Want to improve email deliverability and get even more out of your campaigns? Or maybe you’re experiencing deliverability problems and would like to make sure your offer finally reaches your customers’ inboxes? Whatever the situation you’re in, this article will come in handy.
Below, you’ll find 17 tactics to help you improve email deliverability, sender reputation, and email engagement.
Before we dive in, if you’d like to catch up on some of the topics we’ll cover here, start with these three articles:
- Beginners guide to email marketing
- Why emails go to spam and what you can do about it
- Email marketing best practices for 2020
Let’s begin.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Evaluate your situation
Before you do anything else, it’s best to start by analyzing the situation you’re in. Based on this analysis, you’ll get to decide what you want to do next.
Begin by checking your deliverability, and evaluating your list quality and the results of your last few campaigns.
After reviewing these areas, you should know:
- If you’re listed on any of the major blacklists
- If your authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is set up properly
- How engaged your contacts are
- What percentage of your contacts are inactive
- What percentage of your contacts unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam
- How your results compare to the email industry benchmarks
We’ll refer to these areas later on in this article, so make a note of your answers.
2. Get your IP removed from email blacklists
If you’ve found your IP or mailing domain listed on any of the major blacklists (you can check that using reputation management tools like MxToolbox), you can contact the list admin. Ask them for help and advice on how you can improve your mailing practices, and often they’ll be glad to provide you with additional guidance.
Whatever the outcome, there’s usually a reason why you’ve been blacklisted. If you don’t change your processes and how you run your email campaigns, you may end up on that list again. So, keep reading this post and treat this step as a short-term solution.
3. Create a unique brand identity
Having a strong and unique brand identity can help you increase your recipients’ engagement with your emails. And since engagement is an important element of email deliverability, let’s look at ways how you can improve your brand identity:
- Use your own custom domain to send your email campaigns (as opposed to free email domains like Gmail)
- Use consistent Email fields (From, Name, and Address) across all your campaigns
- Use the same design across all your marketing channels (color scheme, fonts, graphics)
- Use Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) and add your brand’s logo to your emails
4. Make sure your emails are authenticated properly
Another thing that often causes email deliverability issues – and can be easily fixed – is related to authentication.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail our Outlook may filter out or reject your emails if they seem suspicious.
This is related to who you are, how you’re sending your emails and what’s inside them. For now, we’ll only look at the first two factors. – Read more
