Just like with a classic mail, there are many things that can go wrong when you try to send an email to someone.
Besides having the proper email infrastructure, senders have to be very careful about many other things and stick to the best practices regarding the sender behavior. Otherwise, their email won’t be delivered or they may be blocked by internet service providers.
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is about ensuring your emails get through to inboxes.
There are many aspects that influence whether the email will be delivered or not.
Email deliverability is closely connected to the sender reputation. If your sender behavior is in accordance with the general rules and you have proper infrastructure, your sender score will be high and your deliverability will thrive.
Deliverability
Email marketing has a huge potential and offers great possibilities to be creative when reaching your customers.
But in order to reach those people with your top-notch email campaign, your email actually needs to land in their inbox. Undelivered marketing email means lost opportunity. Undelivered transactional email means disappointed or angry customer.
There are a few principles that make a successful email marketing campaign.
- Gain an explicit permission – make sure that you have confirmation from your contact that they want to receive your emails before emailing them for the first time and always provide the option to switch off or unsubscribe from notifications.
- Maximize engagement – many mailbox providers base filtering decisions on how recipients react to your emails. If the majority either don’t open, mark as spam or delete without reading then it is likely that all of your emails will be filtered as spam. Therefore always ensure that content and subject headings are going to provide the interest needed for the recipient to open.
- Maintain your reputation – spam filters place heavy reliance on the reputation of a sender. By analyzing databases for any history of poor quality emails and interrogating a sender technical set up, mailbox providers will quickly pick up on a poor track record.
- Comply to technical standards – good senders take account of mailbox operators specific guidelines and best practices. If you fall below these then you risk being filtered out.
Without proper infrastructure, your email marketing will fail no matter how great campaign you have prepared. In the following tips, we cover the essential best practices when it comes to the infrastructure and authentication of your emails.
1. Use dedicated IP address
Always keep in mind that if you share the sending IP address with the others, their behavior may influence your deliverability too.
2. Use different IP addresses for different email types
Another thing you might consider is to set separate IP addresses for your marketing emails and transactional emails.
This is a best practice to make sure that your marketing campaigns won’t influence the deliverability of the essential emails such as password recovery or purchase confirmation.
3. Don’t change your IP address
If you have deliverability issues, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is to change the sending IP address to start again with a clean slate.
However, it may not be a good idea – this kind of behavior is very suspicious and it may not solve your problem at all. Since switching IPs is a common tactic used by spammers, new IPs are always treated with caution. Spam filters always consider the age of the IP as well as the sending permanence.
4. Warm-up your IP address
If you need to change your IP address (or you start with a new one), make sure to warm it up first. This means that you don’t start sending large volumes of emails from the start. Instead, you gradually increase the number of emails in order to establish the initial reputation.
5. Secure your servers with TLS
Transport Layer Security is a type of encryption that is applied to the email to protect it from being read by unwanted party during the process of sending
6. Authenticate your email
Email authentication is a process of improving the delivery and proving the credibility of emails by implementing protocols that verify the identity of the sending domain.
7. Subscribe to feedback loops
This rule is pretty simple and obvious – do not send emails to those who marked you as spam. If somebody marks your message as spam or trash and you send him another email anyway, your reputation score may suffer considerably.
8. Don’t be afraid of unsubscribes
If someone doesn’t want to receive your emails anymore, make it as easy as possible for them to unsubscribe – otherwise, they will use other options (junk, spam folder).
9. Use double opt-in
To make sure you are really sending only to those who are interested in your emails, you can go even further and implement a double opt-in. It is considered a best practice in email marketing to prevent from sending to people who did not give a clear permission – e.g. if person A signs up person B for a marketing newsletter on a certain website.
Double opt-in simply means a second confirmation of the email preference that is send to the recipient’s inbox and has to be confirmed. Only after this action, the contact will be added to the mailing list.
10. Be consistent
It is important to be consistent and stick to the sending schedule, both regarding the volume and frequency.
Create a plan and stick to it. The best practice is to send one or two emails per week. If you select a certain time, people will.
11. Avoid spam traps
A spam trap is an inactive email address owned by the ISPs. They use these accounts to catch and punish malicious senders as they are sure the email address could not have been obtained in a regular, legitimate way.
Sending an email to a spam trap is usually a one-way ticket to a blacklist. You are very unlikely to get one into your email list if you stick to the ethical ways of getting email contacts. Again, never purchase or harvest emails.
12. Avoid excessive punctuation
Using caps in your email is like shouting. It’s bad practice and it irritates people. It’s also not recommended to use excessive punctuation, such as multiple exclamation marks.
13. Get rid of inactive subscribers and role accounts
If someone doesn’t open a single email from your for a period of several months or even more than a year, they are probably not interested in your emails or the email address is no longer used. Set a reasonable time period and clean your lists from inactive contacts to make sure you keep your engagement levels high.
14. Verify your list
An email verification tool will help you to find and get rid of all spam traps, hard bounces, typos and disposable or catch-all emails.
There is no quick fix to achieving a high level of email deliverability. Remember to take measured steps and apply best current practices and you will see a rise in the proportion of emails getting through.