Email Love is supported by

Email deliverability is a crucial aspect of email marketing that often gets overlooked. It’s the ability of your emails to reach the intended recipient’s inbox and avoid getting filtered. If you’re not paying attention to your email deliverability, you could be missing out on key opportunities to engage with your customers.

To help you make sure your emails are reaching the inbox, we’ve put together some best practices for email deliverability. By following these tips, you can improve your chances of success and make sure your messages are getting through to people who want to see them.

The importance of email deliverability

Email deliverability is an often overlooked but incredibly important part of successful email marketing. Its primary purpose is to ensure that your emails are actually received by their intended recipient. Without it, your meticulously crafted campaigns might never be seen—talk about a waste of time and resources! For this reason, everyone should make sure their emails have the best possible chance of getting to where they need to go: the recipient’s inbox. Achieving high deliverability rates can drastically increase the effectiveness of your communications and ensure that you’re getting the maximum ROI from your email program. All in all, making sure email deliverability is up to scratch should be an essential part of anyone’s email strategy.

Overview of spam filters and how they work

Email spam filters work by analyzing incoming emails and determining whether or not they are likely to be spam. There are several different techniques that spam filters use to make this determination, including:

• Keyword filtering: Keyword filtering looks for certain keywords or phrases associated with spam in the subject line and body of an email.
• Blacklists and whitelists: Spam filters consult lists of known spam senders (blacklists) and known legitimate senders (whitelists) to determine whether or not an email is likely to be spam.
• Bayesian filtering: Spam filters use complex mathematical algorithms to analyze the content of an email and determine the likelihood that it is spam. This is based on the probability of certain words, phrases, or patterns appearing in spam emails.
• Heuristic filtering: Spam filters use a set of rules and patterns that are commonly associated with spam to identify and flag potential spam.
• Reputation based filtering: Spam filters check the sending IP address and domain name of an email and compare it to a database of known spam senders. If the IP address or domain name has a poor reputation, the email is flagged as potential spam.
• Challenge-response filtering: These filters sends a challenge message (automated) to the sender, asking the sender to confirm that they are a real person and want to send the email. The sender then needs to respond to the challenge to prove that they are a real person.

These filters work together to ensure that as much spam as possible is blocked, while minimizing the chances of legitimate emails being flagged as spam.

SPF, DMARC, DKIM… What you need to know about email protocols

Email authentication protocols are a set of technical standards that help to prevent email spoofing and protect the identity of the sender. The most commonly used email authentication protocols are:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF is a protocol that allows domain owners to specify which mail servers are authorized to send email on their behalf. This helps to prevent email spoofing by ensuring that only authorized servers can send email from a specific domain.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM is a protocol that allows the person receiving an email to check that it was actually sent by the domain it claims to be sent from, and that it hasn’t been modified during transit.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): DMARC is a protocol that allows domain owners to publish a policy in their DNS records that specifies which mechanism (SPF, DKIM) is used to authenticate email messages sent from their domain, and what to do when neither mechanism can be used to authenticate a message.

By using these protocols, email service providers and recipients can check the authenticity of an email and determine whether or not it is likely to be spam. This can help to improve email deliverability and protect against phishing and other forms of email fraud.

Best practices for improving email deliverability

To ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients, it is essential to follow best practices. These include authenticating your email domain, using a confirmed opt-in process, segmenting your recipient list, maintaining proper IP allocation, simplifying the opt-out process, being consistent with your sender name, and avoiding spam filters. Additionally, you should send emails to a highly engaged email list and make sure the content of your emails is relevant to the recipients. By following these best practices for improving email deliverability, you can increase the chances that your emails will be delivered successfully.

