Getting into the main inbox is all about being compliant, and being able to show it – meaning that the spam filter will easily understand who you are and what you are sending. This comes with several steps that are highlighted in this article.
There are prerequisites to completing the final steps, which are highlighted here. We won’t go into the basic topics like authenticating your emails, making sure your links are secured, and gathering the permission of your contacts. We assume you already know this. We know you want to improve your email compliance for filtering entities.
To start with, what is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is the probability of your email to land in the inbox. Tracking your deliverability is indispensable to define if your content is working, and obviously, to know which percentage of the recipients received your emails in the inbox.
There are three principal factors that influence the deliverability: the identification or authentication, the reputation, and the content. For the authentication you have some protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prove who you are when you send emails. Meanwhile, in reputation you should take care of your sender reputation and, therefore, the spam complaint rate and other factors that affect it. If you want to learn more about the spiral effect of email reputation and how it can impact you, we’ve got an amazing article here!
Finally, the content is an important part of email deliverability. You should pay attention to not use spam words and to give your audience suitable and relevant content that makes them interact with your email, and thereby, increase your engagement rate.
How to improve your deliverability
We will highlight a few key elements that you may want to implement within your infrastructure in order to improve your deliverability.
The use of explicit subdomains
The subdomain is an additional part of your main domain. It is before your domain name, and companies often use it to distinguish the different sectors within it. This means that you announce to the spam filter what type of traffic you are sending, and why, by highlighting it in the subdomain.
For example: you can send support notifications via support.mydomain.com. You can send your onboarding through onboarding.mydomain.com.
A few examples of subdomains that have proven to help improve open rates include: onboarding (new signup sequence); app. (transactional traffic); out; news; and updates..
This way you avoid emails from one subdomain, like marketing, from harming the reputation of the subdomain used to communicate with your customers.
Work on your HTML and email keywording
This can easily affect placement and get your emails to land into the promotion tab or social tab on Gmail. We advise you to work with test environments and ensure that your keywording is aligned with your subdomain segmentation.
If you manage to get the algorithm to recognize that what you are sending is what you advertise, then you will likely see an increase in Open Rate and activity. This is particularly helpful for low open notifications such as the geographically triggered ones.
This shows how promotional vs main inbox placement can affect your open rate. The new version that lands into main is getting almost twice as much attention as the other one.
Make your traffic stable and your sending patterns predictable
This is of course sometimes really tough to achieve, but here are a few tips that could help you:
- Send your “manually” triggered campaign at the beginning of the day to optimize the send over the day;
- Set a maximum ‘email per hour per ESP’ on your SMTP settings. This will make sure that even a spike of activities or traffic on your app won’t create a huge spike in your outbound emails;
- When you create new emails, make sure that the volume outgoing will not create spikes - otherwise reduce the size of the segment again, or throttle the end of the emails.
Oh, this is a nice pattern of transactional traffic. We see regular bumps over the weekends but this isn’t affecting the open rates.
Use of dedicated IP with alignment between sending and receiving servers
Although not recommended for smaller senders, a dedicated IP correctly set up with the right PTR will allow a level of transparency and make it easy for the spam filter to track your history. This also comes with the right structure – you want a dedicated server per sending outlet to make sure each of them is easy to distinguish from one another.
As you see there is a match on both ways between the IP and the domain; the reverse lookup is set up correctly.
Sending from a single infrastructure
If you’ve found reliable emailing software, we recommend as much as possible trying to limit your activities to just one, or as few as possible, software. Having more than three email platforms sending email on your behalf, even if perfectly set up, can trigger adverse action from the spam filter.
Having many sources of traffic with independent IPs and patterns can lead you to be seen as a spammer. Instead, find a software that can cover all your needs per vertical, ie, one software that can do all your transactional emails.
Give the recipient of the email the opportunity to unsubscribe
Do not make this option complicated, being able to opt-out option needs to be clear. It doesn’t help you if the recipient can’t unsubscribe, as it’s unlikely they will want to read the email, or identify it as spam. Generally, the unsubscription link should be on the footer of the email campaigns. This is one of the first steps in order to have a quality list inside your email software.
If you want to learn about the ideal practices that you should follow to maintain a quality list inside your email software, check out our incredible article here!
Vous voulez mettre en place une campagne d'email avec l'aide d'un professionnel ?
Compliance with political laws
You have to comply with the applicable legislation regarding the recipients’ personal data. Any company or organization that sells a product or service in Europe must follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It is a data protection law within the European Union, and sets out rules on how a company can collect, store, and use personal data. To avoid data breaches we wrote an article about all the important factors that you should consider in terms of personal data and email campaigns. You could check it out here!
To conclude, the spam filters will reward anything that gives them an easier time getting to a decision. So make sure that you show your compliance and implement the items above. It’s an important optimization for advanced senders to get to the very best deliverability they can achieve. If you have any questions on the implementation of such practices, feel free to reach out to us!
Contact us now and we will help you set up a good email deliverability for your business. Our focus is to get your email traffic into the main inbox reliably. If you want to optimize your email deliverability and increase your mailing reputation with the best solutions, MailSoar is here.
