You put a lot of work into your email marketing campaigns, and you don’t want to waste all that effort by having large percentages of your emails bounce. Email deliverability is a hot topic today — as technology gets more advanced, it gets harder to identify and remember all the factors that go into whether an email makes it into your recipients’ inboxes.
We realized just how big of an issue this has become as we’ve been working with a lot of new clients and started seeing a real problem with bounces and other deliverability issues. Based on our team’s deep knowledge of the subject, we wanted to share some of the things that impact deliverability.
# 1. Sender Reputation
According to Return Path, 83% of email delivery failures are caused by reputation problems. Receiving servers look at IP addresses, and if the IP address has a reputation for sending high-quality emails, then they will likely allow an email from that IP address through. If not, or if they can’t tell, servers may reject a message or flag it as spam.
Receiving servers and email filtering software also look at the domains and hostnames mentioned in an email — for example, your unsubscribe link, your company’s link, and the link to view the email in the browser. These are evaluated based on the reputation of the domain, and sometimes the IP address the domain or hostname points to. Domains and URLs have their own reputations separate from the reputation of the sending IP address.
There are four key elements that make up your sender reputation: authentication, bounce management, list cleanliness, and user engagement.
Authentication. This process verifies a server’s identity, giving receiving servers assurance that the message is coming from a reputable source. There are four common methods of authentication, and in most cases you can simply use the method your email provider or marketing software offers.
Bounce Management. There are two types of bounces: soft and hard. Soft bounces are usually due to a temporary factor, such as an overloaded receiving server. After a few bounces, you’ll probably want to put them into a suppression list.
Hard bounces mean that an address is no longer good. You should move these out of your lists completely. Try to keep your total bounce rate under 2% to avoid deliverability issues.
List Cleanliness. Bad email addresses come in several types, and you should clean your list regularly to make sure none of these are limiting your deliverability.
- Role-based addresses such as admin@example.com and press@example.com;
- Addresses with typos;
- Fake addresses (nope@example.com probably isn’t a real address); and
- Spam traps (addresses set up to identify unsolicited email — make sure all of your addresses have opted in)
User Engagement. Receiving servers track how engaged subscribers are with an email and its sender. If your recipients are opening a message, adding your address to their contact lists, clicking through links, clicking to enable images, or scrolling through the message, you get a positive score. If recipients mark an email as spam, deleting it immediately, or move it to the junk folder, it negatively affects your engagement score.
# 2. Email Sending Schedules
Because user engagement directly affects your deliverability long-term, it’s important to send your campaigns at times when your recipients will open, click and engage in your content. You can do this either by researching and optimizing send times for your particular audience or using a software like Seventh Sense to customize send times to each individual.
#3. Email Filters
Spam senders tend to use HTML code that’s messy or full of errors, so email filters look at the back-end code to determine if a message is legit or not. As long as you are using a reputable service provider or email software system to send email, you should be fine.
#4. Content Filters
Receiving servers look carefully at the content of incoming emails to determine if they are spam. Many things can get your emails categorized as spam, including:
- ALL CAPS;
- Use of the words “free” and “buy now;”
- Excessive punctuation!!!;
- Too much talk about money;
- Excessive use of “breakthroughs;”
- Appearance of a mortgage pitch;
- Overuse of money-back guarantee terminology;
- Marking as “urgent;” and
- Colored fonts
Although authentication takes a little time initially, it’s dramatically affects deliverability. Optimizing sending schedules, using quality code, and eliminating spam triggers in your content only take a quick review before you send. Here’s a checklist to run through to improve your chances of making it into your recipients’ inboxes.
Mike Donnelly is the CEO & Co-Founder of Seventh Sense, a SaaS platform designed to plug into your HubSpot marketing automation account and existing email systems Donnelly is a data fanatic who’s always looking for new and creative ways to help sales and marketing professionals get better at their trade.
