How To Improve Email Deliverability
How To Improve Email Deliverability
Just because you hit the send button doesn’t mean the people on your email list will receive your message. Even if they have opt-in to receive email from you, studies have shown that for every 5 opt-in messages sent, at least 1 doesn’t make it to the inbox. Surely, you do not want this to happen. Sending messages that never land in the recipients’ inboxes is a waste of time and money.
Consider this, internet service providers (ISP) have a single goal that is to keep spam out of their customers’ inboxes. When you send out messages, your ISP send them to recipients such as Google, Yahoo, Comcast, and so on. The receiving ISPs have a long filtering process in place to check the incoming messages for potential spam. If one or more of these flags are detected, the message is flagged as spam and goes directly to the recipient’s spam or junk folder. Even if you are sending legitimate messages that people have opt-in to receive, your message could still end up being undelivered because they triggered a spam filter. From your own spam folder, you can also see some of the messages that you have subscribed are sitting in there. Why? Because your ISP detected an element within those messages that triggered them to be flagged down as spam. You need to mark those messages as “not spam” to train your ISP not to recognize them as spam.
If you are working with a reputable email service provider (ESP) to send your email
marketing messages, it is most likely that the company has a set of processes to
improve email deliverability. So, you need to do some research because you
choose your provider. Reducing the chances that your messages are flagged,
as spam by ISP filters requires following the law and taking steps to make your
messages as authentic as possible.
Your Reputation
The reputation of the IP address and domain that you’re sending email messages
from is one of the first things ISP looks at when deciding whether your messages
are spam. Your IP address is the numeric address of your device on a network.
It is used to identify you and allow you to communicate with others across the
network. If you are using an ESP such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign,
GetResponse, or AWeber to send your email marketing messages, then those
messages are sent using the ESP’s IP address. In this case, the IP is shared
among many users, so the behaviors of one user could affect the deliverability of
other users’ messages.
For example, if you use MailChimp and another MailChimp user consistently sends
out spam but MailChimp doesn’t catch and stop that user, then the IP address
reputation will be negatively affected. As a result, the deliverability of all messages
sent from that IP address will decrease which means your messages have a
greater chance of going into the spam folder rather than to the inboxes.
When your messages are sent, the receiving ISP checks the reputation of the
sender’s IP address. If you are using a dedicated IP address( meaning only one
sender or company used that IP address) then it is up to you to build your IP
address reputation. Until the ISP can detect that your ISP send legitimate and
authentic messages constantly, it will throttle your messages, which means they
will go to the spam folder. That’s why it is important to warm up your IP address by
sending a low volume of messages consistently to build your reputation. Once you
have developed your reputation, you can increase the volume but if you suddenly
send a large volume of messages from a random IP address, ISP will think you’re
a spammer, and improving your IP’s address reputation after it has been tarnished
isn’t easy.
Authentication
Authentication of your email address is an important step to ensure your messages
are delivered. Authentication allows ISPs to verify the sender’s address and tell the
ISP that you are who you claim to be. Most ESPs handle authentication for you
using the 3 primary authentication methods: Sender Policy Framework (SPF),
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) or Domain-based Message Authentication,
Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).
Authentication of your email address helps to build your domain reputation and
protects you from spammers who use forged email addresses to send phishing
and spoofing messages. Once you authenticate your email address, you need to
update your email domain’s DNS (domain name systems) records, TXT (text) records and MTA (mail transfer agent) records with your hosting provider. Every hosting provider has different processes to complete this. But if you plan to do this yourself, check with your provider to learn how to go about doing it.
List Quality
The quality of your email list can significantly affect the deliverability of your email messages. Therefore, list cleaning is a critical process you should be doing on an ongoing basis. You also need to make sure that you follow the rules and send emails only to people who have opt-in to receive messages from you. This means you need to honor unsubscribe requests on a timely basis too.
To maintain a quality email list, firstly, you need to make sure people opt-in to receive messages from you. This is also to ensure people know who you are. If they recognize you as the sender, they are less likely to flag your message as spam.
Secondly, make sure you send messages to your list on a consistent basis. This is because if people forget who you are, they are more likely to flag you down the next time they receive messages from you.
Thirdly, you need to clean your list regularly by removing addresses that delivered hard bounces (meaning there is something wrong with the email addresses and the messages cannot be delivered at all), addresses of subscribers who do not open your email messages for the past 6 months (you can change this to 3 months if you send messages on a biweekly or weekly basis) or addresses that are fake such as admin@domain.com, or test@test.com. All of these can negatively affect your sender's reputation.
While it is good a have a large email list, that’s not the case when many of the addresses are hurting the overall deliverability of your messages. Therefore, it is good to monitor hard bounces and inactive subscribers and clean your list regularly, preferably on a monthly basis.
Fourth, you must avoid spam traps. You only have to send a message to one spam trap to immediately hurt your reputation.
