Improve the deliverability of your emails with these 10 best practices
Good email deliverability means that emails sent by your company arrive at the right destination, i.e. in your customers' inboxes.
But how can you improve the deliverability of your email campaigns ?
Marketers, discover the 10 best practices to adopt when it comes to emailing, as well as lots of advice on how to optimise your deliverability rate!
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability: definition
The deliverability of an email campaign is defined as the fact that the majority of emails sent arrive correctly in the recipients' inboxes.
But a good email deliverability rate depends essentially on :
- your reputation
- and your ability to maintain it. So you need to be part of a continuous improvement process.
Mail deliverability factors
Several factors and quality criteria contribute to your reputation in order to optimise your email deliverability rate:
- your domain name
- your IP address
- your business email addresses,
- ISPs (Internet Service Providers),
- webmails, messaging clients,
- anti-spam filters,
- technical rules and html code,
- the content of your messages,
- the interest and reactions of your recipients,
- management of your subscriber lists,
- your degree of commitment to the fight against spam,
- the professionalism of your ESP (Email Service Provider) or emailing platform.
The challenges of email deliverability
Email deliverability has become a major issue for businesses.
Emailing remains an important tool for communicating with your customers, and therefore for developing your marketing and sales. But if a certain percentage of your emails don't reach their destination, part of your strategy falls by the wayside... which has a negative impact on your business.
In addition, poor deliverability reveals problems with the reputation of your e-mail address, which need to be taken into consideration.
10 best practices for improving email deliverability
1. Take care with the quality of your IP address
IP addresses are associated with your emailings, and therefore with your reputation as a sender. Without an IP address to identify yourself, ISPs can simply stop you from sending your emails.
So you need to choose an IP address to show your credentials and prove your identity.
💡 We advise you to buy an IP address. That way, you can keep it, no matter how you move from one provider to another. It also helps you maintain the reputation you've spent time building up.
2. Use security protocols
Why use a security protocol?
- It allows you to be clearly authenticated using your IP address;
- ISPs and messaging services give preference to senders who are in good health and have security alerts;
- You avoid your domain name being borrowed and your ID being stolen;
- You protect your contacts from hacking of all kinds, spamming and phishing.
All factors that improve the deliverability of your email campaigns!
💡 There are 4 authentication methods:
- The SPF (Sender Policy Framework) protocol: this examines your domain name and its correspondence with the server(s) used to send your emails, thanks to the IP ;
- Reverse DNS protocol: this reveals the domain name linked to an IP address;
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) protocol: this uses a cryptographic signature in your message;
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): this authenticates each email by combining SPF and DKIM techniques.
🛠️ If all this sounds complex, the good news is that there are tools available to help you set up your security protocols. Merox, for example, can help you deploy a DMARC policy. In this way, you can secure your email domains and confirm your identity with the recipient in order to achieve a better delivery rate.
3. Link your email addresses to your domain name
Associating your domain name, i.e. your Internet address (e.g. appvizer.fr) with your own email addresses enables ISPs and messaging services to identify and authenticate you as the sender. Here again, the challenge is to maintain your reputation.
Examples of dedicated email addresses:
- postmaster@nomdedomaine.fr: to communicate with the technical manager;
- alerts@nomdedomaine.fr: this type of address can be used to automate certain actions relating to alerts, by setting up triggers;
- business@nomdedomaine.fr: reserve the use of this email address, for example, for business partners, or even customers, if you work in BtoB.
💡 4 beginner's mistakes to avoid in order to preserve your domain name:
- Never change the original intended use of an email address: you risk damaging your reputation.
- Don't use your specific addresses, such as the server administrator's address postmaster@votredomaine.com, for prospecting!
- Do not use a webmail address (gmail, orange.fr, hotmail.fr, free.fr etc.) to canvass or send mass mailings: these are not linked to your domain name and are reserved for personal, not professional, use.
- Don't send an email marketing campaign from a commercial partner using your own domain name: your reputation will be ruined.
4. Clean up and qualify your contacts' email list
A quality list meets several criteria:
- It is made up of "clean" email addresses, without too many hard bounces (non-existent or incorrect email addresses).
- Your contacts show an interest in the messages they receive: they open the email, click on your links, etc.
- The email address has been collected by your own means, legally and "fairly".
💡 Some advice:
- Aim for quality of email addresses rather than quantity: sending "the right message, to the right person at the right time" leads to customer satisfaction.
