Email deliverability is a measure of how successful an email system delivers emails, either marketing or transactional, to recipients’ inboxes. However simple this may seem, delivering an email successfully is a lengthy and complex process, and there are a multitude of factors that can determine whether an email lands in the primary inbox of a recipient or not. In this article, we’ll break down the main components that have a significant impact on email deliverability and guide you through the best practices you should follow to successfully reach your intended targets.

1) Email Authentication

The first thing you should do before sending email through your Amply account is configure email authentication protocols. Email authentication is a technical solution that allows mailbox providers and email recipients to confirm the identity of senders and the legitimacy of emails. There are three email authentication methods that you should set up to maximize your email deliverability – SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance).

SPF

Sender Policy Framework is an email authentication protocol designed to prevent spam by verifying the sender’s IP address. In essence, SPF helps confirm that you are the owner of the domain you intend to send emails from, and gives you the ability to designate authorized mail servers to send email on your behalf. SPF is an essential email authentication method that will help you reach your customers’ inboxes and avoid the spam folder.

DKIM

Domain Keys Identified Mail is another email authentication method developed to identify email spoofing by verifying the message integrity of your email. It achieves this by providing a digital signature to each outgoing email message that lines up with your public DNS records, verifying that the email comes from an authorized source and hasn’t been tampered with. Implementing DKIM will not only enhance your email deliverability, but will also protect you from harmful email scams.

DMARC

DMARC is an email authentication system that leverages SPF and DKIM to define message failure and reporting strategies. It allows you to specify how you want email clients like Gmail to administer unauthenticated mail through a DMARC policy. You can monitor all of your mail to certify that legitimate messages are authenticating appropriately, and choose to either quarantine messages that fail DMARC (place them in the spam folder), or reject messages that fail DMARC (mail won’t be delivered). You may run into issues with implementing DMARC on a shared IP address because the rDNS of your IP would not align with the server name that is sending the email. With Amply, you are given a dedicated IP address to make setting up DMARC hassle free. Unlike other email providers, we know how critical DMARC is at improving your deliverability and protecting your business, your customers, and your brand from spoofing and phishing attacks. 

For businesses that send commercial marketing and transactional emails, it’s imperative that you set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC to maximize deliverability and drive revenue for your business. Properly arranging these technical specifications will also secure your communication, and thereby protect you and your brand reputation from devastating fraudulent email practices.

2) Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation is a key component of email deliverability. Before placing an email in the inbox of a recipient, mailbox providers screen the email to make sure that it passes certain reputation checks. They primarily look at the sender’s reputation, the server/IP reputation used to route the email, the domain reputation of links in the content, and specific email engagement metrics such as bounce and spam complaint rates.

A sender reputation is the reputation of the email address you’re using to send emails from. The success of your email initiative is reliant on you having a positive sender reputation as it indicates that your IP address and sending domain are trustworthy to mailbox providers. In order to maintain a positive, healthy sender reputation, you must send messages to known users to avoid bounces, spam traps, and blacklists.

For marketing email, the consistency of your email timing plays a role in your sending reputation. It is advised that you send your emails in a regularly scheduled manner, meaning that your timing on a weekly basis should be predictable.

Along with emailing your users in a consistent, timely manner, you must practice good list hygiene to deter bounces. A bounce is an email that has not been delivered to a user. There are two types of bounces – soft and hard. A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure. Soft bounces happen when a mailbox is full, a mailbox has been disabled and is not accepting messages, the mail system is full, there is network congestion, etc. In the case of a soft bounce, the email address you sent to was valid and reached the recipient’s mail server, but the message could not be delivered. The real problem lies with hard bounces. A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. Typical hard bounces occur when an email address is invalid or expired, the user’s mailbox was not found, the recipient is not local to the server, etc. You want to avoid email addresses that hard bounce on your list as it will negatively affect your sender reputation.

Sending to known users will also help you avoid spam traps. A spam trap is a fake email address primarily used by internet service providers and email clients to lure in spammers. Sending email to spam traps will label you as a spammer and cause your deliverability to decline. Avoid purchasing lists with unknown or fake users so that you don’t get caught in a spam trap.

