A Guide to Email Deployment: How to Improve & Best Practices

Email deployment is the act of ‘deploying’ - or sending - an email campaign through an email marketing platform. Email campaigns are sent to a pre-defined list, and subscribers should have opted in to receive marketing communications from your brand in line with GDPR. 

While deploying an email is when the email is actually sent, the discipline of email deployment covers far more than that. Email deployment encompasses everything from quality control to testing, and even understanding how Email Service Providers (ESPs) process your emails. 

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what’s going on in the world of email deployment.

As demonstrated by the deliverability metrics covered above, it’s more important than ever to get email deployment right. Implementing best practices can make or break your campaign – if you fail to do so, your emails simply won’t arrive in your subscribers’ inbox or even be flagged as spam. 

With all of that in mind, let’s look closer at how to improve deployment via these best practices:

Email design and content

That’s right; email deployment isn’t just about the act of sending the email - it all begins with the email content. If emails aren’t in line with your audience's expectations, you risk increasing unsubscribes or, most importantly, triggering spam reports. 

We know from our Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability that ESPs will see activities such as deleting emails without opening, marking emails as spam and hitting ‘spam traps’ all as contributing factors to sender reputation. 

Of course, several elements play into this, but design and content are definitely considerations for marketers. Ensure all content is relevant and ‘expected’ by your subscribers, meaning they have a strong feel for your brand and react positively to your presence in the inbox. One way to ensure relevance is through audience segmentation and personalisation… a perfect segue into the next section. 

Audience segmentation

Quality over quantity is paramount to your email marketing success, but that doesn’t always mean you have to reduce email frequency. Audience segmentation is the act of organising your subscriber base using tagging or categories covering anything from personal data (location, age, etc.), purchase history or email engagement.

Personalising emails will improve relevancy, ensuring your readers are only getting messages that they want, and this will, ultimately, reduce the likelihood of spam reports, unsubscribes, and ignores.

Send timing and frequency

We’ve already touched upon this, but it requires further attention. Send time optimisation is the practice of working out the best time, and ideal frequency,  to send your email campaigns. 

Validity notes that 70 per cent of all emails are sent within the first ten minutes of any hour. The negative impact of such a large influx of emails is two-fold: the ESPs are put under significant stress at the top of each hour, “meaning more throttling, filtering, and blocking.” Secondly, users are hit with emails at these peak times, and are less likely to engage - and even more likely to unsubscribe or report.

You can negate this by offsetting send times and keeping a record of the results achieved by each email sent at specific times. From here, you will start to identify patterns over time and find the best approach for your emails – this might be that you need to stagger large sends or invest more heavily in personalised communications.

GDPR, PECR and other privacy requirements

This should be foundational knowledge for marketers, but it’s still worth mentioning as it impacts your deployment strategy. For B2C marketers, all of your subscribers should have signed up to receive your emails and be able to easily unsubscribe at any time. For B2B, brands can send relevant emails to users who have not opted-in as long as it is easy for them to opt-out.

If you need a refresher on GDPR, read our full guide. 

Under PECR, the opt-in rule for B2C marketers is a little more nuanced. The regulations do state that marketers should only send people emails if:

• They have specifically consented to electronic mail from you; or
• They are an existing customer who bought (or negotiated to buy) a similar product or service from you in the past, and you gave them a simple way to opt out both when you first collected their details and in every message you have sent.

Other lesser-known privacy requirements might be platform-specific. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) triggers a pixel when emails are received by Apple Mail users, regardless of whether the user opens the email or not. This is a privacy protocol that aims to protect Apple Mail users from sending their behavioural data to brands, but it also means that marketers are unable to accurately monitor email performance for subscribers using the Apple Mail platform.

Since Apple’s introduction of MPP to its native mailbox app in 2021, inbox placement has reduced by 20% below the global benchmark – so it’s an uphill battle to get your emails in front of your audience. Considering that the choices you make in deployment echo through to successful placement and even ROI, it’s more important than ever to fine-tune your campaign’s deployment strategy. 

Testing and optimisation

Now we’re into the nitty gritty of deployment - testing is absolutely critical to the success of any email campaign. According to email marketing software Campaign Monitor, 39% of brands don’t test their broadcast or segmented emails. This is shocking, considering testing gives marketers unique insight into their campaigns, and allows them to make decisions that will directly impact the success of their emails.

A/B testing is the process of changing one factor of an email campaign, and sending two different versions to a portion of your audience. This is typically done before you deploy the full campaign, so you can make adjustments based on the response to your A/B test. 

When A/B testing, you should only look to change one aspect; otherwise, it won’t be easy to determine what the subscribers actually liked or disliked about each option. Factors you can A/B test include:

• Subject lines
• Images
• Copy
• Length
• Calls to action

Once you get the result of your A/B test, you can optimise your campaign for the best results. This is, essentially, a core part of email deployment strategy and one you can’t afford to ignore.