Do you know the key areas that affect your email deliverability? Do you know how to keep your domain safe? What to do if you get blacklisted? What tools can you use to help you? Our email deliverability expert shared his tips with us, and we’re going to share them with you in this blog.

Ready?

First up, the key areas that affect deliverability.

There are 4 fundamental areas that can affect your email deliverability. These include:

  • Poor quality data, whether it’s purchased data lists, spam traps in your lists or invalid data
  • Content – if you use spam words or poorly code your emails, you’re at risk!
  • Infrastructure, for example, any incorrectly set up domain info.
  • Sending – blast sending to new data or sending to unsubscribed data are two key examples.

So, what can you do to keep your domain safe?

Firstly, we would say avoid buying in poor quality data lists wherever possible. You want clean data that you know doesn’t contain spam traps and will ensure your emails go to genuine, active accounts. Your email deliverability will improve the more your data engages with your emails. That’s why you need genuine data!

Our second best practice tip would be to split up sending for engaged and non-engaged. This will keep your domain safe, even if your non-engaged meet typical industry standards and only engage at a sub 1% rate.

Third and finally, always send campaigns using time-based and batch sending. This will slow campaigns down and spread the sending over a longer period of time. This will help you keep your IP warm over time and ensure no sudden campaign sending spikes that attract the attention of spam filters.

What should you do if you get blacklisted accidentally?

If you believe your email domain has or may be blacklisted, the first step is definitely to get in touch with your ESP provider (i.e. us!) and our support team will help you.

Personally, what you can do is assess what sending behaviours you’ve been doing that may have resulted in you being blacklisted. Are you honouring unsubscribes because that’s a big one! Did you send to a whole purchased data in one hit rather than stagger them to warm up your IP? Have a look and see what could have caused it and then change that behaviour! There is nothing worse than repeating blacklist behaviour.

Ok – now you know what to do, you need the tools that can help

SendForensics is the third party app we use within our ESP which measures your infrastructure, content and flags up any potential deliverability issues BEFORE you send the email. From the vocabulary you use to the copywriting tone itself, as well as the six key areas within your infrastructure, SendForensics is definitely worth taking a look at.

In particular, it will check that you pass in the following areas:

MTA Toxicity – MTAs are programmes on mail servers that are responsible for routeing and sometimes delivering mail.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC – Email authentication protocols with different varieties of verification to make sure you are a genuine sender with genuine emails.

Spam traps – This is an email address traditionally used to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without permission, email marketers with poor permission and bad list management practices.

If you need more information about how SendForensics can help you, get the 9 common questions around SendForensics answered.