MARKETING HELP FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
If your email open rates are falling, your list hygiene and email deliverability could be part of the problem.
Nobody gets into marketing because they’re excited about removing inactive email addresses from spreadsheets.
It’s not exactly the glamorous part of the job.
There are no exciting brainstorming sessions. No shiny campaign visuals. No LinkedIn posts announcing your “record-breaking Q2 email database cleanse”.
But if your email results have started looking a bit ropey lately, email deliverability and list hygiene are often sitting quietly in the background causing problems.
A lot of businesses don’t realise anything’s wrong until open rates drop, enquiries slow down, or someone says:
“I haven’t had your emails in months.”
Which is rarely what you want to hear from someone who’s been on your mailing list since 2019.
So here’s a straightforward guide to what helps, what doesn’t and which bits of email marketing folklore can finally get in the bin.
First things first: what is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is about how successfully your emails reach the people you send them to, and how trustworthy mailbox providers such as Gmail and Outlook consider your emails to be.
When you send campaigns, those providers make judgement calls about whether your emails look wanted, useful and legitimate.
If people regularly engage with your emails, you build credibility.
If large numbers of people ignore them, delete them, unsubscribe immediately or mark them as spam, that credibility can start to slip.
And once your sender reputation suffers, even people who genuinely want your emails may have more trouble seeing them.
🫤 Not ideal.
There’s one important nuance here though.
Delivered doesn’t always mean seen.
An email can technically arrive while still being buried in a Promotions tab, filtered lower down somebody’s inbox or completely overlooked because it was email number 97 before lunch.
Visibility is part of the battle too.
Cleaning inactive contacts matters more than you might think
One of the biggest mistakes we see is businesses hanging onto enormous email lists “just in case”.
As the saying goes, bigger isn’t always better.
Especially when half the list hasn’t interacted with an email since Boris was still in office.
A smaller, engaged list is generally far more useful than a massive list full of people who have forgotten who you are or are one newsletter away from reporting you out of irritation.
If large chunks of your audience never engage, that can contribute to weaker email deliverability across the whole list, including your genuinely interested subscribers.
Most email platforms make it fairly straightforward to identify inactive contacts.
That doesn’t mean you need to immediately delete everyone who hasn’t opened something recently.
You could try a re-engagement campaign first and see whether some people still want to hear from you.
And there’s nuance here.
Open tracking isn’t completely reliable anymore thanks to privacy changes from Apple and others, so this definitely shouldn’t become a ruthless:
“Didn’t open the last three? DELETE.”
exercise.
You’re looking for patterns over time rather than punishing someone because they missed one newsletter while getting sunburnt in Magaluf.
Engagement signals matter
Mailbox providers pay attention to the way people interact with your emails.
Positive signals can include:
- clicking links
- replying
- interacting with your emails consistently
- moving emails out of Spam or Promotions
- adding you to contacts
- spending time reading your content
Less helpful signals include:
- repeatedly ignoring emails
- deleting emails without engaging
- marking emails as spam
- sudden unsubscribe spikes
- high bounce rates
This is one reason sending endless generic sales emails to a completely disengaged audience can eventually backfire.
People tune out.
And mailbox providers notice in much the same way your mum notices when you ignore her WhatsApp for two days.
Unsubscribes are not the enemy… well, not always
Watching people unsubscribe never feels particularly lovely.
But someone choosing to unsubscribe cleanly is far healthier than someone becoming frustrated enough to mark you as spam.
Spam complaints send a much stronger negative signal.
Making it easy for people to leave also means the people who remain are more likely to genuinely want your emails.
A clean, engaged list is usually far more useful than one being held together by what-ifs and wishful thinking.
Basic email deliverability checks worth making
You don’t need to become an email infrastructure expert, but there are a few basics worth checking.
1. Authenticate your domain properly
This is the slightly dull technical setup involving things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.
You do not need to memorise what all those acronyms mean.
The useful bit to know is that they help verify that your marketing emails genuinely come from your business.
Your email marketing platform should provide instructions for setting these up, and an IT provider or web developer can usually help if needed.
2. Use your own sending domain
Sending business marketing emails from a generic Gmail address doesn’t exactly scream established and trustworthy.
