Optimize the Email Performance

This article helps you understand how to optimize email performance. For information on domain reputation issues and preventive measures, refer here.

Overview

The performance of your emails is evaluated based on email delivery and engagement metrics. This includes:

Delivery metrics assess factors such as the ratio of emails sent versus those delivered, instances of bounces, and deferrals.
Engagement metrics, on the other hand, encompass a wider range of indicators, ranging from positive to negative outcomes.
- Positive engagement metrics consist of metrics such as delivered, opened, clicked, and converted.
- On the contrary, negative engagement metrics encompass complaints about spam and cases of unsubscribing from your emails.

To improve email performance, you must enhance your delivery and positive engagement while keeping your negative engagement low. To achieve this, you must perform the following:

Analyze your history
Find areas of improvement
Plan your campaigns

Analyze Your History

To enhance your email performance, it is essential to identify the specific areas that require improvement. For this, you must retrospectively assess the email performance data from the past 6 months and check for any recurring patterns. To analyze your email performance history, examine the following:

Trends in delivery and engagement metrics
Domain reputation data
Spam complaints rate
Active user base growth
Inbox placement reports

If you focus only on the most recent trends and overlook the overall trends, you might miss a gradual decline in email performance over several months. If you find any issues while analyzing the email performance history, you must debug, repair, and ramp up your email plan.

Find Areas of Improvement

After analyzing your email performance and addressing the issues identified during the analysis, it is crucial to identify potential areas for improvement. Consider the following areas where you can enhance email performance, with suggestions for each respective area:

