Introduction

Despite what some might think, email marketing is far from dead! It's still a key part of successful marketing strategies, offering personalized, targeted messages that drive real results and deliver strong ROI. Email marketing is flexible, scalable and cost-effective, making it a great way to connect with both new and existing customers while keeping your business competitive.

To get the most out of email marketing and boost your ROI, focus on two key areas: making sure your emails actually land in your audience’s inbox and creating content that drives action. By reaching the right people and encouraging meaningful interactions, you'll increase conversions and reduce wasted effort.

Bottom line: strong deliverability and high engagement rates aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re must-haves for email marketing success. Let’s dive into some strategies and tools that can help improve your deliverability and keep engagement high, ensuring you get the best possible ROI.

Avoid Spamming: Key Steps to Improve Deliverability

You might be unknowingly spamming your customers and prospects with email marketing. Common mistakes can quickly turn your emails from helpful to harmful. For example, sending mass unsolicited emails or irrelevant content can lead to more unsubscribes and increase the risk of hitting spam traps. This damages your sender reputation, making it more likely that future emails will end up in spam folders. Using spam-triggering words or phrases like "free," "cash," "limited time," "order now" or "click here" can also raise red flags for spam filters and cause your emails to be flagged. To avoid this, focus on sending personalized, timely and relevant content that adds value. Ensure you're reaching high-quality contacts who actually want to receive your emails, and always give subscribers control over how often they hear from you to avoid overwhelming them with irrelevant messages.

Helpful Tools: How HubSpot Improves Email Deliverability

As a HubSpot Gold Partner, the team at Pepper Group uses HubSpot’s marketing tools to help clients improve their email marketing and deliverability. HubSpot makes it easy to set up domain (DNS) authentication, including SPF, DKIM and DMARC policies, so you can ensure the IP address used to send emails is authorized on your behalf. This helps protect your email reputation, improve deliverability and reduce the chances of your emails getting flagged as spam.

Plus, HubSpot’s email templates are automatically CAN-SPAM compliant, including an unsubscribe link and your mailing address in the footer, so you stay on the right side of regulations while building trust with your audience. HubSpot also automatically unsubscribes contacts who opt out of marketing emails and removes hard bounces (invalid email addresses), helping you maintain a clean list and improve overall deliverability. Once your emails are reaching the inbox, the next step is to focus on maintaining high engagement rates—because strong engagement is key to maximizing your ROI.

Maintaining High Engagement: Finding the Right Email Frequency and Managing Inactive Contacts

To keep your marketing emails effective, it’s important to find the right balance in how often you send them. Sending too many emails can overwhelm your audience and lead to lower open and click rates while sending too few might cause them to lose interest. The key is adjusting your email frequency based on how engaged your subscribers are. Highly engaged readers may welcome more frequent emails, while those who aren’t as engaged might prefer less.

Timing is important, too. For example, people may be open to emails during the holiday season, but right after (say, from December 25 to January 2), they might be less engaged, making them more likely to unsubscribe.

Keep an eye on how your audience interacts with your emails. If certain subscribers aren’t opening or clicking, it might be time to try re-engaging them or consider removing them from your list. Focusing on a more interested and active group can help improve your results.

Boosting Engagement and ROI with Email Segmentation, Automation and List Hygiene

To increase engagement and get the most out of your email marketing, use event-triggered automation and segment your audience effectively. By dividing your list based on factors like industry, job role or interests, you can send emails that speak directly to each group's needs. For example, follow up with a case study for someone who attended a webinar, or offer an exclusive deal to a lead who downloaded a whitepaper. Event-triggered emails—like a thank-you message after a demo or webinar—ensure you're reaching out at the right moment, which leads to better open rates and more conversions.

To improve deliverability, it’s crucial to keep your email list clean and prioritize quality over quantity. Use tools like NeverBounce to clean out invalid email addresses and avoid buying cold email lists, which can lower engagement and increase the chances of being flagged as spam. Also, pay attention to formatting—steer clear of all-image emails and excessive punctuation, and focus on delivering consistent, valuable content. When you’ve got a clean list, great content and targeted emails, you’ll see improved engagement and better results.

Conclusion

To really boost your email marketing ROI, focus on both improving deliverability and maintaining high engagement. By using tools like HubSpot, following best practices for list hygiene and leveraging segmentation and automation, you can ensure your emails are not only reaching the inbox, but also connecting with your audience. With the right strategies, your email campaigns will deliver more value, build stronger customer relationships and help your business stay competitive. If you need help optimizing your email marketing, contact Pepper Group, your dedicated B2B marketing agency. We’re here to help!