You want to avoid spam complaints as much as possible. Spam complaints occur when your recipients click on the “mark as spam” button that is located in each email. Clean out old and unengaged users out of your email list, verify your email lists, and refrain from purchasing lists to reduce bounces, spam traps, and spam complaints, and as a result, improve your sender reputation.

Be conscious of being placed on a blacklist. Email blacklists include lists of IP addresses and sender domains that have been suspected or caught sending spam. If your IP gets blacklisted, your email delivery will take a massive hit. Amply monitors your email reputation 24/7 and alerts you if we detect you on a blacklist.

Make it easy for your users to unsubscribe from your emails by adding an unsubscribe link in each of your emails. Although this might sound counterintuitive, it’s much better if one of your users opts to unsubscribe from your emails than if they were to report your email to spam out of frustration instead. Providing your users with a clearly visible and obvious unsubscribe link in each email will drive down your complaint rate significantly.

Sending email with Amply makes it easy for you to maintain and grow a positive sender reputation. We manage the full lifecycle of all of your transactional and marketing emails, and provide you with the tools you need to drive engagement with your users.

3) Sending Infrastructure

Within your sending infrastructure, there are a few components that affect the efficacy of your deliverability. The IP address you’re sending email from plays a key role in making sure your emails get delivered. That is why Amply gives our customers dedicated IPs to maximize their email deliverability.

To summarize, a dedicated IP address provides you with full control of your sending reputation. With a dedicated IP, you can configure all of the email authentication protocols that we discussed previously in this article to improve your deliverability rates. You don’t have to deal with issues that arise from sharing an IP with other senders that could stifle your delivery.

4) Email Content

The content you display in your marketing and transactional emails is a major determining factor of whether your email gets placed in the recipient’s inbox or is marked as spam. To achieve excellent deliverability, it’s critical that you follow the practices outlined below.

The most important thing to consider is that you’re sending relevant content to your recipients. Your content needs to be in line with what you do and should go over how you can benefit your contacts or subscribers with your offering. If you send content that isn’t relevant to your brand, you run the risk of dealing with unsubscribes, or even worse, being reported. In addition to sending your contacts applicable content, it’s best to be consistent with how your design looks. Your email content is a significant aspect of your brand identity and should match the design aesthetic of your website or other marketing material to invoke a sense of trust and familiarity with your recipients.

When it comes to relevant content, the first thing that your recipients see before they read your email is your subject line. Recipients and spam filters will often report email as spam due to the subject line alone. Make sure that you’re not including any language that sounds spammy in your subject line, and try to avoid including spam sounding keywords in your email content as well. A couple examples of types of content that indicate spam are – capitalization of every word, too much punctuation, HTML mistakes, and specific words that trigger spam.

We highly advise against sending your email campaigns from a free, personal email address. Your brand identity is a very important part of your business and it’s imperative that your email initiatives reflect that. A personal email address such as an Outlook or Gmail account will be treated as spam by different filters in our infrastructure. In addition, mailbox providers and internet service providers’ implementation of email authentication protocol DMARC penalizes the practice of sending email campaigns from personal accounts. That is why when you first set up an account with Amply, you’ll go through a quick verification process for either your email or domain. The best thing you can do for your deliverability is to use a professional email address from a domain name that your recipients can trust.

When you’re putting together your email content, you need to make sure that you find the right balance between using images and text. The reason for this is because an email with a lot of images can look like spam. That being said, your contacts will prefer emails with some visual substance over pure plain-text content. We recommend using more text than images in your email content to ensure strong deliverability. Aim for a 60:40 text image ratio.

In addition to properly displaying a text/image ratio in your email content, it’s a good idea to add a plain-text version along with your HTML emails. Email clients will show the most suitable email version to your recipients based on their preferred settings.

Since roughly 50% of emails are read on your users’ phones, it’s essential that you design your email content to be mobile friendly. Formatting emails that are compatible across all mediums will help you avoid complaints and improve the efficacy of your email initiatives. With Amply, you can preview what your email content will look like for both desktop and mobile to ensure that the layout is properly displayed before sending them off to your contacts.

Conclusion

Deliverability plays a major role in determining the success of your transactional and marketing email activities. Follow these email deliverability best practices to achieve excellent deliverability and grow your business with Amply. If you have any questions or would like to consult an email expert directly, please contact us here.