Email delivery vs. deliverability 📨
There are many mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc., and they all have one thing in common – spam filtering 🕷️ For us, marketers, it’s quite a big headache trying to send bunch of emails only just to find out that they went straight to spam or even worse – got blocked by the inbound mail servers ❌
But!
Email delivery is basically a journey, where your email travels between mail servers ➡️ However, deliverability is the decisive process, which determines where your email lands 📩 Some will say that we (email senders) have no power on what a particular mailbox provider decides, but it all starts from building a decent email sending infrastructure ⚙️
So, before doing any kind of email marketing, make sure you follow the rules of best practice:
Prepare your email sending infrastructure
Some best practices:
⭕ Create an engaging list building technique.
Make sure to send emails only to those, who expect to receive them from you. Surprisingly, sending campaigns to unengaged subscribers can negatively impact your sender reputation, thus your emails might start dropping into spam folders even for those, who actually expect to receive them.
⭕ Foster reputation.
Here, I like the saying “hard to achieve, easy to lose”. If you’re just starting out with emails, be sure to start with the ones that have the highest engagement rates, like Abandoned cart or Welcome email sequences. This will make sure that mailbox providers will recognize you as “good” and “trusted” sender. Consistency of your sending times and volumes is also key here 🔑
⭕ Check your DNS records.
The quality of email sending infrastructure usually has the most weight on email deliverability for any kind of email marketing. Using dedicated sending infrastructure will most likely improve your deliverability rate, however, you will need to update your DNS records for this. Typical settings to check are SPF, DMARC and DKIM. To run a test, you can use free tools like Google’s Postmaster or dmarcian.com.
⭕ Clean your list regularly 📜
Regular list clean-up will protect you from sending your emails to unengaged subscribers or inactive inboxes, thus not only improving your email metrics, but also fostering your reputation as a sender. Depending on the size of your email list and your sending habits, a good practice is to remove unengaged, bounced and blocked email addresses every 3-10 months. The faster your list grows, the more frequent your list cleaning should be.
⭕ Use plain text!
Flyer type emails may look nice, but they are suspicious to most mailbox providers, so make sure to use some genuine copy not only to feel more “human”, but also have a better chance of landing your email to your recipient’s inbox.
Not sure how spammy your emails are? Check the spam rate via mail-tester.com or Mailgenius and get your answers right away 😊 Remember – email deliverability is key to a successful email marketing 📧
Do you have questions? Contact us!
We will gladly respond to each of your inquiries, analyze your needs, and provide tailored email marketing solutions. All prices listed on the website are approximate, and the final proposal aligned with your specific requirements will be presented after our initial meeting.