Issues	Resolution
High hard bounces	Secure user email collection points: This helps prevent incorrect or fake email addresses from being added to your email list. Implement double opt-in: This adds additional verification to the email subscription process. Email addresses are added to the email list only after the user confirms the subscription. This guarantees the delivery of your emails to legitimate and active recipients. Create an onboarding flow: By providing clear instructions, valuable content, and a positive user experience during the onboarding process, you can establish trust and increase the likelihood that subscribers will actively engage with your emails. This, in turn, helps reduce the chances of high hard bounces caused by disinterested or unengaged recipients. For more information on customer lifecycle campaigns, refer here.
High soft bounces	Suppress repeated soft bounces: You must suppress soft bounces except in cases caused by IP/domain blocks or content filtering. This helps maintain a clean and engaged email list, prevent unnecessary retries, and ensure that your emails are delivered only to active and responsive recipients. Use low request per minute (RPM): This allows your server or email service provider to manage resources effectively and maintain a reliable and efficient email delivery rate, leading to fewer bounces. For best practices regarding RPM, refer here. Use the best time to send (BTS) for higher volumes: By sending emails at these times, you increase the chances of recipients opening, interacting with, and responding to your emails. This higher engagement leads to a lower risk of soft bounces because engaged recipients are more likely to have active and accessible email addresses.
High deferrals	Adjust request per minute (RPM): This helps you balance sending emails at a reasonable rate and ensuring a smooth delivery process. It can result in fewer deferrals and increase your email campaigns' overall deliverability and success. For best practices regarding RPM, refer here. Optimize the sending patterns: By sending emails consistently and in a controlled manner, you enhance the chances of successful delivery and improve the overall deliverability of your email campaigns. For best practices regarding sending patterns, refer here. Ensure the warm-up is successful: This helps email providers recognize your IP address as a trusted sender, reducing the chances of deferrals. For more information on email warm-up, refer here. Use the best time to send (BTS) for infrequent high-volume campaigns: This helps align your email delivery with your recipients' preferences and habits, improving your campaigns' overall effectiveness and success. It also reduces the likelihood of your emails being deferred due to low engagement or buried in recipients' crowded inboxes.
High unsubscribed	Optimize segmentation strategy: This helps you achieve targeted and relevant email content, leading to increased engagement and a lower likelihood of unsubscribing. For best practices regarding segmentation strategy, refer here. Increase frequency capping: This helps reduce campaign overexposure, improve relevance, enhance campaign effectiveness, and provide a better user experience, thereby reducing unsubscribing. Ensure content is relevant to the segments: This helps in personalized messaging, meeting user expectations, addressing individual needs, avoiding spam or irrelevant content, and constantly refining content based on feedback and analysis. Explore event-based triggered or life-cycle campaign use cases: This helps you deliver timely and personalized content to users based on their specific actions, behaviors, or campaign life-cycle stages. These strategies provide users with valuable and meaningful interactions, keeping them engaged and reducing the likelihood of unsubscribing. Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns: This helps increase relevance, avoid information overload, enhance the customer experience, deliver segment-specific messaging, and provide personalized recommendations. These strategies create a more targeted and valuable interaction for subscribers, fostering engagement and reducing their likelihood of unsubscribing.
High spam complaints	Ensure the unsubscribe link, both in the email body and list-unsubscribe, is working as expected Ensure the unsubscribe requests are processed and reachability is updated as expected If you send emails from multiple vendors, make sure all suppression users (unsubscribed and spam complaints) are in sync at all times between all systems. Secure user email collection points. For this, implement double opt-in. Creating onboarding flow and set the right expectations: This helps establish permission-based communication, be transparent about communication frequency, deliver value-oriented content, offer unsubscribe options, send welcome and confirmation emails, and proactively collect feedback. By following these practices, you can build trust, engage subscribers, and minimize the chances of their messages being marked as spam. Optimize segmentation strategy: This helps enhance relevance, minimize message overload, eliminate content duplication, enable personalized communication, ensure optimal timing and frequency, and allow continuous testing and refinement. By delivering targeted and valuable content, you can engage subscribers, foster positive interactions, and reduce the chances of their messages being marked as spam. For best practices regarding segmentation strategy, refer here. Increase frequency capping: This helps maintain a balanced approach to messaging. You can deliver valuable content while minimizing the risk of subscribers marking messages as spam. Ensure content is relevant to the segments: This helps deliver targeted messaging, enable personalized communication, respect subscriber preferences, optimize message frequency, provide explicit permission and unsubscribe options, and encourage regular preference updates. By delivering valuable and relevant content, you can enhance the recipient's experience and minimize the risk of messages being marked as spam. You can also configure subscription categories to allow users to choose what kind of emails they want to receive and at what frequency. Explore event-based triggered or life-cycle campaign use cases: This helps create a more targeted and personalized approach to messaging. This, in turn, reduces the risk of recipients perceiving the communication as spam and ultimately leads to fewer spam complaints. Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns: This helps maintain user engagement and build trusted relationships with valuable and relevant personalized content. It also decreases the likelihood of emails being marked as spam.
Declining open trends	Optimize segmentation strategy: This approach helps increase the likelihood of email opening by addressing their specific needs, utilizing personalized subject lines, and appropriately timing the emails. Regular testing and understanding audience preferences refine your approach, boosting open rates. Increase frequency capping: This helps increase the willingness to open and engage with the emails received, send more personalized emails, and maintain the recipient's interest, thereby improving open rates. Ensure the content is relevant to the segments: This helps you enhance personalization, increase relevance, boost engagement, build trust, and avoid sending irrelevant emails. Collectively, these factors contribute to higher email open rates. You can also configure subscription categories to allow users to choose what kind of emails they want to receive and at what frequency. Optimize the sunsetting policies: This helps maintain a more engaged and interested subscriber base, leading to higher open rates, improved deliverability, enhanced engagement metrics, better personalization, and cost optimization. Analyze your onboarding flow: This allows you to refine your welcome emails, personalize content, optimize CTAs and email timing, conduct A/B testing, and address potential pain points. These efforts collectively improve the effectiveness of your onboarding process and increase email open rates. Use AI to improve subject lines: This helps you create effective written content for email marketing campaigns, increasing the number of email opens. For more information on generating email subject lines and previewing text with Merlin AI, refer here.
Declining click trends	Optimize segmentation strategy: This helps send relevant and personalized content, targeted offers, and behavioral triggers and keeps audiences engaged. These factors can significantly increase click rates by making your emails more compelling and aligned with each segment's interests and needs. Ensure content is relevant to the segments. Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns: This helps to increase the relevance of email content, improve engagement rates, utilize behavioral triggers, cultivate smaller engaged audiences, prevent email fatigue, and enable ongoing optimization. These efforts increase click rates by providing recipients with tailored, valuable, and timely content.
Infrequent campaigns	Create weekly personalized periodic campaigns: This helps in consistent engagement, tailored content, responsive design, A/B testing, promotion highlights, and long-term relationship building. These factors collectively contribute to higher click rates by regularly delivering timely, relevant, and valuable content to subscribers. To maintain the reputation while sending only monthly campaigns, refer here.

Plan Your Campaigns

Given that deliverability or performance issues cannot be promptly resolved, it is crucial to plan email campaigns. Outline your strategies for effectively targeting each optimization option.

Review and monitor all metrics closely by running the email performance checklist.
Revise and adjust plans as you learn.
Repeat this in each quarter.