Digital marketers love using email as one of their primary mediums for marketing. Despite the evolutions in technology such as the prevalence of chat apps and mobile messengers, communicating through email delivery remains an integral part of the lives of many people.
In fact, the number of global email users worldwide has now reached 4 billion and is expected to grow to 4.6 billion users by 2025. To add to that statistic, approximately 306 billion emails were sent each day in the previous year and are expected to increase to more than 376 billion in a few more years.
Email campaigns are still one of the most vital marketing channels businesses can use today, which is also the reason why email deliverability is extremely crucial.
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the term used when referring to the ability to deliver email messages to recipient inboxes successfully. Several factors affect email delivery – all of which we’ll discuss later.
When you improve email deliverability, your reputation as a sender increases. If the sender’s behavior complies with the standard rules of sending emails, then they will benefit from a high sender score, resulting in better deliverability.
But why should you care about following the best practices when it comes to email marketing?
Email marketing offers many possibilities for reaching your target audience. Yet to reach these potential customers, your email messages have to actually arrive at their inboxes first.
If you practice poor email hygiene, your emails will end up being blacklisted, blocked, or even be categorized as spam. Undelivered messages mean wasted opportunities and loss of ROI.
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Email Deliverability and Sender Reputation
The connection between email deliverability is clear: It is dictated by the reputation of the sender. Sender reputation plays a crucial role in ensuring your emails can reach their targets.
That’s why it’s important to always ensure your domain reputation and IP reputation are in good standing.
What is Domain Reputation?
Domain reputation has become one of the most popular ways of ranking sender score. It not only looks at the IP address of the sender but also the domain they are using.
What this means is that the sender reputation is bound to their brand and will stay with them even if they change their IP address. A good sender reputation is great since you don’t have to constantly rebuild from scratch. The catch here is that it also becomes harder to get rid of in case you have a negative sender reputation.
What is IP Reputation?
The internet protocol (IP) address consists of a series of numbers that becomes the unique identifier of a device when used in sending an email. Internet service providers (ISPs) tag one to each device within their network to route user requests accurately.
The two basic types of IP addresses are shared IP addresses and dedicated IP addresses.
The difference between the two is that a shared IP address means that you and other companies use the same IP address, which means you share your reputation with that of other users in your network. A dedicated IP address is the opposite, wherein you don’t have to share your IP with others and it’s only for you.
As mentioned earlier, then are many factors that affect sender reputation. As a marketer or business owner, it’s your job to ensure that you know the different components that influence sender scores to avoid suffering the effects of having a bad email reputation.
Factors That Affect Sender Reputation
There are at least six factors that email marketers need to keep an eye on to ensure the outcomes of their email marketing efforts.
Factor #1: Deliverability Rate
The deliverability rate of an email is one of the major contributors to the success of any email marketing campaign. This metric lets you know how many of your emails were allowed by the ISP and that they were neither deferred nor rejected.
Factor #2: Open Rate
The open rate is the number of times people have opened your emails. This amount is divided by the total messages that were delivered. It is determined by a small image inserted in the email that credits an opened email as soon as that image loads up.
Although each email open can only be recorded for messages that have images allowed by default, it still provides sufficient data concerning the level of engagement for your emails.
Factor #3: Click Rate
The click rate is the number of times users have clicked on the links in your messages divided by the total delivered emails. Having a low click rate could indicate that the content in your messages is not seen as valuable or relevant by your target audience.
Factor #4: Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the number of email messages that have been rejected by the ISP. This could probably be due to the inboxes of a recipient being full or just using the wrong email address.
Whenever the ISP returns with a 500 class error, the email address will be considered a hard bounce. Having a high bounce rate is directly associated with poor email list hygiene. Cleaning your list to eliminate non-responders and hard bounces may help.
Factor #5: Unsubscribes
The unsubscribe metric is the total number of users who have chosen to opt out of your email list. Requests to be removed from your mailing list need to be honored within 10 business days.
If you notice an increasing rate of unsubscribes, you should assess your content to see what is causing people to do so.
Factor #6: Spam Reports
Your spam report rate is the total number of users who have marked your email messages as spam. Any spam report negatively affects your sender reputation, which is also another reason to ensure the unsubscribe process is working as intended.
If you see a significant increase in your spam report rates, then you should look at the entirety of your email campaign to identify what’s wrong.
How to Improve Email Deliverability
A huge part of email deliverability comes down to ensuring that you’ve done everything possible on your end to avoid being labeled as a spammer by spam filters and your email recipients.
One of the most decisive ways wherein you can influence email deliverability is by authenticating your emails. Email authentication makes a sender transparent to ISPs so that they will acknowledge the legitimacy of your messages.
What Is Email Authentication?
Email authentication is a way to show an ISP that your email is legitimate and not forged. Using authentication technology provides the mail servers of the recipient a record that they can check to see if the sender is authentic.
Failing to pass an email authentication check could result in messages being listed as spam or outright blocked, reducing the chances that they will reach their intended recipients.
Most email providers utilize authentication to keep track of sender reputation. This allows ISPs to identify email senders accurately so that they can make better decisions regarding email deliverability.
Today, email authentication has become a necessity for email senders since it helps differentiate them from spammers.
Primary Authentication Methods to Improve Email Deliverability
There are at least three primary types of email authentication protocols you can use to improve email deliverability.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Authentication
A Sender Policy Framework, simply called SPF authentication, is one of the pioneering authentication protocols that continue to serve email marketers well. It essentially checks the ‘from” address of a message to ensure that the sender is genuine.
