According to Return Path’s® 2013 Email Intelligence Benchmark Report, nearly 20 percent of legitimate commercial email is not being delivered to email inboxes. The cost for this undelivered mail is enormous. Lost prospects, ineffective and inconsistent marketing, lost transactions and lack of communication all result from poor delivery of email messages. This costs legitimate email marketers billions of dollars in lost sales each year.
Email is an integral component of any successful digital marketing program but, in order to make the most out of this communication medium and achieve ROI, you must ensure deliverability. Deliverability, if properly watched and managed, can yield huge dividends. In this white paper, we’ll present 10 factors that impact email deliverability.
10 Factors That Impact Email Deliverability
1 - Follow list building best practices
The manner in which you build your list is the single greatest determining factor in deliverability.
• Avoid purchased, rented or harvested email addresses. • Make sure your email list recipients have explicitly opted-in. • Refrain from using pre-checked boxes in email sign up forms
(This is now illegal in Canada under the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation [CASL]).
• Validate new contact email addresses by sending welcome messages.
• Continuously weed out addresses that hard bounce or repeatedly soft bounce.
2 - Track and understand your email delivery rates
Monitoring your delivery on an ongoing basis is the key to quickly identifying and resolving issues. The best way to maintain a high delivery rate is to partner with an Email Service Provider (ESP) that focuses on high delivery standards. Find out how they continuously measure, monitor and manage email delivery. They should have a clear process that ensures your email is being
delivered. This process should include participating in various whitelisting and sender reputation programs, monitoring recipient feedback and automatically deactivating hard bounced email addresses. They should also monitor delivery across major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and establish an analysis process that eliminates potential spammers from using their systems.
If you’re intent on going it alone, the best way to maintain high delivery rates is to monitor your bounce and complaint rates while proactively monitoring variances in delivery rates.
Industry experts suggest using one channel or provider to send your emails, but if your organization sends email through several different channels and/ or providers, it’s important to consider the large-scale picture. Certain types of filtering used by ISPs can cause your deliverability via one channel to affect the deliverability of your other channels. Keeping track of the deliverability of all your mail streams (and/or consolidating them under one provider) is critical.
3 - Establish and monitor email reputation
According to the 2012 Email Deliverability Review from Return Path, ISPs on average base more than 80 percent of delivery rules upon the sender’s reputation. Your email reputation can be based on some or all of the following criteria:
• Email volume and frequency
ISPs are looking for consistent and predictable sending patterns. Too many emails can put you on the radar while not enough emails may put you too far under the radar, making it difficult to establish a positive sender reputation.
• Email authentication
Email authentication is a sort of digital signature that confirms to recipients’ mail servers that the sender is who they claim to be.
• List quality
Removing hard bounced email addresses from your mailing list, along with monitoring unsubscribe requests, will prevent avoidable damage to your sender reputation.
• Complaint rates
Recipients have the ability to report messages they don’t want in their inbox with the click of a button. By keeping an eye on complaint rates per campaign you can avoid any spam-related issues.
• Blacklists
A blacklist, or blocking list, is a collection of IP addresses or domain names that are flagged as being sources of spam. ISPs and mail server operators use these lists to block incoming email that is likely to be spam. Legitimate email senders can end up on a blacklist for a multitude of reasons, most of which can be controlled. By keeping an eye on your channel partners’ sender reputation, you can make sure your domain name isn’t being negatively impacted by something that has been sent on your behalf. An aged email list may have recycled spam traps in it, making you more vulnerable to being blacklisted.
• Whitelists
A whitelist is essentially a “safe list” of email or IP addresses that are accepted,
Monitor and manage your
• Reputation program participation
By participating in an accreditation or reputation service, you will receive reports on junk email issues that have been reported by a recipient.
• Permission and privacy policies
A legally approved privacy policy gives your email recipients a clear understanding of how you intend to use their data. Recipients will feel a sense of security in knowing your organization will strive to protect their personal information.
4 - Authenticate your email messages
Email authentication determines if an email message is truly from the origin identified. It is essentially a digital signature that shows receiving mail servers you are who you claim to be.
Today, all of the major ISPs are using at least one of the following authentication methods:
• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
Creates a specific record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that will prevent spammers from sending out messages using your domain name.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)
DKIM validates a domain name associated with a message, enabling you or your organization to claim responsibility for the message.
• Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)
An authentication system that enables you to set policies for what mailbox providers should do with unauthenticated mail purporting to be from you. For example, a sender could set a policy that mailbox providers should reject any messages appearing to come from them that do not have correct DKIM authentication.
5 - Check for SPAM triggers
The Radicati Group released a 2015 Email Statistics Report that predicts daily consumer email traffic will exceed 93.1 billion messages in 2015, with an expected rise to 117.7 billion by 2019. With so many emails constantly sent and received, inboxes are overflowing with messages on a daily basis. This abundance of communication can negatively impact recipients’ acceptance and engagement with email messages. In order to ensure your sent emails have safely landed in your
recipients’ inboxes and have not been marked as junk or moved to the trash folder, each message should be checked for elements that could trigger automatic filtering and/or cause recipients to question the validity of the message.
• Use of ALL CAPS
Use of ALL CAPS is commonly seen in spam emails, along with other formatting issues.