• Adhere to email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These protocols help to prevent email spoofing and protect your domain name from being used in phishing scams.
• Keep your email list clean and up-to-date. Remove inactive subscribers and bounced email addresses. This will help to reduce the chances of your emails being flagged as spam. You can also utilize email validation services which run checks on each contact to ensure that any addresses are valid before they are added to your list.
• Test your emails on different platforms and email clients to ensure that they are compatible and display correctly.
• Avoid using spam trigger words and phrases in the subject line and body of your emails.
• Personalize your emails as much as possible. Personalized emails tend to have higher open rates and lower bounce rates.
• Monitor your server’s IP and domain reputation. ISPs use these metrics to determine if an email is spam or not, so it’s important to maintain a good reputation.
• Monitor your bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and spam complaint rate. High rates of these metrics can be a red flag for ISPs.
• Limit the frequency of your email campaigns. Sending too many emails can lead to unsubscribes or marking emails as spam.
• Use double opt-in process to confirm the email address of the subscriber, this will help in reducing the bounces and complaints.
  ‍
• Monitor your analytics and A/B test your emails to see what works and what doesn’t. This will help you to continually improve your email deliverability over time.

By following these best practices, you can improve your email deliverability and increase the chances of your emails reaching the inbox.

Measuring and monitoring email deliverability

Measuring and monitoring email deliverability is essential for successful email marketing, as it helps you to identify any potential issues in advance before they become a problem. This allows you to adjust your strategies accordingly for maximum impact and improved deliverability rates.

• One of the most important metrics to track when measuring email deliverability is open rate, which indicates how many people opened your message out of those who received it. It’s important to note that open rate should not be used as an absolute indicator of success – a low open rate doesn’t necessarily mean that your campaigns are failing, but rather that there may be room for improvement in terms of crafting more engaging messages or optimizing the time of day at which they are sent.
• In addition to tracking overall performance, you should also monitor individual campaigns closely. Keeping track of clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes on a per-campaign basis will give you insights into what types of content or targeting strategies are resonating with each audience segment so that you can replicate this success with subsequent messaging efforts.
  ‍
• Sender reputation is another integral metric when attempting to improve deliverability rates, as it tells ISPs (Internet Service Providers) how trustworthy the sender is and whether the emails are likely to contain spam or malicious content. You can measure this by tracking bounce rate and complaint rate – if either one starts to increase significantly it could be indicative of a deteriorating reputation with ISPs, meaning that some emails may now start getting blocked or filtered out from recipient inboxes.
  ‍
• Finally, ISPs use several different algorithms when evaluating incoming messages and filtering them according to certain characteristics such as language or images used within the body of text. To avoid any potential spam triggers in future campaigns, you should utilize spam checking tools which will provide feedback on any potential issues with each message before it gets sent out – this way you can modify content accordingly based on what works best for each audience segment.
  By keeping track of these various metrics while regularly monitoring campaigns & implementing improvements where necessary – companies will be well-equipped to ensure their emails make their intended destination without being marked as spam!

Conclusion

Ensuring email deliverability is essential for successful email marketing and involves several key strategies. First and foremost, you should use a reliable ESP (email service provider) to ensure a clean sender reputation and increase the chances of emails being delivered successfully. Additionally, personalization tactics such as segmenting audiences by demographics or interests will help to create more targeted messaging that resonates with each individual customer segment. It’s also important to be mindful of email frequency – avoid overwhelming customers with excessive emails by adjusting the frequency accordingly.

Measuring and monitoring email deliverability is also critical for optimizing campaigns – open rate should be tracked in order to identify any potential issues that may need adjustment. Additionally, tracking clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes on a per-campaign basis can provide insights into what works best for each audience segment. Sender reputation should also be monitored closely, with particular focus on bounce rate and complaint rate as increases in either one can be indicative of future problems with mail delivery. Finally, utilizing spam checking tools prior to sending out messages can help to reduce the likelihood of triggering any potential spam filters from ISPs.

In order to improve overall email deliverability rates, it’s important to regularly monitor all campaigns for any potential issues and make adjustments when necessary based on what works best for each customer segment. All these strategies combined will ensure cleaner email lists, fewer bounced messages, improved sender reputation & higher engagement rates with customers!

Much love,
Andy

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove