Email marketing is a crucial way to stay connected with potential vendors and keep your agency top-of-mind, however even the best-crafted emails won’t matter if they don’t actually reach your recipients.
Email deliverability—the ability to land your emails in your audiences’ inboxes rather than their spam folders—is an essential part of a successful email strategy.
In this blog, we’ll explore the best practices estate agents can adopt to improve email deliverability, ensuring your important messages make it to the right inboxes at the right time.
Authenticate Your Domain
One of the key factors that impact email deliverability is domain authentication. Proper email authentication tells email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo that your emails are legitimate and not being sent by spammers.
How to Authenticate Your Domain:
- Set Up SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This helps email servers verify that your emails are coming from authorised IP addresses.
- Implement DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): DKIM adds a digital signature to your emails, proving they haven’t been tampered with during transmission.
- Enable DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): This adds another layer of protection by preventing fraudulent emails from being sent from your domain.
When these protocols are in place, your email marketing communications are better equipped to bypass spam filters and land in your vendors' inboxes.
Focus on List Hygiene: Clean Up Your Email List Regularly
As your email list grows, it’s important to regularly maintain its quality. Over time, email addresses may become invalid, subscribers may disengage, and continuing to send emails to inactive contacts can hurt your deliverability.
Best Practices for List Hygiene:
- Remove Hard Bounces: Hard bounces occur when an email is undeliverable due to invalid email addresses. Regularly cleaning these addresses from your list is crucial for maintaining a good sender reputation.
- Segment and Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers: Identify contacts who haven’t engaged with your emails in 6-12 months and run a re-engagement campaign. If they still don’t respond, consider removing them from your list.
- Use Re-Engagement Campaigns: Before deleting inactive vendors from your list, try re-engaging them with informative content like a market update, or new property listings.
By focusing on quality over quantity, you ensure your email list is filled with engaged contacts, improving deliverability and email performance.
Create Engaging and Relevant Content
Engagement is a critical factor in determining email deliverability. The more vendors interact with your emails—by opening, clicking, or replying—the less likely your emails are to be marked as spam by email providers. Sending content that is useful, relevant, and engaging helps build a positive sender reputation.
How to Create Engaging Content for Vendors:
- Personalise Your Emails: Use the recipient’s name, reference their location, or tailor property listings and market insights to their preferences.
- Segment Your List: Send targeted messages based on the vendor's stage in their journey—whether they’re a new lead, in the process of selling, or a repeat client.
- Avoid Spammy Language: Phrases like “Free!”, “Act Now!”, or “Limited Time Only!” can trigger spam filters. Focus on clear, professional language to improve deliverability.
Delivering value in every email ensures that your vendors stay engaged, which, in turn, enhances your deliverability rates. Spectre Email has over 3.36 billion combinations to segment your audience and over 40 property-specific triggers to ensure every email you send hits the right person, at the right time.
Optimise Sending Frequency and Timing
How often you send emails can also affect your deliverability. Sending too many emails can lead to unsubscribes or spam complaints, while sending too few can cause vendors to forget who you are.
Best Practices for Sending Frequency:
- Find the Right Balance: Estate agents should aim to send emails regularly but not too frequently. Weekly or bi-weekly emails work well for most agencies, with additional campaigns for important updates like new listings or market changes.
- Use Automation for Timing: Spectre Email allows you to automate email triggers based on vendor behaviour—such as sending a follow-up email after a property valuation request—ensuring your emails are always relevant and timely.
By finding the right sending frequency and timing, you can keep your vendors engaged without overwhelming them.
Monitor Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation is like a credit score for email deliverability. Email providers track the behaviour of your email campaigns—how many are marked as spam, how often your emails bounce, and how frequently people engage with them. A strong sender reputation increases the likelihood of your emails reaching the inbox, while a poor reputation can send them straight to the spam folder.
How to Maintain a Good Sender Reputation:
- Avoid High Bounce Rates: Regularly clean your list to remove inactive or invalid email addresses.
- Minimise Spam Complaints: Only send emails to those who have opted in and provide an easy way for recipients to unsubscribe if they’re no longer interested.
- Keep Your Engagement High: Focus on creating content that encourages opens, clicks, and replies to maintain a positive sender reputation.
Improving email deliverability is critical to ensuring your marketing efforts pay off. By focusing on list quality, authentication, relevant content, and consistent engagement, you can avoid spam filters and make sure your messages reach the right people.
With the right strategies in place, your emails will land where they belong—directly in the inboxes of vendors who are ready to engage. Spectre Email are designed to help estate agents improve deliverability by offering robust features that protect your sender reputation, automate email campaigns, and integrate with Street.co.uk CRM for real-time data updates.
Want to see it for yourself? Speak to one of our team today!