• Wording of your subject line
Subject lines such as Re: give the impression that the message is in response to something the recipient previously sent. This deceptive tactic can result in your recipient flagging the message as spam. Another subtle tactic that can result in an undelivered message is the use of random characters inserted in a subject line (hashbusting). If you feel like you are doing something tricky, spammers are probably already trying it, and that is not company you want to keep.
• Ratio of text to images in your messages
• Use of attachments
On any bulk deployment, attachments are not safe to send and can raise the red flag as spam. Larger, executable files, such as .swf, .wmv, .exe, etc. should never be sent as an attachment. Linking to a landing page to retrieve a document or file is a good practice as long as the linked domain has a positive reputation.
6 - Keep your IP address, domain and “from” consistent
As your reputation is established, it’s important to maintain consistency as a sender so ISPs, filters and your recipients will recognize you.
ISPs track accepted and unaccepted messages from an IP address. If an email is consistently accepted by the recipient’s email server, the IP address can be validated and subsequent messages will also be allowed in the email server. On the other hand, an IP address that consistently sends bad emails can be filtered out as a unreliable IP address, and may not be allowed to send future communications into the email server. Just as the sending IP address should remain consistent to avoid negative sender reputation, individual domains within the email are also evaluated to determine authenticity. Domains have their own reputation to uphold and should be kept consistent to avoid landing on a domain blacklist (DBL).
Once an email recipient has opted-in or subscribed to your list, they are familiar with your “from” name and can clearly identify the email as legitimate. If you are constantly changing your “from” name, recipients could think the email they are receiving is from an unknown party and may classify the message as spam.
7 - Ask recipients to add you to their “whitelist”
Bypass personal filtering by having subscribers add your
“from’’ address to their safe lists. Prompting subscribers to whitelist you is a precautionary method to avoid interrupted email delivery. There are several opportunities to ask a subscriber to add you to their whitelist, such as:
• Subscriber opt-in page
• “Thank you for subscribing” email
• Email specifically for the purpose of asking to be whitelisted
There are several benefits of being added to a subscriber’s contact or safe sender list. This is especially important in a B2B environment where an IP or domain name may need to be whitelisted on a corporate level. Companies can determine who their trusted customers and/or suppliers are and ensure critical emails are delivered to their inboxes.
8 - Keep your list clean
Keep your list clean by making sure you have a process in place (automated is ideal) for:
Ask subscribers to whitelist you and
• Processing soft bounces
Soft-bounced email addresses are valid but “temporarily unavailable.” The recipient may have a full mailbox that will not allow your message to be received. Monitor your soft-bounced addresses and, based off the frequency of sent messages, deactivate repeated soft-bounced addresses.
• Informing recipients how to opt-out
Let your email recipients know how to opt-out of your email list and be sure to remove any recipient who has opted-out or unsubscribed from your mailing list within 10 days, as mandated by CAN-SPAM.
• Removing unsubscribes
While CAN-SPAM allows 10 days before opt-out requests must be processed, you should not wait that long. Removing an unsubscribed email address from your list immediately will not only keep your list clean, but will also avoid any negative backlash towards your brand from additional emails received during that 10-day window.
• Maintaining feedback loops (FBLs) with all ISPs that offer them
Feedback loops help you know who has marked your emails as spam, which gives you the opportunity to remove those email addresses from your list. This can uphold your IP reputation and improve your email deliverability. Removing these email addresses can also reduce your complaint rate, which can increase from unhappy subscribers.
• Identifying inactive recipients and applying separate tactics to these contacts
Mailbox providers look at their customers’ engagement with your message. If you have a lot of subscribers who never take any action on the messages you send, it can appear that you are sending out unwanted emails and this can have an impact on your program. Identifying inactive subscribers and reaching out to them with different tactics to address inactivity can be beneficial.
9 - Never ignore delivery issues should they arise
Act quickly and diligently to determine and resolve any delivery issues. Ignoring delivery problems will not make them go away; it will only make them worse. Address issues immediately by:
• Contacting your email service provider • Contacting the affected ISPs
• Fixing any technology-related problems • Resolving any content-related issues
• Identifying any issues with your process that could have resulted in bad addresses being added
10 - Engage your email recipient with relevant content
In today’s consumer-centric market, engagement is just as important to email marketing success as render, click and
conversion monitoring. Subscriber engagement is a critical metric that influences inbox placement as ISPs look at engagement measures to help determine how “wanted” an email is.
Positive email engagement can be tracked through actions, such as opening a message, replying to the message, clicking through links, moving the message from junk to the inbox and sharing content. Negative actions, such as reporting the email as spam, unsubscribing, deleting the message or moving the message to the junk folder can also be tracked and negatively impact sender reputation and deliverability.
Strategic email marketing programs, based off gathered and analyzed data, offer marketers the ability to connect to consumers with content they expect and appreciate. This relevant content can directly impact reply and forward rates, increase the percentage of subscribers and re-engage inactive email recipients.
Conclusion
Email is a valuable channel for any marketer, but successful delivery is essential for an effective digital marketing program. As stringent compliance regulations continue to grow, following best practices to ensure deliverability is of the utmost importance. By taking these top 10 determining factors into account throughout your email marketing program, you are taking the proper steps toward achieving effective communication with your customers and potential clients.
Questions?
The best practices addressed in this white paper are based on email industry trends and the experiences of Harland Clarke Digital. If you have additional questions, we’d be happy to discuss them with you. Contact us at (630) 303-5000 or [email protected].
