Email Deliverability Guide

The importance of maintaining a high level of email deliverability

Maintaining a high level of deliverability is one of the most significant email marketing issues and the reason why email delivery is so important to digital marketers worldwide. And such won’t be possible if email deliverability is neglected. Email marketing offers a different set of issues to print, press, or television advertising, yet getting that all-important message out, in front of the correct audience, is common to all.

An introduction to email deliverability

Email deliverability is the key to obtaining your best results; it’s dependent on how you handle your campaigns, your mailing lists, and your content.
In the same way, you wouldn’t trust a dodgy-looking door-to-door salesperson; your email client and your server reject the approaches of equally dodgy email addresses.
Our email marketing deliverability best practices look into what makes a dodgy-looking and untrustworthy email account, and how to create the best and most healthy ways to garner a strong and positive reputation.

The importance of healthy email and domain reputation

You want to achieve the highest email delivery rate, landing as many as possible safely in your customers’ inboxes. The most important factors involved in creating your best chances are your email address, IP, domain reputation, the quality of your content, and its value to your client.

What is a sender email reputation?

Your business performance depends on your reputation—your email deliverability is no exception.
Different email providers estimate your sender reputation by gathering data about your sending behaviour and email operations. These judgements are made against your IP address or your email domain.
Either way, your IP identifier or domain is monitored to decide whether you’re a valid and useful provider of information or not. This way, you earn your sender score. The better your score is, the more chance you have of reaching inboxes; the worse it is, the more chance you’ll end up junked or filtered out.

Building a strong email reputation

A strong email or sender reputation requires planning, monitoring, and regular maintenance. High bounce rates, spam filtering, and a lack of engagement can quickly lead to a poor reputation. A poor reputation leads to further poor performance and into a significant spiral that is much harder to recover from than it is to prevent.
There are good practices that you should carry out in the technical preparation of your delivery. Some of the most important we’ve covered in previous articles. However, in today’s email deliverability guide we’re discussing the best email sending practices.

Why is email deliverability so important?

Typically, global inbox placement is around 85%. That’s 15% of all emails sent never arriving at their senders’ desired destination.
Could you imagine if 15% of your product deliveries went missing? Or if 15% of your payments didn’t arrive? Given that every email sent out is a possible conversion and sale, we should be just as disappointed in the way this limits potential income and profit.
So, how do you ensure you’re getting the best possible results from your email campaigns? By following our best possible practices, of course.

Best email sending practices

We’ve put together the following suggestions of how marketers should create a healthy email reputation and keep it that way. Following our best sending practices will, without a doubt, help the email marketers thrive—creating the responses, reactions, and return that they’re looking for.

Never buy, scrape or rent a mailing list

One of the golden rules here at Bouncer is to NEVER buy, borrow, rent, scrape or harvest email lists. Our big issue is that you don’t know what you’re buying.
Bought lists are most likely full of expired and spam trap email addresses. You’re also gambling whether anyone on the list has a genuine interest in your product or service.
Both of these factors lead to trouble. Regular mailing to expired addresses or spam traps will create excessive hard bounce rates—damaging your sender reputation. Recipients regularly ignoring or marking your emails as spam will also add to the damage.
Also, when you buy an email list, you haven’t acquired the recipient’s consent which goes against every grain of current GDPR legislation.

Consent creates engagement

The best way to ensure that the people are receiving your information, won’t ignore or junk your messages, is to send it to an already engaged audience.
Opt-in subscribers are your very best bet, as they’ve already shown an interest in what you’re promoting. Blanket marketing to a non-vetted audience often leads to more long-term damage than it promotes sales.
As far as GDPR legislation goes, you should have permission for every type of the email engagement, so you shouldn’t send anything to anyone without their permission anyway.

