This article will talk through the best practices for email deliverability. There are several factors that can affect how mailbox providers (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.) make decisions to either flag your email as spam, or allow them to arrive at inboxes.
Check out the terms and tips below for best practices for your emails.
Sending Internal Mail
If you are sending a message to the same domain that the message is coming from (i.e. sending from john@exampledomain.com to john@exampledomain.com), it may go to spam. That is because a mailbox provider can see that it appears to be receiving a message from itself. This could mean the mailbox provider thinks it is being spoofed, and thus the message will be sent to spam.
Solution: If you must send internal mail to test your messages, you may want to use a free service, like gmail. If you’re sending internal mail outside of testing purpose, the manager of the domain will need to whitelist the IP address of your SMTP provider.
DMARC
Does the domain you use for sending mail have a DMARC policy? (DMARC stands “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”. It is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol used to improve protection of a domain from fraudulent emails. You can learn more about DMARC here: https://dmarc.org/)
If your domain uses a DMARC policy but you haven’t verified the domain with your SMTP provider, your messages could be marked as spam.
Solution: Check with your SMTP provider for instructions on how to ensure your messages pass DMARC.
Sending From a Public Domain
If you’re sending messages from a free domain such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, our outlook.com, your messages may end up in spam.
Solution: Send email from a domain that you 0wn which matches your branding. E.g. instead of sending from mybusiness@gmail.com, send from firstname@businessdomain.com
Best Practices Subscriber List Health & List Collection
This is important but we highly recommend making sure you’re all set with the pieces above before spending time here. Here’s a few key factors to check:
- Ensure everyone on your list has subscribed to your communications. (Make sure they have given you permission to send email marketing to them.) You can add subscription information to forms on your website, and more, to explicitly ask for permission to send email communication to contacts.
- Make sure your contacts have multiple options to opt-out/unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in receiving your emails (check out our Unsubscribe Link tutorial for the how-to.)
- Clean/scrub your cold subscribers from your communication lists to improve your deliverability.
- This means removing contacts who are unengaged from your mass communications. Within the system, consider creating a smart list to tag contacts based on “last activity” and select a time frame such as >90 days or > 3 months, to filter out the cold leads.
- Secure your forms with reCaptcha or double opt-in.
- The easiest way to do this is to setup a double opt-in system. When a user signs up for your email marketing, you need to send a follow up email to confirm their subscription.
- This can be done in the system using a trigger. When a subscription form is filled out, a confirmation of subscription email is sent. When the link in the email is clicked, then the contact will be added to the marketing list.
Check out our “Email Deliverability 101” article for more tips and best practices on email deliverability.
