7 Dos For Deliverability and Avoiding Email Spam Filters

Orig. Post February 23, 2015 by Tracy Milligan, Oracle | Re-Post April 14, 2015

How much time and money did you spend crafting that last email to promote your new product or service? I bet you checked and double-checked the content, the images and the links before you were ready to hit send. But hold on a second, even though you may have sent the next award-winning email, there’s something else you need to take into account; what does it actually take to get your email delivered into the inbox of your intended audience?

Did you know that according to a recent inbox placement benchmark report from Return Path, 1 in 6 commercial messages sent worldwide never make it to the inbox? Roughly 17% of messages go to junk folders or simply disappear. That’s crazy, right? Not if you take a step back and consider all the factors that go into a successful send. With the ever-changing ability for mailbox providers to filter your email, it’s important to understand the entire deliverability eco-system.

As spammers have become more sophisticated in their ability to breach your inbox, corporate email filters have become more complex and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have also had to up their game. Understanding all the factors that contribute to deliverability can help you implement best practices and provide you with the insight needed to resolve minor problems before they lead to larger issues.

Below are a few key things to consider when it comes to getting your emails successfully delivered into the inbox of your intended audience:

1. Acquisition: Do you have good email acquisition strategies? Are the new contacts coming into your database viable and interested in your messages?
2. Spam Traps: Do you have a process to validate email addresses to be sure your database doesn’t contain a bad email that will land you in a spam trap or honey pot?
3. Complaints:  Be sure to establish feedback loops with ISPs so you can quickly address these complaints and remove these contacts from receiving future messages.
4. Bounces: Are you keeping an eye on deliverability KPIs? Understand what is acceptable in terms of hard or soft bounces and be sure to monitor these regularly to quickly identify potential issues.
5. Engagement: When developing your communication strategy, do you consider engagement rates? Continuing to send communications to customers who do not engage with you can drag down your campaign performance, as well as lead to unwanted complaints that hurt your reputation.
6. Content: Is your content up to par? Email filters check all aspects of your content, from language to reputable links to how well your emails are coded. Are your emails hitting the mark?
7. Infrastructure: Have your domains been properly configured for sending email? Did you go through an IP warming process before launching regular campaigns?

To ensure your messages are reaching your intended audience you need to understand all the factors that influence deliverability. Oftentimes this can be overwhelming for marketers who also have to juggle the demands of creating and executing their campaigns. However the success of those campaigns relies on high deliverability rates, for if your message isn’t seen, no action can be taken.