Continued engagement creates conversions

Humans thrive on routine and schedule, so to feed into that psychology. Analyse the data regarding the best send out times or create test campaigns to find out what metrics are your ideal and use them.
Consistency creates confidence
It’s essential to find the right balance of the schedule. Too many emails will feel like spam to most recipients; too few won’t provide the returns your business requires.
The ISPs monitoring your actions for sender reputation won’t want to see huge spikes or periodic campaigns involving huge numbers. Consistency is the key, so find out those best-performing actions and stick to them.

The unsubscribe button isn’t your enemy

It may sound counterproductive, but the unsubscribe button is one of your greatest assets. If a recipient can’t unsubscribe, often they’ll mark the message as junk. This goes back to the mail service provider or ISP, who applies this information to your sender score.
For those who aren’t interested in what you’re selling, the unsubscribe button gives you a real opportunity to cleanse your email list of uninterested parties.

Fixing the spam statistics

If at all possible, you should aim to keep your spam complaints rate below 0.1%. Figures suggest that rates above 0.08% impact deliverability in Gmail, so you can guarantee that other providers will be working to very similar parameters.
To turn this negative into a positive, see if you can find out what your complaints relate to and create a workaround to stop the same issues from reoccurring.

Sidestepping the spam traps

ISPs utilize inactive email addresses to spot the email campaigns with unethically acquired and poorly managed lists. You can lower your sender score and prevent damaging your deliverability by measuring how many inactive addresses you send out to.
Spam traps are one of the quickest ways to end up on a blacklist.

Blacklist prevention and repair

ISPs also utilize information gathered by outside sources to validate the quality of email senders. There are hundreds of blacklists quarantining the worst spammers and offenders, unfortunately, among those, you can also find legitimate senders, that did not pay attention to their sender reputation.
To stay ahead of the game, there are plenty of blacklist checker tools available. If you’ve found yourself on any of the lists, find out why, put things straight, and get yourself removed.
Some lists only keep email addresses in quarantine for a few days, but there are many more who will keep you on them indefinitely.

Constant care and email list cleaning

If you want to keep your email list healthy, then, regular cleaning is a must. This means understanding why the bounce rates are high, where spam complaints are happening, and which outdated addresses are still sent emails.

How to ensure email delivery?

Find the problem addresses and remove them. You should also set systems in place to prevent them from being re-added, if they entered your list via improper means.
You should be able to automize some of your list hygiene operations. However, a careful eye and monitoring addresses that don’t engage, suffer frequent soft bounces, or are the obvious generic addresses unassociated to a single relevant recipient, is just as important.

Filtering out those bad bounce rates

A hard bounce, such as a non-existent email address, expired domain, or unreceptive mail server, delivers a permanent error and an obvious case for removing the address straight away.
Soft bounces need a little more consideration. Most of the time, a soft bounce is a temporary problem that can resolve itself over a short time. You may find that the email delivers successfully after a day or two, once the owner cleans their inbox or server fixes their issues.
However, too many soft bounces from one address can be just as dangerous as a hard bounce. Set a limit to soft bounces and delete every address that breaks the rules.

Email verification is the best head start to list hygiene

One of the easiest ways to remove hard bounces, misspelled, catchall, and disposable addresses, is to utilize an email verification tool such as Bouncer.

Secure email deliverability

Most inactive email addresses occur organically with people switching providers for personal reasons, forgetting passwords, moving jobs, and so on. Using a validation checker will filter out all of these problem instances before they have a chance to impact your sender score and email deliverability.

Play by the rules, keep your lists clean, and you’ll reap the benefits

As we’ve outlined in our email marketing deliverability best practices, there are plenty of areas where your sender score is negatively impacted and the ways to make sure you keep ahead of the problem.
To be sure that your email list is optimized, clean, and efficient, Bouncer is here to help. Our system is simple, easy to implement, and over 99.5% accurate, when it comes to your mailing list management.
We’re certain you’ll see the vast array of benefits in no time—maintaining the best connection and conversions with as many of your customers as possible.
Start verifying all of your email lists today. Prevention is far better than cure, after all.