Four Deliverability Strategies for Optimizing Inbox Placement

Deliverability may not be an obvious or outward-facing piece of a donor communications strategy, but it is essential to driving ongoing results with your digital audiences. Your email campaigns can have the best hook, the most compelling story, and a brilliant strategy for audience personalization – but are they landing in inboxes?

Your ability to fundraise successfully is directly tied to your ability to drive strong inbox placement, because if folks aren’t seeing your campaign, then your program is leaving essential revenue for your mission on the table.

To avoid any major issues and maintain a healthy file, monitoring deliverability should be a regular and ongoing effort. This can spare you time-consuming and costly setbacks solving issues or working your way out of a deliverability trap, and weeks to even months of sending your campaigns to highly constricted audiences to rebuild your sender reputation.

With inbox providers constantly making changes to their platforms, ensuring your emails reach end users means carefully monitoring and optimizing deliverability as a preventative measure. At MissionWired, we recommend considering this one of the core benchmarks that you track alongside other key performance indicators.

To help you steer your program clear of these kinds of issues, identify early warning signs, and set up your digital program for ongoing deliverability success, I’m excited to share four key strategies to optimize your deliverability strategy across all digital channels:

1. Get strategic with your segmentation windows to maximize engagement and send positive signals.

We talk a lot about list size in nonprofit fundraising, so advising programs to send to fewer people can feel counterintuitive. But if you’re mailing to the people on your list who are less likely to engage, then you’re also less likely to drive a strong response – and less likely to send the kinds of positive signals to your inbox providers that help support inbox placement.

Rather than going out to your whole file with all your fundraising campaigns, sharpen your targeting to send to people who are recently engaged and active online. These are the audience members whose activity shows they want to receive your messages! By sending to folks who have opened, clicked, or donated to your emails within a certain period, you strengthen your deliverability by building greater proof of activity in each of your campaigns. Just remember: Due to changes inbox providers have made on how they track opens, clicks are a more reliable metric of activity in today’s email landscape, so you can set a wider click window and a narrower open window to help balance this out.

2. Try engagement tactics like automated streams to welcome new audience members or reactivate lapsed supporters.

One powerful strategy for boosting engagement that we’ve found effective with new or lapsed audiences is testing automated streams optimized for driving clicks. By sending top-performing, engaging content that educates and builds affinity for your program, such as surveys, petitions, or interactive photo or story journeys, you can reconnect or introduce targeted audiences with your work and mission while sending positive engagement signals at the same time.

This strategy is most effective with a careful approach to targeting and follow-up. With new or historical subscribers, be sure to remove names that haven’t opened or engaged with these messages after a certain number of appeals. How long to wait will depend on the cadence of your program – you want to offer them ample chances to open your messages, but you don’t want to keep them around once it’s clear they are not going to engage.

3. Leverage the right tools and technology to monitor performance regularly.

Taking advantage of the full range of digital tools and technology at our disposal to monitor the performance of email deliverability is key for catching the early warning signs of deliverability issues. Look to your CRM for regular email performance results, and be sure to review domain reports for any domains that have significantly below-average engagement metrics. Leverage Google Postmaster to monitor your IP reputation, domain reputation, and spam complaint rate.

As you review engagement metrics, be on the lookout for the following early warning signs:

Drops in open rate: these can be an indicator that your audience is too broad or your volume is too high – evaluate the possibility of scaling back.

High bounce rates: anything above a safe standard can indicate you’re sending to a large volume of inactive emails or are encountering an issue with a provider.

Spam complaint spikes: Look closely to determine if you’re seeing a single blip or a sustained increase.

Reputation changes: If your IP reputation drops from consistently high to medium, consider whether your audience is too broad, your volume is too high, or you are onboarding too many new audience members at once.

4. Work with your agency partner to build a proactive system for protecting your deliverability.

As you focus on expanding the reach of your mission and sharing the compelling stories of impact with your supporters, your agency partner is an important team to look to when it comes to keeping your lines of communication clear and working efficiently. At MissionWired, our priority is to avoid deliverability issues before they arise by monitoring and optimizing deliverability as a core part of our digital strategy. We engage experts from across our practice to specialize in each portion of deliverability monitoring, prevention, and resolution when issues do arise.

Strategy leads constantly monitor your deliverability through engagement metrics and domain performance through your CRM, and keep an eye on any changes to list size from month to month. We revisit your segmentation strategies regularly, rather than taking a “set it and forget it” approach, to determine whether to include more key supporters or tighten criteria to remove inactive names, and ensure that your messaging is driving positive net revenue.

Our strategy leads are supported by a production team dedicated to gathering the domain reports necessary to support ongoing monitoring, and building the most effective segmentation groups to drive response and send positive signals to your inbox providers. Our deliverability team helps mitigate issues when they arise and works closely with your external vendors to identify solutions.

With a careful strategy for monitoring performance, optimizing tactics, and mitigating issues quickly, deliverability can stay where it belongs in a nonprofit program’s donor communications: behind the scenes. We work closely with our partners to help keep deliverability issues at bay – so that their powerful messages and critical appeals can land in inboxes with the best placement possible. If you’d like to talk more about how to put these deliverability best practices into action for your program, reach out – we’d love to talk!