Email Deliverability Tips

Once you have defined your email marketing strategy, and before you develop and optimise your email content, you must first ensure your emails get delivered to recipients.

If your emails don’t arrive in the intended inbox, it is pretty obvious they won’t get a response, regardless of how much effort you put into optimising the content.

Here are 5 recommendations to improve your email deliverability:

• Build trust with ISPs: ISP filters defend against spam. To ensure ISPs consider your IP trustworthy (so don’t block your emails) you need to show relevancy through engagement with your emails.  Sending small, targeted batches of emails should have a better chance of higher engagement.
• Develop a sender policy framework: An SPF increases the trustworthiness to the receiving email server as it can cross check your domain with IP address.  Without an SPF your emails might be rejected.
• Sender Score: Keep an eye on your sender score which is based on unsubscribe rates and spam reports (the higher your score the better).  One way to improve your sender score by implementing regular schedules to your emails, rather than sending random and erratic emails out.
• Maintain your lists: Purge hard bounces (people who have left, inaccurate email addresses etc.) from your lists, as a high bounce rate will lead to the blocking of your IP.  It’s probably also worth removing inactive recipients as well as it will impact on your engagement percentage.
• Check blacklists: DNS blacklists are created to protect users from senders with high spam reports. It is a good idea to check you are not blacklisted and if you are, follow instructions as to how to reverse it (details will be on the blacklist’s site).

Follow these 5 recommendations and you should increase your email deliverability.

For help and advice on developing your email marketing strategy, contact me today.