Email Deliverability Foundations 

Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes. Advertisers use it to determine whether or not their emails will make it to their subscribers’ inboxes. Every email marketer is aiming for their recipients’ inbox and maximising engagement. Email marketing is an essential aspect of marketing, and doing it right is key, as it contributes significantly to the success of your marketing campaigns. When setting up your email marketing campaign, you want to use a platform that will help you improve your email deliverability and conversion rate.

 

To help you understand email deliverability better, let’s look at the factors that impact email deliverability.

4 Factors that Impact Deliverability 

Infrastructure and Authentication 

The first thing you need to do is understand the technology behind deliverability. At Munro Agency, our email sending infrastructure uses SendGrid, Shared IP Pools, and dynamic feedback.  The authentication technology that we utilise includes domain verification, DKIM, and SPF. You need to verify your domain when you set it up on our platform to prove that you have ownership of the domain. After verification, the next step will be authentication, where SPF lets the server know that the IP address can send emails on behalf of your domain.

Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM) allows you to tell the recipient server that the email source is who they say they are and that the content of the email was not altered during transmission. For authentication purposes, it is not a good idea to use a generic email domain, such as Gmail, to send marketing-based emails.

Transactional and marketing emails

At Munro Agency, we help many SMEs improve their email deliverability. Typically, when you send out emails using our platform, it goes through some checks, all the way to the recipients’ inbox. Generally, there are two types of emails. i.e., transactional emails and marketing emails.

Transactional emails are non-marketing and non-sales-related emails. It could be something like a password reset, confirmation that you own or have access to a confirmed opt-in process, or a notification, such as a visitor ID. These are emails that are sent out with no marketing or sales intent. Marketing and sales emails, on the other hand, are emails that have marketing content. They are mostly bulk emails. Marketing emails often undergo more scrutiny than transactional emails because they need to be identified as emails that must reach the recipient. 

When you set up your email sending domain on our platform, you are placed into an IP pool. To get high value from a dedicated IP then your volume has to be extremely high. Shared pools mean that we group companies so that your traffic goes out together with other traffic on the IP. This allows us to accommodate the volume that inbox providers want to see to legitimise the mail being sent. Our tool ensures that you get to authenticate your ID and that the content you send out gets to the recipient as it is and is not altered in-between transmission.

Sending Reputation 

Sending reputation is another factor that impacts your email deliverability. Your email sending reputation is affected by several things, including IP and domain pairing, bounces and spam traps, email lists, and warm-up receipts.

IP and Domain Pairing 

When you send out an email, two things will be checked from the source, which are the domain you’re sending from and the IP address. This is why being in a healthy IP pool is important because it helps your domain get a good reputation. Different algorithms will be looking at the reputation of domains and the content. Using the Munro Agency email sending platform means that there is no minimum number of emails that you have to send out to get good results. You get to control the volume of emails you send out while still getting the best out of your email campaigns.

Avoid Bounces and Spam Traps

When your email recipients use bounces and spam traps, they can worsen your reputation, such that inbox providers may not be keen on sending out your emails. They typically fall into any of the soft bounces or hard bounces categories. For soft bounces, you will get an acknowledgement that something is blocking your email from going out to the recipient’s email address. This can occur based on a variety of reasons. It could be because the recipients’ mailbox is full, or their email security system is blocking out your emails. Occasional soft bounces do not affect your reputation much.

When you get hard bounces, it signifies that you do not have any relationship with the person you are trying to send the email to. The biggest reason a hard bounce may happen is that the email address you are trying to send to does not exist. Hard bounces often have a significant impact on your email sending reputation. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your email list is healthy before sending out emails. We also offer some list verification services to check that the emails on your list actually exist. Spam traps may be more challenging to track down than hard bounces. This is usually an email address that’s monitored by services to try and catch spam-sending. Try to send only to qualified opt-in leads as much as possible to avoid getting caught in spam traps.

