As a marketing firm, our team deals with mass email campaigns on the daily. Our biggest struggle is configuring emails so that they land in the appropriate inbox; most importantly landing in an inbox that our chosen recipients pay attention to.
What do we at Leadarati do when we face an obstacle? We turn the Grasshopper into the Master!
Having outgoing email rejected due to domain name system (DNS) configuration issues and a compromised reputation is becoming a problem that more and more Internet email server administrators face. We did some research and found out that the average inbox placement rate was 83% in 2019—meaning one out of every six messages failed to reach the inbox. Global deliverability saw a slight decline of 2% points from the 2018 average of 85%.
So, it isn’t only our team that’s facing this issue and needs help.
If you’re using email to contact your prospects, pay heed. We rely on our emails as a critical tool to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Here are five basic issues that need to be addressed to fix this email outrage:
Inbox Placement. Defining your inbox placement ratio (IPR) helps to improve the placement of your emails in the inbox. Your reputation as a sender with ISPs can change over time. Sending without permission or too often can generate spam complaints and bounces. But you can also repair your reputation by improving your email practices and get positive feedback from your recipients.
DMARC Analytics. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a technical standard that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam and phishing. This standard establishes a method for a domain owner to publish its email authentication practices.
Bounce Analytics. Email bounces occur when an email can’t be delivered to a recipient’s inbox, comparable to the internet marketing term – “bounce rate.” Much like decreasing a bounce rate, there are many ways to minimize issues creating undelivered emails (email bounces).
Monitoring and Alerts. Placing internal bots, algorithms and monitoring processes will allow for a continuous and deeper watch on errors occurring and will record and generate alerts to be sent to the appropriate people. These monitoring and alert implementations will minimize negative side-effects causing deliverability failures.
Reputation Check. Reputation is everything, especially when it comes your email’s deliverability! Your reputation effects your Internet Service Provider (ISP), which directly effects your email deliverability. I’m sure you guessed it, but with a higher score – your emails are more likely to be delivered. But no need to worry because a domain reputation can be restored with practices like prime your IP address, purge your recipient list, check blacklists, implement a sender policy framework, and more.
It’s important that you monitor your delivery reports and act on spam complaints, non-deliverables and bounces immediately. If none of this made sense to you, then you’re in luck because we've developed a program called EmailXpress that will do all of this for you!
This is critical to do, especially if you've been blacklisted. Let us know if you're interested and we can send you more info.
Delivering your emails one inbox at a time,
Anita O’Malley
CEO, Leadarati
P.S. - If you aren’t ready to reach out to us yet, one thing you can do to improve deliverability is to make sure you are not using “spammy” words in your email copy. This does contribute to your deliverability rate. Here's a great resource for checking that out.
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