Take control of your email campaigns to ensure maximum deliverability. Don’t leave everything to your Email Service Provider (ESP); in fact, your ESP really only controls a small aspect of deliverability. The rest is up to you. You can and should exert a high degree of control over the content and configuration of your emails. Good content and smart design will in turn lead to higher deliverability rates. George Bilbrey of Return Path offers some excellent tips in a recent article:
1. Get the fundamentals right. Poorly configured email servers reek of spam. This is the one area where your ESP does have a lot to do with deliverability. But it’s only what you make of it. Make sure your ESP is maintaining a good infrastructure that doesn’t render your outgoing emails spam-like. Bilbrey notes that ensuring that you have a dedicated IP address is the most crucial aspect here.
2. Avoid complaints. Let recipients opt-in to receive mailings, and make sure those messages are relevant. You should be sending emails frequently enough to stay at the top of your customers’ minds, but not so much as to annoy them. Three emails per year is probably not enough; three per day is definitely too many. The bottom line? You don’t want recipients to grow so frustrated that they automatically hit the “This Is Spam” button every time they get an email from you.
3. Bring out your dead! Practice good list hygiene and periodically weed out all of the dead or nonperforming email addresses on your list. When someone signs up for your list, send out a welcome email to check for bounces. As Bilbrey points out, a high proportion of emails sent to “unknown users” is strongly suggestive of a spammer. Make sure you don’t give the wrong impression by keeping your list free of bogus addresses.
4. Resist the honey pot! Spam traps, also known as “honey pots”, are dormant email addresses used to apprehend spammers. These spam-trap addresses get mixed in with lists of legitimate recipients, usually when you’re emailing infrequently (and hence getting older, inactive addresses) or sending emails to a very old list that has not been updated. Sending to these spam-trap addresses can get you blacklisted; all the more reason for maintaining good list hygiene (see #3).
5. Unclutter your content. Bilbrey cites content as a less common but still important factor in ensuring email deliverability. He emphasizes that, while reputation (as determined by the above factors) is absolutely key to deliverability, there are certainly systems that filter for content, so it is something to keep in mind as well. If the content of your emails is complicated, cluttered, or otherwise spammy-looking, you may encounter problems with deliverability.
Touching on this last point, we’ve all heard the phrase “Content is king.” Take this to heart. While Bilbrey and many others cite good content as less essential to deliverability than all the other factors discussed here, I would argue that it deserves perhaps the most attention, as it is the area where you have the most control. You control 100% of the content and design of your emails, so it follows that you can make the most impact by focusing your efforts on cleaning up your content, improving your design, and writing with your desired audience in mind. Go ahead, be a control freak!