It is important to mark recipients who have bounced or unsubscribed previously so that you do not send them emails again because this indicates that they are not deliverable. If you do not have a good email sending reputation, you may want to change your domain. But since inbox providers will detect the algorithm, it is not advisable to change your domain. Instead, you can take up measures to correct what has been going wrong and improve your reputation.

Use Only Healthy Lists

Avoid purchasing lists to send out emails because different spam traps will identify that you are not sending consent-based emails. Consent-based means that you are only sending to people who willingly opted in. This normally happens when people who did not opt into your email mark the email as spam, and the more people that do this, the more your emails will be marked as spam. Eventually, it will damage your IP reputation. 

Warm Up Receipts 

Warm-up is another aspect that affects your sending reputation. This is where you temper your email sending gradually to increase the volume of content that people are interested in. Having healthy lists is important when it comes to determining the success of your email send-outs.

Email Content 

Content is key when it comes to sending out emails. For better engagement, you want to focus on creating high-quality and useful content before sending them out. When creating your email content, avoid using buzzwords, many exclamation marks, or all caps. Also, avoid using walls of text or single-image emails that do not have any text. Do not send out irrelevant or unsolicited emails to your recipients or send out too many emails within a short time.

Instead, use concise, focused subject lines that are relevant. Each subject line should concisely represent what the email is about. Keep an image or text ratio of around 20/80 since this is a healthy balance. Ensure that your message is focused and in line with your brand and business goals. Try to find out what your recipients are interested in to increase the chances of them opening your email. Also consider personalising with list segmentation.

Recipient Engagement 

Munro Agency provides a suite of tools to help you optimise engagement and email sending while altering you to any potential issues impacting deliverability. Email Sender Status — one of the tools we use on our platform — provides you with a report of some negative attributes and positive attributes of your email sending efforts, such as open rates, spam, and hard bounces. It is best to aim for at least 15- 25% of open rates in your email sending. Above 25% is excellent, but if you fall below 15%, you need to find out what is not working. You will be able to see all of your recipients’ email statuses from our control panel. 

Other tools that you can use to evaluate how good your recipient engagement is includes email reports, engagement scores, dedicated compliance or deliverability teams, and built-in opt-in functionality. Our platform also measures engagement scores to help you evaluate how many recipients are connected to your content.

Email Deliverability FAQs

What can I do to improve my email deliverability?

The important steps to take to improve your email deliverability include:

• Authenticating your email domain
• Having a proper IP allocation
• Perfecting your opt-in process and sending to only qualified emails
• Use a healthy email list and craft non-spammy subject lines
• Sending emails useful emails
• Avoid spam traps, and
• Measuring and improving your recipients’ engagement

Are all hard bounces automatically unsubscribed from the mail list? 

Yes. If you get a hard bounce, that email address is going to be unsubscribed.  You can appeal to show that it was a temporary outage on that recipient and that you can reverse it. A hard bounce means that the recipient’s server is saying that the address you are sending to does not exist.

Does the Munro Agency email marketing platform allow a re-engagement email to an unequalled audience? 

The engagement process on our platform is based on an engaged core associated with each lead in the system. Every time you send out an email to an individual, it is going to reduce their engagement score by 1. But if they open the email and interact with the content, it will increase their engagement score depending on the kind of engagement they take. You can therefore use the engagement score to decide who to send to. You can suppress emails to people who are low engaged or not engaged and then send out emails to them during a re-engagement campaign. 

At Munro Agency, we offer you an optimised email marketing platform designed to help you improve your email deliverability and increase conversions. We offer a variety of marketing automation and software tools at Munro Agency, all of which will help you generate better marketing results. We are a SharpSpring Platinum Agency dedicated to helping you bridge the gap between your sales and marketing efforts.

If you’re struggling with your email deliverability score or looking to understand how your audiences interact with your emails, feel free to contact us today and request a free trial of our email deliverability platform. Check out this link if you are looking for a managed lead generation service.