Picture this: you’ve spent hours crafting the perfect marketing email. Its copy is compelling, the images are eye-catching, and the layout is easy to read. You add your recipient lists, write a sharp subject line and hit “send,” only to have the message fall on deaf ears.
Without an email warmup tool, this common scenario can be frustrating and costly for your business. In this article, we’ll discuss email deliverability in depth by defining the subject matter, explaining how it works, and offering some best practices for ensuring high deliverability rates.
Email Deliverability Explained
Before we discuss the best practices for improving deliverability, let’s clarify the term. What exactly is “email deliverability”?
Email deliverability is a metric used in the world of email marketing to describe the percentage of messages sent that are successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.
Most people are familiar with and expect the convenience of instant delivery right after they hit ‘send’ (as it usually works in person-to-person correspondence).
Meanwhile, several factors can affect deliverability, i.e., whether or not an email—and especially a marketing email—arrives in someone’s main inbox.
It’s worth noting that email deliverability is different from email delivery.
The status of a message describes when the email arrives at the server or ends up in the spam folder. The email is delivered to the recipient’s inbox.
Factors that Can Affect Email Deliverability
To understand how our proposed practices can help you with deliverability, it’s worth taking a brief look at aspects that adversely affect it.
Several factors can affect email delivery, from host servers to spam filters. Here are the top villains and how they operate.
Email Spam Filters Can Kill Deliverability
The most common reason for email deliverability issues. Spam filters are algorithms designed to identify and separate spam messages from regular old emails automatically. While most of these work well in general, they could be better. Thus, sometimes legitimate messages can get tagged as spam and end up in recipients’ spam folders (or, even worse, get blocked entirely).
Some IP Addresses Are Blacklisted, But Emails Are Still Delivered
A blacklist is a list of IP addresses or domain names identified as spam sources and thus blocked by ISPs. If your message is sent from an IP address or domain on a blacklist, it will likely have trouble getting through to its intended destination.
Email Servers Affect Deliverability
An email hosting provider’s server can also impact deliverability. If the server is set up correctly and has a good reputation, it can prevent messages from being flagged as spam or rejected outright.
Factors that Can Affect Email Delivery
Factors that may affect the availability of an email include the collection and use of valid recipient data. You should use only segmented and personalized email data. Correct rendering on all devices and optimized design of messages sent to recipients are extremely important.
How To Improve Email Deliverability: Best Practices
Email delivery can be daunting for a marketer, but for a seasoned professional, it’s a manageable, straightforward process. You can follow a number of measures and best practices to enhance the chances of messages getting through to their intended destinations.
If you need an effective cold email marketing solution, it is important to find a specifically designed platform. Then it will help you improve the effectiveness of message delivery.
Such platforms offer many features to help you get the most out of email marketing campaigns, including segmentation, automation, and more.
In addition, experienced experts working on such platforms can provide valuable guidance and support to ensure you are using the right practices to get the message across to your recipients.
The following are some best practices to help you secure high deliverability rates.
Authenticate Your Emails With SPF/DKIM Signatures
DKIM, otherwise known as Domain Keys Identified Mail, is a technology designed to verify the authenticity of an email message. Verifying that the message is coming from where it says helps to reduce spoofing (when someone pretends to be someone else) and phishing attempts.
SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a similar technology that helps validate an email’s sender. Verifying that the message comes from an authorized IP address helps prevent spam.
Both DKIM and SPF are authentication standards used by ISPs to determine whether a message should be marked as spam. Customizing these records for your domain can improve delivery. Tips on how to set up DKIM and add SPF records. Microsoft tips set up SPF to prevent spoofing. Use DKIM to check outgoing mail sent from your own domain.
Use a Reputable Email Service Provider
As I mentioned earlier, the server your messages are sent from can impact deliverability. One best practice to ensure that messages are being sent from a reputable server is to use an Email Service Provider (ESP).
An ESP is a company that specializes in providing email services. It can help you set up and manage an email list, send messages, and track results. It also has the infrastructure in place to ensure that messages are sent from a reputable server with a good reputation.
Segment Your Email List
One of the most favored practices among email marketing specialists is email segmentation, which is the process of dividing an email list into smaller groups based on common characteristics. These could include age, location, gender, interests, purchase history, and other factors.
One of the benefits of segmentation is that it can help improve delivery. By sending messages to smaller, more targeted groups of people, you’re less likely to trigger spam filters. Since the messages are more relevant to the people receiving them, they’re also more likely to engage with them, which can further improve your metrics.
Warm Up Your IP Address
Last but not least, one of the helpful practices is warming up the IP address. If you’re using a new IP address to send email messages, it’s important to take some time to “warm it up” first. There are tools designed to warm up your inbox. They exchange fake messages between inboxes and other inboxes, ensuring that these messages are automatically replied to (messages are removed from spam if they end up in spam). This simulates human interaction between inboxes and builds a reputation as a sender.
Warming up an IP address helps to avoid this problem by gradually building up a reputation for sending high-quality, non-spam messages.
Before your marketing emails can be responded to, read or even opened, they need to reach recipients’ inboxes. Unfortunately, this last mile is fraught with dangers, including spam filters. However, by following the practices above, you can significantly improve your deliverability.
Email Deliverability Test Tools
It is important to check the score of your email before you start your campaign:
- MailTester — Check your newsletter’s spam score and quality. This tool’s free and pretty.
- MXtoolbox — This tool requires you to send a test message. Tool systems analyze the headers, the blacklist reputation of your originating IP address and SPF records to create a comprehensive delivery report.
- Unspam.email — Check your spam rating and email quality. Improve the deliverability of your emails with a functional online tester and spam checker.
- GlockApps — Allows you to test email deliverability. Learn about email deliverability, reputation, authentication, and DMARC compliance.
These tips will give you information about whether you really made the changes I presented in this article.
Conclusions about Email Deliverability
To summarize all of the above, the delivery rate is the percentage of your emails that reach the inbox rather than just reaching the server. This belongs to the best practices because ISPs keep track of the number of complaints they get about messages coming from each IP address. If an IP address suddenly starts sending a large volume of messages, it can trigger a red flag and lead to deliverability problems.
For your messages to have the best chance of conversion, you need to know how many end up in your customers’ mailboxes rather than immediately in the spam folder. You must carefully monitor the data to obtain informative statistics.
You should aim for deliverability rates above 95%. Services provided by various agencies can help you achieve this rate.
