Are your emails being delivered properly?
Delivery is still the number one area of concern for email marketers, and with so many factors that can affect it, it is something that you must closely monitor to ensure your email reaches your subscribers’ inboxes with all of the design aspects and linking features in place. Eight out of 10 marketers struggle with deliverability issues but few know what to do to monitor and solve the problem.
The first step to solving this problem is to monitor your block percentage by ISP. Knowing who is blocking your email will help you pinpoint the issues as the different ISPs use different tools to determine the validity of an email. However, most use a reputation- based system that measure the number of complaints, number of bounces, number of messages sent, and the size of the messages. If your reputation reaches the threshold, the ISP will block your messages. Reputation is also impacted by factors such as the message’s header and the source server’s IP address, host name, from address field, reply-to address field, email text, image tags, and links to external websites in either plain text or HTML format. If the ISP finds any errors or abnormalities in these areas, your company could be blacklisted.
To measure your reputation online for free, visit http://www.senderscore.org/. If you identify a problem there are several things you can do to fix it. For example, if your subscribers are mistakenly reporting your emails as spam, find out why. It could be a frequency issue that you can solve by sending them fewer messages, or perhaps it would be better to just remove them from your list altogether. After all, someone that reports you as a spammer isn’t likely to make a purchase the next time you send them an email. If the problem is more technical in nature you should check to be sure your email is sent from a dedicated IP address and that headers, tracking links, and images contain your domain name. Maintaining an isolated infrastructure will help you overcome many deliverability challenges. To learn more, read Listrak’s white paper How Reputation Impacts Deliverability.