Using your own business domain supports credibility, brand consistency and your wider email setup.
3. Keep bounce rates under control
Emails bounce when addresses no longer exist, are invalid or cannot receive your message.
Large numbers of bounces can damage your sender reputation.
Another reason regular email list hygiene matters.
4. Avoid disappearing for a year and then emailing everybody
This catches businesses out a lot.
If you’ve barely emailed your list for months and suddenly send a huge campaign to thousands of old contacts, that abrupt change in sending behaviour can look suspicious.
Consistency is much healthier than randomly appearing in somebody’s inbox like an ex who’s “just checking in”.
The spam-word myth that refuses to die
Every few months, someone confidently announces that words like:
- FREE
- SALE
- BUY NOW
- CLICK HERE
automatically send an email straight into spam.
This idea has been floating around since approximately 2007 like the proverbial bad smell you can’t find the source of.
Modern spam filtering is considerably more sophisticated than spotting one naughty word.
Mailbox providers look at the wider picture, including sender reputation, engagement, authentication, sending behaviour, formatting and patterns over time.
One word alone is rarely the whole problem.
Content still matters, though.
Misleading subject lines, aggressive formatting, manipulative tactics or emails that generally look and feel spammy can still cause problems.
A subject line written ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS!!!! with a mysterious attachment probably isn’t helping your cause.
The bigger issue is usually the overall quality of your sending behaviour.
So… should you segment your email list?
Yes. Probably.
And that could easily become an entire article of its own because segmentation can get complicated very quickly and some marketers become alarmingly emotional about it.
In simple terms, segmentation means sending more relevant content to different groups of people rather than sending exactly the same email to everyone.
You might segment by:
- customer type
- interests
- buying behaviour
- location
- engagement level
- previous enquiries
Done well, segmentation can make your emails more relevant and useful.
Done badly, it becomes an over-engineered nightmare where nobody remembers which email goes to which audience and somebody accidentally sends the “welcome new customer” campaign to an existing client again.
There is a sensible middle ground.
Three questions to ask about your own email list
1. Are you emailing people who still genuinely want to hear from you?
Have a look at engagement over time.
A huge mailing list may look impressive in a spreadsheet, but the people regularly reading, clicking or replying are the ones that matter.
2. Are you giving people a reason to engage?
Think about what arrives in their inbox.
Is it genuinely useful, relevant or interesting to them?
If every email is essentially another version of “buy something from us”, disengagement shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
3. Is your technical setup actually working properly?
Check your sending domain, authentication, bounces and unsubscribe process.
You can have brilliant email content and still make life harder for yourself if the foundations underneath it are wonky.
If you only take one thing from this article…
Email deliverability is rarely destroyed by one spectacular mistake.
Problems tend to build from lots of smaller habits over time:
- leaving inactive contacts untouched forever
- sending irrelevant content
- emailing inconsistently
- poor technical setup
- high bounce rates
- treating your mailing list as a dumping ground for sales messages
Healthy email marketing is largely about behaving like a trustworthy sender with something genuinely useful to say.
Ideally something useful to your audience, rather than just useful to you.
Which is quite reassuring really, because most of the genuinely effective stuff in marketing tends to be less glamorous and more consistent.
Bit annoying, that.
Still not sure? You’re in good company
Most businesses don’t spend their evenings worrying about sender reputation, DMARC records and list engagement.
Usually they just notice something like:
“Our emails don’t seem to be doing as well as they used to.”
Or:
“We’ve got thousands of people on this list and absolutely no idea whether any of them are still listening.”
Maybe you inherited the database.
Maybe it grew over years without anyone really managing it.
Maybe you haven’t emailed people for six months and now feel slightly terrified about pressing Send.
You don’t need to work out the whole problem before asking for help.
We can look at what you have, what you’ve been sending and what you actually want email marketing to achieve, then work out where your attention is best spent.
Want to get more from your email marketing?
If your mailing list has become one of those jobs permanently sitting at the bottom of your to-do list, bring it to us. We can help you look at your email marketing strategy, audience, content, list health and how email fits into the rest of your marketing. You don’t need another 48-point email optimisation checklist.
You need to know what matters, what can wait and what to do next.