Building a Solid Email Reputation: Best Practices for Improved Deliverability

Email marketing has been a tool for businesses to connect with their customers, but the effectiveness of this strategy largely depends on email deliverability. When your emails fail to reach the recipient’s inbox, all your efforts may go to waste. To enhance your email deliverability and ensure that your messages consistently reach their intended audience, it’s crucial to follow a set of best practices.

Let’s review best practices for email deliverability.

What Is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability of an email to successfully reach the recipient’s inbox without being filtered into the spam folder. In essence, it’s the measure of how well your emails perform in terms of reaching their intended destination and being read by the recipient.

How Is Email Delivery Different from Deliverability?

While email delivery primarily focuses on whether an email is sent and reaches its destination, email deliverability encompasses a broader set of factors. It not only involves successfully sending an email but also ensuring that it arrives in the inbox, is opened, and is not marked as spam by the recipient.

High email delivery rates are important, but email deliverability also considers the effectiveness of your emails in achieving their intended purpose.

1) Authenticate With DMARC

What Is DMARC?

DMARC, which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, is an email authentication protocol designed to protect your email domain from spoofing and phishing. It could allow domain owners to set policies on handling their emails if they fail authentication checks.

How Does DMARC Work?

DMARC works by requiring email receivers to verify that incoming emails are aligned with the sender’s authentication policies.

When an email is received, the recipient’s email provider checks if it aligns with the policies set in the DMARC record of the sender’s domain. If the alignment fails, the DMARC policy instructs the recipient’s provider on handling the email, which could include quarantining or rejecting the message.

2) Only Send Emails to Relevant Recipients

Sending emails to recipients who have no interest in your content or haven’t explicitly given permission to receive your emails may harm your email deliverability.

It could increase the chances of your emails being marked as spam, which may negatively impact your sender reputation.

Consider building and maintaining a high-quality email list to improve your email deliverability. Ensure you’re sending emails to people who have expressed interest in your content, products, or services. You may even avoid purchasing email lists or scraping email addresses from the internet, as these practices could lead to deliverability problems.

3) Ensure Your Email Doesn’t Read Like Spam

To maintain a good email reputation, it may be crucial to ensure that your emails don’t resemble spam. Spammy emails are more likely to be filtered out or marked as spam by email service providers. To avoid this, you could consider following these guidelines:

• Use clear and relevant subject lines that accurately reflect the email’s content.
• Avoid using excessive capitalization or excessive use of exclamation marks.
• Steer clear of spam trigger words and phrases, such as “free,” “urgent,” or “act now.”
• Always provide an easy and visible way for recipients to unsubscribe from your emails.

Bottom Line: Email Reputation Matters

Building a solid email reputation and improving email deliverability may be essential for the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Understanding the differences between email delivery and deliverability, authenticating your domain with DMARC, sending emails only to relevant recipients, and ensuring your emails don’t resemble spam may be key steps in this process.

By following these best practices, you could increase the chances of your emails reaching the intended audience’s inbox and achieving their purpose effectively.