Enlisting your contacts to do the right things will help all your ActiveCampaign emails get delivered more reliably.

Because how lovingly your ActiveCampaign emails are received by your contacts, and welcomed in, matters.  It matters a lot.

ActiveCampaign emails that are welcomed with open arms, that get marked as important, or upgraded from the Promotions folder, or opened and clicked every time, get a lot of good attention, massively help with you ActiveCampaign email deliverability.

Emails that are not welcomed, opened, clicked – emails that are left unread, deleted, or even chucked in the spam, are really damaging for your deliverability. Even more so, since Google and Yahoo increased requirements for emails to get delivered to their inboxes in Feb 2024. And other mailbox providers will follow this lead.

You want to know how to get your contacts to help your emails land in the inbox, so read on…

Reminder – deliverability is the measure of how well your emails get to the inbox, and it’s critically important, because emails that don’t get delivered can’t get read and have zero chance to help you or your customers, to get what they need, to grow, and thrive.

This blog is for you, so you know how to enlist your contacts on team Get To The Inbox as your secret insider-army…

(By the way, if you didn’t do your email domain authentication homework yet, be sure to get that done too)

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Understand how inbox behaviour affects your ActiveCampaign deliverability

The real humans who receive your emails (your ActiveCampaign Contacts) are being watched…

Think about what you do with emails that you don’t want in your inbox… You do the digital equivalant of scrunching it up and chucking it away in a huff.

Now think about what you do with emails you like, and that you do want in your inbox…

Pretty different inbox behaviours, right?

We do different things with emails we want vs emails we don’t want.

ActiveCampaign and the Mailbox Providers (the tech that dispatches and delivers your emails for you) do the very smart thing of watching those inbox behaviours.

Then they use that info to tell whether you’re a much-wanted sender….  or whether you’re not welcome in that inbox.  

Yes… the tech is judging you and your emails, based on your contacts’ inbox behaviours.

And if they observe consistent signs that your emails are less than beloved, then ActiveCampaign and the Mailbox Providers start to get twitchy about whether you might be a spammer…

And then your ActiveCampaign emails are less likely to get safely delivered to the inbox.  Urgh.

In fact, for some mailbox providers like Google and Yahoo, if you go over their threshold for spam reports, they just won’t deliver any of your emails any more. Double urgh! Check in here on our blog to see what Google and Yahoo changed for email senders in Feb 2024

Those real people on the receiving end of your emails are the ones who matter most in the big Get to the Inbox game.

Learn what subscribers should do to help your emails stay out of spam

Subscribers (that’s your ActiveCampaign Contacts – the ones you send the emails to) can show really clearly that an email is welcome, wanted, and beloved in the inbox.  

Mailbox Providers and ActiveCampaign are watching to see if this is what happens with your emails – if they see these good inbox behaviours, they know your emails are wanted, and will be more likely to deliver them safely.

So what are they looking out for?

Ten things that subscribers do when they really want your emails

1. Open
2. Read
3. Click on a link
4. Reply
5. Rescue from spam or junk
6. Label or filter or add to a folder
7. Mark the sender as VIP
8. Move to primary tab
9. Add the sender to an address book
10. Whitelist the sender

Some of these inbox behaviours are more important than others…

Hear why you need to prioritise clicks and replies over email open rates

ActiveCampaign open rates are always a hot topic in user forums.

There’s a lot of noise, smoke and mirrors around open rates for ActiveCampaign emails, so let’s demystify open rates first.

The five most common ActiveCampaign open rates questions

1. Are my open rates high enough?
2. What’s a normal open rate?
3. What do open rates mean?
4. Are open rates OK after iOS changed?
5. Why are my email open rates dropping?

I could dive into each of these open rates questions…

But honestly, do yourself (and me) a favour and let open-rates as a measure of success go. 

Let. Open Rates. Go.

Opens are very unreliable to track, for all platforms, and all contacts, and tracking opens is getting harder year on year as privacy features change and evolve to look after recipients more than senders.

Why would you measure the success of your emails with these flakey open rate statistics? That would be silly – like asking your toddler kid if you’re looking slick for your night out – they are not a reliable narrator!

Do not judge your emails on open rates – use click-rates instead.

There are much much better ways to assess how much people like to get your emails, and those are what the deliverability players are watching… and you should be too.

Link Clicks are a much more reliable marker of email success in inbox behaviour.

Why Link Clicks are important for ActiveCampaign deliverability

Link click tracking is a ton more reliable to track for email marketing platforms like ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign’s built-in link-click tracking provides deeply meaningful data – like which link they clicked, and how many times, and when.  Heck, you can even have a whole automation start when a certain link is clicked in an ActiveCampaign email.

Think about it…

Whilst I may open dozens of emails every single day, I click links in a mere handful of emails, and only ever when I’m properly interested. How about you?

Why Replies are important for ActiveCampaign deliverability

Replies too – we tend not to reply to emails we didn’t even want to get in the first place (weirdos and stalkers excepted).

Opens are a wobbly, unreliable, insubstantial metric when it comes to emails.  

Let the opens-obsession go.  

Focus on the link clicks and replies instead. 

Your deliverability will thank you for it

Ask your subscribers to help keep your emails out of the junk folder

How do we get our ActiveCampaign contacts to do more of those good-inbox-behaviour things, to help with deliverability and make sure they get those precious emails delivered?

It’s actually really simple – just ask them! Tell your audience, leads and customers what to do, and when.

Five easy wins to get your contacts to help your ActiveCampaign deliverability

1. Let them know when to expect you, and what your emails look like, so they recognise you in the inbox
2. Be consistent with sender name and email, regular predictable sending, brand recognition, and subject line and pre-headers.
3. Prompt helpful behaviours before sending the first email to a new lead, in that moment after they hit submit on the optin form.
4. Ask explicitly for clicks and replies in most of your emails.
5. Let them know what to do if an email they’re expecting doesn’t reach them.

In a nutshell, you need honesty and consistency on your part, and clarity in setting expectations and telling your contacts what you want them to do. You can do this on thank-you pages, on socials, in other eamils… anywhere you can get the attention of your contacts really.

This is how we get good inbox behaviours and a far greater likelihood of your ActiveCampaign emails being delivered reliably.

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Your next step to stay out of spam and get into the inbox with ActiveCampaign emails

Once you are nudging, prompting and asking for support from your contacts, your deliverability will start to improve.

And now that you have your authentication in place, and know how to stay in ActiveCampaign’s good books, you can move on to the really fun part – firing up the ActiveCampaign engagement flywheel! It everything you’ve ever wondered about what the heck is the point of engagement tags – yes, finally!

Get help to maximise email opens, clicks and replies for ActiveCampaign

There are a lot of moving parts to engagement and deliverability, as you can see. You could keep figuring it all out on your own – it’s totally do-able (been there!) but it does take a long time and a lot of trial and error.

Instead of going it alone, step inside my wonder ActiveCampaign Academy and I will take you step by step through everything you need to know, and exactly what you need to do, to get to the inbox reliably with your ActiveCampaign emails. 

All the details for our fully updated deliverability training course are right here – the sooner you join me the sooner you’ll have great deliverability baked in. After all, emails that don’t get delivered have zero chance of building your business or making you money.

Academy membership comes with access to more courses to do ActiveCampaign the easy way, plus a lovely member community to walk alongside, and direct, regular access to me, Kay Peacey for live time with your resident ActiveCampaign expert.

Learn more about our ActiveCampaign Academy membership
Fast, effective training & support for ActiveCampaign users everywhere