SPF authentication works like this:
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- The email server of the recipient will send a request for the sender’s domain to confirm that the sender is authentic.
- The server requires the domain to send it a list of authorized IP addresses that are allowed to send emails.
- If the sender’s server does not show up on the given list, the SPF authentication will be considered a ‘fail’ and thus reject the email.
To implement SPF authentication, you will need to insert a TXT record that will look like this:
“v=spf1 include:sparkpostmail.com ~all”
It’s always good practice to check the domain settings of your SMTP and then copy the text there into your DNS to be safe.
This can be found under ‘host’ but will depend on your domain hosting. Some may allow you to leave this blank while others will request that you enter the domain.
Also, don’t forget to type your subdomain if you are using one.
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) Authentication
The level of authentication for DKIM is a little more rigid compared to SPF. In DKIM, the protocol checks to make sure that messages are tamper-proof by providing senders with private keys.
These cryptographic keys encode the headers of emails to verify that an email came from an authorized mail server. This helps guarantee that the message is not forged while also preventing the delivery of harmful content such as spam.
DKIM implements SMTP, the standard protocol used in sending email, since it does not have any authentication mechanisms by itself.
To implement DKIM, go over to the domain settings tab of your SMTP. You may also have to give a hostname.
Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)
A DMARC authentication is a policy that lets a sender indicate whether their email messages are protected by DKIM and/or SPF. With DMARC in place, domain owners can counteract business email attacks such as spoofing and phishing.
DMARC is founded on the results of DKIM and/or SPF, requiring at least one of them to be available in the email domain before it could be used. You can deploy DMARC by publishing a record in the DNS.
This DMARC record is a text entry that shows your email domain’s policy after confirming DKIM and SPF status. DMARC ensures if either DKIM or SPF, or both pass.
To implement DMARC, you need to have an SPF or DKIM verification established already. If you wish, you can sign up for a free DMARC account right now and start setting it up easily.
Best Practices for Ideal Email Sender Reputation
You already know that having a high sender reputation helps in ensuring good email deliverability. On the other hand, low sender reputation means that your messages will most likely land in the spam folder of your recipients or just be outright rejected.
To achieve and maintain a good sender reputation score, one has to follow the best practices outlined below.
Obtain Permission and Send Relevant Emails
It’s important to ask permission from recipients in your mailing list before you send any message to them. This is because sending unsolicited emails to users will most likely result in them routing your messages to the junk folder.
Not only does this lower sender reputation but it also makes any subsequent messages you send less likely to reach their inboxes.
So how can you get permission, you ask? The answer to this can be found in your data collection methods.
For instance, many senders use opt-in forms to create their permission-based lists. The key for these opt-in forms is to provide would-be recipients with the option to subscribe.
Those that choose to opt-in are the ones that have a higher likelihood of accepting and opening the emails you send to them.
Get Whitelisted with Your Recipients
A whitelist is a list of safe or approved email addresses that help spam filters determine whether or not a sender is allowed for email delivery. Being listed in the whitelist of your recipients guarantees that your emails will reach their inbox.
To be whitelisted by your subscribers, you can directly ask them to have your email added to their whitelist. You should use simple language since this extra step can be confusing for those who aren’t tech-savvy.
Most senders include this message in their first email to new subscribers since this enhances email deliverability at the start. You can then decorate your own email message with your brand voice to compel readers to follow through.
You can also include links to your instructions so that the whole process is easy to follow.
Keep Your Bounce Rates Low
Email bounce rate can be categorized into two forms: soft bounce and hard bounce. Hard bounces are email messages that have been returned to the sender due to an invalid recipient address.
A soft bounce occurs when an email message is returned by the recipient’s mail server. There are a few different reasons why soft bounces occur, such as the recipient inbox being full.
As the email sender, you want to keep your bounce rates as low as you can since a high bounce rate can make mailbox providers suspicious of your account.
A few ways you can do to maintain low bounce rates include:
- Cleaning your email lists regularly. This involves removing addresses that had complaints, hard bounces, and contacts you haven’t emailed for a long time.
- Send your email messages only to contacts who have subscribed to your mailing list.
- Quickly remove any hard bounces that you encounter in your email list after each batch is sent.
Properly Format Your Email Content
Properly formatting your email content influences how mailbox providers look at your messages, affecting your sender reputation. Sending high-quality email content to your subscribers is a must.
Before sending an email, make sure that:
- The HTML of the content has been formatted properly. Emails with poor code not only fail to render but can also be flagged by spam filters.
- The link to unsubscribe is visible and easy to access for recipients who want to opt out of your mailing list.
- The content in your email can be opened by all of your email subscribers.
- Your content is compatible with mobile devices.
Don’t Use Spam Techniques to Avoid Being Blacklisted
If landing in a whitelist means your email will be accepted by the recipient’s mailbox provider, landing on a blacklist is the opposite. A blacklist is basically a database that contains sender emails that are considered unwanted or spam.
Being listed on a blacklist is often the result of practicing spam-type email techniques, using purchased mailing lists, or triggering a spam trap.
There are tools available today that can help you check if you’re email address has been listed on a blacklist.
Follow the Best Email Practices to Maintain a High Inbox Placement
Email remains to be one of the best communication channels that marketers use today to reach their target audiences. This is also the reason why businesses today should safeguard their email deliverability to ensure their sender reputation stays high.
The primary factors that affect sender reputation include:
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- Deliverability rate
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Bounce rate
- Unsubscribes
- Spam reports
Besides these metrics, marketers can also improve email deliverability by putting in place authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Getting email authentication is particularly important nowadays since it helps differentiate legitimate marketers from spammers.
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