5 ways you can increase your email deliverability by 50% in the next 1 month

If the money is in the email list, then overall email deliverability makes or breaks the business. It means the list is useless. Once it goes below a tipping point, there is the danger of permanently appearing in spam folder or even being completely ignored by service providers.

We have been through this in our earlier days and thats why we build the SendNet platform to measure, track and pre-warn about every tipping point metric in the email marketing business.

Here are ways to improve your email deliverability step by step.

IP Address Maintenance

Shift to a dedicated IP address if you can. If you have a shared IP, you are only as good as the other companies that are using it and you dont even know who they are. This might be expensive but it is worth it. If you are looking a super cheap alternative, you can use Amazon SES in pairing with SendNet and it will cost you zero $ to start over and you will also end up paying a hundredth of what you are paying currently.

If you have to buy a dedicated IP address, get it from a reputed provider. Sendgrid is one of them.

Also, run the IP address through a blacklist. You will have to do this regularly and take measures if any of the lists have your IP.

Gradully warm-up your IP. Dont send it initially to your entire list. This is because email providers need some time to get used to seeing emails coming from the IP and also people happliy receiving them before they allow you a full pass.

The Technical Stuff

There are 3 main things you need to know about and even study if you are new to it so you can ensure that your emails and the IPs you send from play nice with email providers. Basically, email service providers need to know that the IP that is sending the email is actually the owner of the domain and that it is not a phishing attack. Plus they need your email to be encrypted so that it cannot be spied on in the process of transfer. Here is how they ensure that...

SPF records

SPF of Sender Policy Framework is a way to prove to email service providers that the IP that is sending the email is actually authorised to do so. It proves that you own the domain first of all and subsequently you as a domain owner really use this particular IP to send all your emails.

Conversely, it protects you from someone else sending emails from your email address and scam your customers.

DKIM signatures

DKIM is another way of proving the same thing. Some email providers like Gmail prefer SPF but Hotmail required you to have DKIM from the beginning. Just make sure both are in place with your administrator.

TLS encryption

Email providers trust you more if you take the care to provide basic encryption to your emails spo they are not interecpted. Plus they tell the users that the email may not be secure leading to less trust from them as well. Make sure all your emails use TLS grade encryption.

About lists and sending practices

Keep your list clean. Remove broken/bounced emails from your list regularly. SendNet, for example does this automatically and reports bounces in a prominent manner. Also be careful of sending to any contacts that have been inactive for more than six months. Its better to remove them than suffer the penalty.

Do not purchase email lists. Its simply not worth it if you are in this for the long run. Plus with GDPR its not straight up illegal.

GDPR also requires you to use a double opt in subscription method. In all other matters like terms and conditions, providing easy unsubscription options GDPR is a good route to follow not just for compliance but also for list health. It also helps to tag contacts about GDPR compliance so you can work on the ones that have not been acquired by the ideal GDPR compliant methods.

Do not use personal email addresses. Play with the sender name. If your have a powerful brand, then the brand name tends to work better but otherwise we find that using a person's name gets you more open rates more often.