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Ultimate Guide to Improve email deliverability and protect your reputation

Ultimate Guide to Improve email deliverability and protect your reputation

You might have been spending hours, days or weeks on making a personalised content, segmenting your audiences and finally publishing your emails.

 But what if they never reach your subscribers. All your work goes in vain. Having a good deliverability rate and maintaining a good reputation is where you need to set all your focus in.

What will deliverability issues cost you?

  • Decreases your open and click rates
  • Drastically brings down your conversion rates
  • Reduces your audience engagement

Email Validation

For any ISP’s, a multi-step filtration process is incorporated into the validation of email senders, verifying the email and if the mail was built on an authorized brand name.

What all does the recipient’s ISP look for in your email?

  • Your sender reputation
  • Blacklists
  • Abuses
  • Spam traps
  • Domain reputation
  • The volume of email you send
  • Your email content

Emails that fail the test will be either;

  • Rejected: The email is not delivered to the inbox of your customer.
    or
  • Quarantined: The email is sent to their Spam folder.

How to protect your emails and deliver them safely?


We will now take a look at how to keep your emails away from the dreaded spam folder.
Here are some effective strategies that let you get to your subscriber’s inbox.

Keeping your list clean:

A clean list is the first step towards email deliverability. Maintain a hygienic list by;

  • Removing email addresses that don’t exist.
  • Removing misspelt email addresses.

This simple step increases your conversions, opens and click-through rates.

Being consistent with your volume:

Maintaining your email campaigns without major drops or spikes plays an important role in bringing up a good reputation.
Start very slow, do not aim for sending thousands of email in the first day.
Publish your emails in this order.

  • Week 1: 25
  • Week 2: 75
  • Week 3: 100

Regular and consistent emails improves your inbox placement and campaign performance.

Add a double opt-in feature:

Seeking permission before sending an email to your client is necessary. But how do we know, all those subscribers are valid? So here comes single and double opt-ins.

  • Single opt-ins- After someone enters an email address, it is directly saved into a contact list, and no process is followed to confirm its validity or ownership.
  • Double opt-ins- Just after an email address is entered, a confirmation link is sent to the ID. Only those who verifies their authenticity receives the further emails.

Single opt-ins would give you a longer contact list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your market is getting wider. Double opt-ins guarantees you better email deliverability.

Including an easy opt-out:

When you fail to include an easy opt-out process, it’s more likely that your audience moves you to a spam folder. So, the next time you publish your email, make sure you have added that unsubscribe link, this improves your inbox placement and campaign performance.

Send emails as a person, not as a brand:

Use a real person’s name in the “From” name and a real person’s face instead of your brand logo. And make sure your email sounds human. This plays a very important role in making people trust and further engage with your email.

Monitoring your email content:

Campaign content has a strong influence on your deliverability and reputation. You must keep the following points in mind.

  • Never use spammy subject lines. ISP’s filter out emails using spammy keywords. Even take care of the dollar signs, emojis, all Caps sublines.
  • Adding too many images and links attracts your emails to the spam folder. You must add only one image and only one or two links in your email.
  • Only send relevant content. Asking yourself ‘Will my customer find this beneficial?’ is very important. Find out what best for individual customers by segmentation and personalisation. Sending what your subscriber needs is the need for the hour! Or you’ll end up in the Blacklist.
  • Always make use of Link Checkers and Blacklist Monitors, so that you can send valid emails.

DNS Records:

Domain Name System(DNS) is a complex part of internet infrastructure. Simply speaking, DNS records shows the world that we are conscious about the reputation of our domain and our own reputation as a sender. Every record consists of these main elements:

  • SPF(Sender Policy Framework) – SPF is an email validation system that verifies the sender’s IP address. This shows your authenticity as a sender, Who you are and what you are.
  • DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)– DKIM deals with showing a valid signature. It Indicates the ownership of email by a particular organization by adding a signature to the email headers.
  • DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)– Is an additional step of authentication, for protecting your domain from unauthorized use or spoofing.

Any email without any one of the above-listed elements, will be blocked by the ISP of the email recipient.

Using a Dedicated IP:

If you have to send time-sensitive campaigns and if you are a high-volume sender, a cheapest dedicated server is necessary. As dedicated IPs are exclusively used for your campaigns, unlike shared IPs your deliverability rate and reputation spikes. Use dedicated IPs for faster delivery of your emails.

Stay away from being Blacklisted:

When spam is sent to users’ inboxes, the IPs and domains from which they are sent are blacklisted. You can also be blacklisted when ISPs see a sudden increase in email volume.
When your email IP or domain is blacklisted, you can’t send any email from that IP address until it is removed from each blacklist. Even if you send one, they will land in junk or would never be delivered at all.

Conclusion

Failing to focus on the above-discussed measures, may make your emails land in spam folders or maybe even blacklisted. Start small and gain wider insights into email marketing. 

Create well designed, authenticated and relevant emails with Mailercloud. It helps you thoroughly check for any blacklisted domains or broken links with its efficient blacklist monitor and link checker respectively.

Dona

Dona

I am fostering the culture of creators through my work as the Head of the Community. I have decided on my own strategies to get through continued coursework, artwork, and professional development.

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