How do you Evaluate your Email Deliverability?
Email marketing is a proven, cost effective, easy to use, powerful marketing tool. Marketing email newsletters are more popular than ever as they can be created quickly with colorful pictures, embedded with audio and videos, and with little effort can be shared among friends within social network circles: all this and more backed by real time results.
For those emails not shared, or read, can you verify they actually reached their intended destination? Are your emails blocked from reaching your recipients in-box, never to be delivered. On the other hand, are they lying helpless in a Junk Mailbox, trapped by a SPAM filter waiting their turn for the deletion queue?
Does your ESP (Email Service Provider) work on your behalf to ensure your email is delivered to the intended recipient by offering tracking and evaluation tools to assess your email deliverability?
How do you Avoid Email Deliverability Problems?
Statistics show that there is a growing trend to block or discard permission-based opt-in email, typically without warning to you or your recipients. Legitimate emails may produce false- positive results, where a false positive is a legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam. Steps to take to alleviate the false-positive situation –
The sender can minimize false positives by adhering to all the ‘best practices’ for sending email:
1. Confirmed Opt-In
2. Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
3. Domain Keys
4. Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)
5. Don’t send ‘spammy’ content
6. Remove old addresses that are not engaged (no opens, no clickthroughs, etc)
7. Participate in feedback loops (FBL) and remove complainers
8. Etc, etc…
False-positives are only one issue facing the Email Marketer. The bigger task include how to avoid and correct email deliverability problems where you are confident that the messages you send will actually arrive in the inbox and display as designed.
Is Email Deliverability Management possible?
‘Good’ email management tools provide some insight about your email delivery.
‘Great’ email management tools will:
1. Show you the percentage of your email marketing pieces delivered to the inbox versus the junk folder, and the percentage of those messages that are not arriving at all to anyone’s folder.
2. Reveal which ISPs are blocking your email.
3. Inform you if your email format is all wrong because of Bad Email Design. You should have the capability to view your formatted email in at least 50 email clients. I.e. AOL, Outlook, Yahoo and those in-between.
4. Alert you if your content looks ‘spammy’ to anti-spam filters by testing your messages against several types of SPAM filters.
5. Warn you if your sending domain is listed on one of more of the hundreds of realtime blacklists lists (RBLs).
6. Highlite delivery issues at specific ISPs, such as technical difficulties with a receiving email server.
7. Help you establish tangible benchmarks that resolve sending issue so you can achieve your email marketing goals.
With the right set of ‘great’ email marketing tools, you can uncover and fix problems, avoid mistakes, find and analyze issues you weren’t even aware of.
Dundee Internet Services offers advanced email list marketing tools, compatible with any list hosting service, to your improve email deliverability allowing more messages to reach their intended destination–your recipient’s in-box. Using our advanced email marketing tools, the best deliverability features are considered during the message creation process–fixing deliverability issues before your marketing campaigns go out.