Email Deliverability — What You Need to Know about Getting Your Emails to the Inbox

The success of an email-marketing program is highly dependent on email deliverability. After all, people can’t respond to your campaigns if they never receive your emails. How can you help ensure that the emails you send actually get to the people who signed up for them? That’s what we discuss in this month’s feature.

IP Addresses and Domain Names Play a Major Role in Email Deliverability

Although there are a number of factors that determine your email deliverability, the Internet Protocol (IP) address and domain name you use to send your emails play an important role. The IP address is a numeric label that uniquely identifies every computer/sending source and essentially serves as the pipe through which email is sent to your list of recipients.

To help reduce costs, many email service providers (ESPs) share a limited number of IP addresses among a large number of their client users. So if your organization shares an IP address with other companies – some of which may have less than desirable email practices – there’s a possibility your IP address and domain name could end up with a bad reputation, simply due to others who are sharing your IP address. The worst case is your IP address ends up with a bad reputation or exhibits behavior that appears to demonstrate poor email practices, and then it could be blacklisted or blocked by some Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That means that even if your emails are following email good practices, ISPs such as Google and Yahoo could block your emails. So the more companies sharing IP addresses with you, the higher the probability that your company could suffer from a bad reputation due to others. We frequently see this issue when new clients ask us to review their deliverability.

To improve your control over your reputation, ESPs offer companies their own dedicated IP address. In that case, you “live and die by your own sword.” In other words, only your company’s email practices will determine your email reputation.

How Do ISPs Determine Your Email Reputation?

ISPs have developed increasingly sophisticated algorithms to determine email reputations and, for obvious reasons, don’t publicize exactly how they do it. The following are some of the major practices that can affect how an ISP may calculate an emailer’s reputation:

• How the emailer handles bounces – if you email repeatedly to addresses that have previously bounced for you, that’s an example of poor email practices.
• The extent to which a sender does or does not set up the necessary infrastructure items – such as sender policy framework (SPF), Sender ID, and Domain Keys – to confirm the true origin of the email.
• Whether an emailer’s recipients consistently open and/or click through emails – the lower the open and click-through rate, the lower the engagement or interest by the subscribers; low engagement is yet another measure of potentially questionable email practices.

What You Need to Do to Maintain a Good Reputation

The following are six important ways you can help maintain a good email reputation:

1. Manage the inactive users on your email list. A high number of inactive users – subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a certain period of time, such as 6 months or more – can hurt your email deliverability. With numerous inactive users, showing high engagement with subscribers is tough. Click here for some tips on how to re-engage inactive users on your list.
2. Have a good process for handling bounces. When you send an email to a nonexistent email address, it’s classified as a bounce. If you keep sending emails to the same addresses that bounced, you’ll get a bad reputation. So be sure to quickly remove bounced email addresses from your email list.
3. Promptly remove names of individuals who unsubscribe. To comply with CAN/SPAM regulations, the names of people who unsubscribe should be removed within 10 days. Most ESPs allow you to automate this process so people are removed immediately upon unsubscribing.
4. Aggressively manage your email-marketing program. This includes consistently creating engaging content that is customized to the greatest extent possible for individuals on your email list.
5. Send emails only to people who have given you permission – and preferably confirm their permission with a double opt-in.
6. Know your email reputation. Work with your email-marketing agency and ESPs to regularly measure your reputation scores. At FulcrumTech, for example, we’ve developed a Deliverability Essentials Test that can quickly – within 24 hours – help you identify the source of deliverability problems. Click here for more information about our Deliverability Essentials Test as well as the special $99 offer available only for a limited time.

Looking for the best ways to improve your email deliverability and boost the number of your emails opened? The experts at FulcrumTech can help. Email or give us a call at 215-489-9336 and get started today.