Email Deliverability is a term used commonly by email marketers or companies that send promotional and transactional emails. It implies the process of getting the emails delivered to the recipient’s inbox. It also measures the domain’s reputation.
The goal of email marketers is to ensure that their emails reach the inbox, and especially in desired folders, not spam or the promotional mails folder. If your emails do not reach the inbox, it is as good as wasting money and time.
Here are a few tips to improve the email deliverability:
- Create a sub-domain and use it for email marketing only.
A big advantage of doing this is that many anti-spam organisations treat sub-domains differently and even if your sub-domain gets blacklisted, your main domain will still be able to send emails separately. In the long run, users will come to trust the sub-domain.
However, take care that not too many of your sub-domains get into a low-reputation band. This may affect your main domain. And that’s something you have to manage by maintaining reputation of your sub-domains. Finally, building reputation on one domain (even with multiple sub-domains) is easier.
- Authenticate your email domain.
Phishing brings down the reputation of your domain very quickly. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) are the best ways to authenticate your domain. Authenticating your emails using these two ways proves to the Mail Service Providers (MSPs) that you really are eligible to send emails.
- Check your domain reputation.
One of the main reasons of low email deliverability is low domain reputation. ‘Domain’ here refers to the ‘Sender Domain/Sub-domain’. MSPs move the emails to spam or block the emails from any domain whose reputation is low. Google Postmaster is a domain reputation tool by Google. It tracks and shows your domain reputation. It is important to keep a close watch on your domain reputation.
- Maintain dedicated IPs.
It is important to maintain a proper infrastructure to deliver your emails. IP address is one of the aspects of a proper infrastructure. Maintaining a dedicated IP address is mandatory to grow your email volumes. When you add a dedicated IP address for delivery, it is necessary to build up the reputation or warm up the IP address in order to build trust with MSPs. This will help in gaining trust of MSPs.
- Check feedback loops or abuse complaints.
MSPs like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook provide feedback loops or FBLs which help marketers with the information about the complaints they have received.
Yahoo and Outlook make it easy to get this information. Gmail has Google Postmaster which helps track FBLs, although they do not share the recipient addresses over Postmaster.
- Maintain a proper opt-in process.
The method you use to collect the email addresses plays a very important role in your email deliverability and domain reputation. If you are sending emails to recipients who have not opted-in or have not agreed to receiving emails, FBLs and MSPs will consider you a spammer. The most common way to collect email addresses is single opt-in. This may seem simple and easy, but it may backfire by generating high FBLs. The most authenticated way to collect email addresses is double opt-in. Here, you send a confirmation email to users to verify their email address and have their approval to send emails.
- Clean up your list regularly.
You will always receive bounces on your list if you send emails to non-existent users. You should not send emails to these bounced and complaining users again. Re-sending to these users’ leads to lowering of email deliverability. It is important to blacklist a user at your database level. It is also important to add a unsubscribe link to your emails. It helps you to scrub your email list.
Follow these tips to enhance your email deliverability and get best returns on your email marketing efforts.