There are 2 types of spam traps you should avoid. The first is a recycled spam trap and typically happens to senders who don’t maintain the quality of their lists by cleaning them on a periodic basis. Recycled spam traps and typically happen to senders who don’t maintain the quality of their lists by cleaning them on a periodic basis. Recycled spam traps are basically email addresses that were valid and belonged to someone at one time but have since been abandoned and become spam addresses. Sending to spam trap addresses shows ISPs that your list quality is low. The second type of spam tray is the honeypot spam trap, which is also called the pristine spam trap. These email addresses do not belong to anyone. ISPs create them with one goal in mind, to catch spammers who use robots to crawl websites for email addresses and ISPs hide these addresses on websites for this purpose. This also helps to catch people who purchase lists that include these addresses. If you send messages to these spam addresses, ISPs will detect that you’re sending to people you have not gotten permission to email. As a result, your messages are automatically marked as spam and your reputation will be affected.
Click here on How To Build A Business with Email Marketing.
Content
The quality of your message plays a smaller role in your message deliverability
these days but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. You should take every step
possible to keep your message from being flagged by ISPs or recipients as spam.
Therefore you need to adhere to the following list of email content best practices
do’s and don’ts to avoid triggering spam filters or complaints:
· Do send content that is relevant to recipients
· Do send messages that include more text than images
· Do send messages with well-formatted HTML
· Do send messages that include an easy-to-see unsubscribe link
· Do send messages with familiar sender names that the recipients will
recognize
· Don’t send messages with embedded forms (include links to forms
instead)
· Don’t send messages with attachments
Don’t use URL shorteners in your messages
Don’t use all caps or excessive punctuations
None of these practices are difficult to follow, so always review your message
against this list before you hit the send button. This will greatly improve your
message deliverability.
Recipient Behaviors
What people do after they receive your messages can greatly affect the
deliverability of your messages in the future. If they consider your messages as
spam, your must consistently email relevant content to your subscribers. However,
there is more to this.
ISPs review how recipients engage with emails sent from your IP address. They
looked at the address on your list to determine if the owners of those addresses
are real, trustworthy people who actively used their email accounts by logging in,
sending and receiving messages, and even how they determine messages as
spam or not spam. ISPs also analyze recipients’ engagement with your messages
based on many factors, such as whether they read your messages, move your
messages to different folders, forward your messages, reply to your messages,
click the links in your messages, and mark your messages as spam and more.
Recipients’ behaviors matter a lot to the future deliverability of your messages but
you need to make sure your messages get into the subscribers’ inboxes first. One
way to do this is to ask your subscribers to add your email address to their
personal safe sender lists (also called whitelists) within their email applications.
When someone submit your web form and subscribes to your list, display a thank
you page that asks them to add your address to their safe sender list. You can also
include this request in the first email message you send to them, such as your
double opt-in verification message or a welcome message. It’s also a great way to
remind them to whitelist your email address by including a link to a web page that
provides instructions on how to do it with common mail providers like Gmail,
Yahoo! and Outlook.
Click here on How To Build A Business with Email Marketing.
Blackists
There are hundreds of blacklists used by ISPs to filter out spam and unwanted
email messages but there are just 2 types of blacklists – IP address-bases blacklists and domain-based blacklists. IP address-based blacklists check out IP addresses in real-time to find spammers. Domain-based lists search for URLs (including redirects) within the content of email messages to find domains that have been identified as spam sources.
If you land on a blacklist, your message could be blocked by certain ISPs. The extent of the damage depends on how many ISPs used that list. It is possible to get removed from blacklists if you have a good sender reputation and agree to change any questionable email practices you’ve been using. A few sites to check if you appear on any blacklists are:
· Uribl:http://uribl.com
· Surbl:www.surbl.org
· Spamhaus:www.spamhaus.org
· MultiRBL:http://multirbl.valli.org
Most list holder provide forms on their websites that you can use to request removal. Example, to request removal from Uribl list, you need to visit http://uribl.com/lookup/ and enter your IP address or domain name into the provided form to confirm that you are on the blacklist. If the result showed you are on the list, a link is provided to request removal. But be sure to clean up any problems with your email marketing practices before you request removal from any blacklist.
Who Should Be Responsible For Email Deliverability
If you are using an ESP for your email marketing, you are tempted to assume that ESP is taking all the necessary steps to ensure that your messages are delivered. Don’t make that mistake because the truth is your ESP’s responsibilities related to deliverability are limited. They are responsible for ensuring that the technology that they provide is compliant with current laws. While it is not solely their responsibility but it’s in their best interest to proactively implement functionality and processes that improve deliverability, such as authentication, if they want to keep and attract new customers.
It is your responsibility as a sender to comply with the law. It is also in
groups, and cleaning your subscriber lists periodically, your deliverability rate will be affected.
So, your efforts to improve your reputation, coupled with your ESP’s efforts to improve deliverability, should ensure that your deliverability rate is high. If in any case, you see that your deliverability rate is down, reach out to your ESP for help. Remember that, if people don’t get your messages, all your time and efforts are wasted.
That's all for now, friends. See you all in my next article.
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