Email deliverability failure is one of the biggest challenges that most marketers face despite having a good email marketing campaign in place. If your email delivery rates are also low and you don’t know how to overcome this situation, remember that maintaining email deliverability is a tricky affair and is a common problem in all organizations.
To place your emails in the preferred inbox folder of the receiver can be challenging as it involves a complicated procedure. After being accepted by the recipient’s ISP, your email messages should reach their inbox to get the real benefit of your email marketing campaign. Email deliverability helps you identify whether the email has reached the inbox, spam folder, or other folder. For your emails to reach your consumers’ inbox, you need to make sure that the email identification, reputation, and content are on point.
No matter how advanced the technology incorporated into your email marketing system, you will face delivery problems throughout the lifetime of email marketing. But if you know how to troubleshoot those email delivery problems, you can avoid most of them.
Here are the five questions that you need to ask yourself when troubleshooting email delivery problems:
Do you know your email sending reputation?
It is essential to have a high email sending reputation score, to maintain trustworthiness. The ISP assigns the email sender reputation scores based on positive subscriber behavior, how engaging their emails are, and if they are being marked as trustworthy senders and makes filtering decisions based on it. As your sending reputation fluctuates with each email campaign you deploy, you need to monitor your email sending reputation score regularly.
If you notice it going down, work towards improving the score to maintain your email deliverability. Before sending an email, you need to make sure that your reputation is high and reliable by sending only personalized, useful, and relevant emails to a targeted audience to ensure your emails’ deliverability.
A poor sending reputation will end up in your email in the spam folder. Also, make sure that you do not use email spam trigger words.
Do you know your complaint rate?
Irrelevant, too frequent, and poorly designed emails often get marked as spam by the receivers, increasing your complaint rate. A high complaint rate can reduce your email sending reputation score to a huge extent, affecting your email deliverability. Thus, make sure that you send highly relevant emails to all the users on your email list and remove the email addresses reporting your emails as spam.
You can also sign up for feedback loops to receive complaint data from the ISPs, explaining the reasons behind marking as spam so you can work on fixing it. At the same time, check your response rates to determine how engaging your content is.
Is your IP on a deny list?
If you are on a deny list, then you can get blocked at any ISP. High complaint rates are often the reason behind your IP being put on a deny list. Check if your IP is on a ban list by denying lists such as Spamhaus, SURBL, Barracuda Reputation Block List, Invalument, Spamcop, and MultiRBL. If you find your IP in any of these lists, you need to clear up the discrepancy by taking the proper steps to remove your IP from these lists.
Did you authenticate your email?
If you fail to authenticate your email, your IP can get blocked. Thus, it is essential to authenticate your email. By signing in your email, you can specify which domains legitimately belong to you. This prevents spammers and phishers from using trusted brand names to trick the ISP into delivering their mail and the user into clicking on malicious emails.
When you send an email, you need to maintain a specific set of protocols to establish your identity, such as Domain-Based Message Authentication, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Conformance (DMARC), and Reporting. By following these protocols, you can maintain the right email authentication identity needed for the best deliverability.
Do you have a new IP?
Just like a poor email sending reputation score can reduce your email deliverability, a new IP can also have the same effect. Thus, it would help if you warmed up your IP by gradually building your reputation to gain ISPs’ trust and mark you as a legitimate sender. Focus on increasing the volume of the email you send gradually over 30-60 days.
Email marketing is one of the most revenue-generating marketing channels that often get disrupted due to delivery problems. Thus, marketers need to focus on their emails’ quality rather than the quantity to troubleshoot them. Remember that you need to create relevant, attention-grabbing, and valuable content to attract and engage your customers to increase your email deliverability rate.
