Email remains one of the core channels of communication. With so many organisations competing for engagement, ensuring your emails avoid the spam folder and reach your audience’s inbox is a vital part of your email marketing strategy and overall marketing efforts.
Here’s our top tips on setting yourself up for email deliverability success and how to protect your domain reputation.
To allow a recipient to consider you a safe sender, you need to have an Internet Provider (IP) warm-up plan in place.
The idea is to warm up your dedicated IP address and sender domain in order to improve the deliverability of deliverability of your email campaigns.
A well-designed IP warm-up plan will help you overcome those initial hurdles when you start sending to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or if you are returning to large-volume sends after going cold for a prolonged period.
Before a new email campaign is deployed from any sending domain, basic mandatory domain authentications need to be in place to ensure ISPs recognise you as a bulk sender.
This is required along with the basic Domain Name Server (DNS) configuration that your Email Service Provider (ESP) will ask you to implement.
If any of the below is not in place, you’re likely to have a high rejection rate against most of the ISP domain family.
Decide who you are sending to within your email deliverability testing programme.
The IP warm-up plan needs to be designed around the data you have available. An IP warm-up email should ideally be sent to the entire ‘active customer’ database. ‘Active’ is defined as customers who have opened and clicked an email within the last 12 months and avoid sending to contacts with invalid email addresses.
If you don’t, you risk a negative impact on your IP and your sender score rates will drop, which could result in your delivery volumes dropping. A ramp-up plan sets the scene for future sends. It’s imperative that you build a strong IP reputation from initial execution of your plan.
Depending on your circumstance, your first campaign could be a generic email to keep recipients informed and prompt them to interact positively with the email. An example of this could be – “We have now changed email service providers. Please save this domain to your favourites”.
It’s important to have an engaging subject line that will encourage opens. Avoid using spam words such as those that make exaggerated promises as this can impact your email deliverability too.
Ideally, your first campaign should not contain time-sensitive content. The email message will be sent over a pre-determined duration of time, so removing time-sensitive copy reduces the risk of sending an untimely email.
It’s advisable to send your campaigns as Multipart MIME (HTML and TEXT together), as this will help increase your email deliverability rate. Any customers unable to view the HTML can view the text version. Firewalls, whitelisting domains, Ips, and SSLs, can affect viewing and delivery of emails to corporate email addresses and mobile devices.