Maximize Email Deliverability
October 13th, 2008 by Matt MacDougallYour Newsletter was Sent but was it Delivered?
You spend hours crafting your marketing message but if you haven’t taken steps to insure it’s being received, there’s a good chance it isn’t. Here’s some tips to make sure your message gets through today’s spam filters.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail uses a method of signing each email leaving a mail server to provide trusted identification for that message to the recipient. This is a very powerful way of insuring that a message is not spam.
- Sender Policy Framework or Sender ID is simple to implement and let’s you specify which IP addresses or domain names are allowed to send email on behalf of you. This can help to identify IP addresses that should not be sending mail for you and could help build trust for your messages.
- Use a trusted IP address. Using a shared, unmanaged server to send emails can be dangerous. If another customer on the server attempts to send out spam and the server gets blacklisted by various ISPs, it can take several weeks to be removed from the blacklist. Your reputation gets tarnished along with the spammer.
- Signup for Feedback Loops. Large ISP’s like AOL offer a service called a Feedback Loop where email senders can be notified via email when users mark their messages as spam. This builds trust with an ISP as you become accountable for not sending spam. You want to try and have less than 25 complaints per 10,000 messages.
- Review failure messages. Those seemingly cryptic failure messages that get sent to your newsletter email address are actually very useful. They can be a big help in identifying things you may need to change in your mail server setup.
- CLEAN YOUR EMAIL LIST. This is an often neglected, simple, method to help deliverability. Each email that you send to a non-existent user at an ISP counts negatively against your spam score at that ISP. Each message counts for very little but it can add up quick if you’ve got a list you haven’t cleaned the bounces out of.
- Monitor Inbox Placement Along with Complaint Rate. Use a third party service to track the number of message “opens” for a particular mailing. This number is widely inaccurate since many people block this tracking but it is a good measurement to compare one message to another. Keeping an eye on your feedback loop complaint rate from one message to another can provide insight too.
- Check your message in various email clients. Don’t just see how you message will look in your email program, messages can appear very different in other email clients. Check at the least major online clients like yahoo, gmail, hotmail and aol. Also check multiple versions of Outlook. The more platforms you have available to check, the better.
Tags: Internet Marketing
