch so you can catch and fix potential problems before you reach the inbox.

We built Sinch Mailjet to help simplify email marketing and customer communications, so businesses can keep their customers engaged, informed, safe, and happy. Our users enjoy AI assisted tools that help you build and write effective emails, features that help you manage your list, monitor campaign performance, automate communications, and more.

Email made easy

You can start with Sinch Mailjet for free and grow with us when you’re ready. If you’ve got questions or more specific email program needs, reach out to us today.