- Avoid buying mailing lists: if a web user has never been in contact with you, by subscribing to your newsletter for example, their natural and legitimate reflex is to declare you as spam.
- Clean up your database: don't leave bounces, unsubscribers and contacts who have lost interest in you in your customer file; they damage the quality of your list.
- Maintain your subscriber list : send them regular messages with interesting content to arouse their interest over the long term.
5. Segment your contact lists
Your contacts have different uses, expectations and needs, and each of them is looking for a personalised offer.
To meet the expectations of your subscribing customers or prospects as closely as possible, segment the profiles based on your statistics, but also on criteria such as :
- social
- demographic
- relating to centres of interest, etc.
💡 If you have several campaigns underway, define lists for each of them. Personalising the conversation with your web users is essential to meet their needs.
6. Ask for permission with opt-in and double opt-in
To engage your recipients naturally, there's nothing better than asking for their consent before sending any email. A quality list only contains :
- email addresses collected internally, on your proprietary spaces,
- and by means of a clearly identified proposal.
But what exactly do opt-in and double opt-in mean?
- Opting in involves asking permission to send content to a web user via, for example, a tick box in a registration form on a landing page of your website.
- Increasingly used, double opt-in is defined as sending an email to your contact following their registration on your form, with a confirmation link. This technique is safer because it allows the subscriber to be clearly identified: anyone can enter someone else's email address.
☝️ An unsubscribe or unsubscribe link should also be present and clickable in your emailing. On the one hand, this is a legal obligation. On the other hand, it is an excellent way of encouraging uninterested readers to unsubscribe. Your list will be the better for it!
7. Improve the engagement of your subscribers
Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook users will have noticed that these email services place a large proportion of unsolicited emails in the spam folder. After a certain period of time, unopened messages can be automatically classified in this category: we can see that "disengagement" has become a key factor on which messaging services base their decision to classify emails as spam.
That's why it's important to develop the commitment of your contacts, through regular, daily work. If you respect your audience and sustain your efforts over the long term, they pay off and translate into a better email deliverability rate.
💡 A few tips:
- Start by saying hello. With a welcome email, thank your contact for their interest in you. This is also an opportunity to make an appointment, encourage them to consult your online tips, etc.
- Personalise your messages: personalising an email is still the most important factor in getting a message opened.
- Distribute interesting, consistent content: tailor your content and offers to your contacts' profiles. It's all about communicating the promise you made when you signed up!
- Monitor your performance indicators: carry out regular analysis of each of your KPIs (open rate, click rate, deletion rate, etc.) to make any necessary adjustments.
- Revive inactive contacts by arousing their interest. And if you can't, then remove their addresses from your lists.
8. Define the right time to send your e-mails
A database that is over-solicited loses its quality. Targeted Internet users often become reluctant to open your messages, even if it means declaring you spam. To avoid this, adapt your content and choose the right times and rhythms for sending your messages.
To do this, you need to know your customers inside out. Determine their habits and then segment your lists accordingly. Gradually refine your list to identify the most appropriate times to send your emails.
9. Take care with the subject of your emails and avoid spam filters
The subject of your email or newsletter should be neither too long nor too racy, and should encourage people to open your message, while respecting the rules of anti-spam filters:
- If you use only capital letters, YOU WILL GIVE THE IMPRESSION OF SHOUTING. So avoid them.
- Use special characters sparingly (€, $, *, etc.) or excessive punctuation (!!!, ????, etc.).
- Ban spam words ("free", "earn money", "viagra", etc.).
- Carry out A/B testing to simulate the effectiveness of your subject on a sample of contacts, then choose the best one.
- Do not exceed 35 to 50 characters.
10. Work on the header of your emails
Finally, in terms of deliverability, anti-spam filters prefer a header (at the top of the email) with several of the following elements:
- information identifying the sender,
- an unsubscribe link (again),
- the "abuse@" email address for complaints,
- a "Precedence: bulk" header field to indicate that this is a mass emailing.
Gmail support confirms and makes mandatory the last point.
How do you guarantee a marketing strategy?
Make sure you optimise your emailing deliverability right away by maximising the return on investment of your digital marketing campaigns: apply the good practices set out above to ensure that your messages reach their destination in the best possible conditions.
To ensure that your actions are profitable, it has to be said that the main challenge lies in building and maintaining an excellent reputation as a sender. Between infrastructure, IP, security protocols, domain name, ISP vigilance, etc., the quality of your reputation depends on many elements converging in the same direction: showing your credentials.