If you’re in the business of email marketing, it’s important to make sure your messages are as effective as possible. Deliverability is an aspect of the marketing process that many people don’t put enough emphasis on — but fortunately, there are some best practices you can follow to ensure your emails arrive in the inbox of your customers and prospects.

In this post, we’ll cover what makes up a good email campaign and how you can improve deliverability for your messages.

 

1. Understand the rules of the email delivery game

Deliverability isn’t just about putting a lot of effort into your email campaign. You have to play by the rules, too, and these rules change from one provider to the next. The first step in improving deliverability is making sure you know which providers you want your messages delivered to, how often you can send messages to individual recipients and what keywords are off limits for your messages.

 

 

2. Make sure your list is clean and up-to-date

When it comes to email marketing, a large list is always better than a small one. Not only can you send more messages, but you also have more people who can receive your messages. But if your list is full of inactive subscribers, the remaining, active subscribers will receive a lower deliverability rate.

It’s not difficult to identify which contacts are still active on your list and which ones aren’t. Start by creating an automated email to send to all subscribers asking for an interaction that requires them to reply or take some sort of action — a good example would be sending a survey or content upgrade offer where they need to click a link in order for their participation to count. If they don’t take action within 30 days, remove them from the list and move on.

Use your email service provider’s tools to monitor which contacts open your messages and which ones click through to your website. These metrics can help you identify subscribers who aren’t engaging with your content.

 

3. Improve deliverability with a good list-building strategy

If you’re not getting enough opens and clickthroughs from current subscribers, there’s not much you can do about it — but if you’re building an email list from scratch, there are practices you should follow to increase the deliverability of your messages.

Subscribe all prospects to a webinar or some sort of educational content upgrade offer.

Include a strong call to action to subscribe in your emails, and make sure it’s clear what the benefit of subscribing is for this particular prospect.

Focus on building relationships between you and your subscribers — use tools that help you track the level of engagement within your list.

 

 

4. Send engaging messages

The quality of your email marketing messages can have a considerable effect on deliverability. The more engaging your messages are, the more likely they are to be opened and clicked through to your website. Here’s how to make sure your emails capture attention: Include a strong opening message that compels recipients to read through to the end of the email .

If you’re planning to include images in your campaign, make sure that you’re sending the right number and type of images. In general, you should send one image per message. More than one image per email can increase the chances of recipients opening an email from a mailing list — but too many images can be off-putting and cause recipients to throw their emails away altogether.

Ensure that your subject lines are distinct and compel recipients to open your messages. You can use the subject line feature in most email services to deliver a subject line that matches the content of your message, meaning subscribers will be more likely to open the message — and if they open it, they’ll be more likely to read it through until the end.

Write your content for your audience, and make sure it’s useful to them. Without a call to action in the message, subscribers are unlikely to click through.

Always use a professional email signature that includes your company or brand name and website address.

 

 

5. Allow your messages to be opened on smartphones and tablets

Do you know what percentage of email opens happen on mobile devices? It’s about 60 percent ,and this number is expected to continue increasing throughout the coming years — especially as more and more people start using mobile devices to check their email every day.

If your marketing messages aren’t mobile-friendly, you’re going to miss out on an enormous segment of your audience. Here are some tips for making sure your messages show up on as many devices as possible: If you can include a strong call to action in your messages, it’s possible to make viewers click through. But if you give them no indication of what they should do after opening the message, they’re more likely to simply read the message and ignore the call to action.

It’s not enough just to tell subscribers what device they should view your content on — you have to ensure that the content itself is formatted for mobile consumption. This means making sure multimedia elements are sized correctly and don’t cause problems for mobile devices.

If you want to test your messages in order to make sure they are mobile-friendly, you can upload them through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Start using email to build relationships with your subscribers, and then use other channels — such as webinars, newsletters and social media — in order to give them the information they need. Remember that the best email marketing campaigns are the ones that are set up on a long-term basis. If you do things right, you’ll be able to attract more subscribers and increase your deliverability for years on end.

The DMARC specification was invented to improve email deliverability.

Most popular email accounts and services use DMARC to qualify how spam messages should be handled when they are received through their servers. When a service like GMail receives an email, the first thing it will do is perform a simple check against the sender domain’s domain name system (DNS) record to see if the sender is within that service’s approved list. If this DNS check confirms that the message was sent from someone who operates an account within the recipient service, then delivery goes forward as normal — but if not, then DMARC will take over.

DMARC can actually review three areas of concern: The authentication status of emails; The reputation of senders; or The reputation of recipients.

Here’s how it works: If an email address is listed as not authentic, the message will be dropped and the sender will receive a notification that their mail has been rejected. If the address being transmitted is blacklisted by other major email providers, then it will automatically bounce and the sender will receive a notification that their mail was rejected “due to high volume of messages from this domain.” The final case is if there are 100 or more recipients from a single IP address, and all of them are on an approved list, then the message would be accepted and distributed.

Dmarc stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

Dmarc is a DNS extension created to provide email authentication and validation to prevent fraudulent email messages from being delivered to the intended recipients. Dmarc relies on SPF (Sender Policy Framework) which provides data that specifies which servers or IP addresses are authorized or not authorized to send mail on behalf of the domain owner, DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) for message integrity checking, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) for reporting & conformance purposes.

 

 

Dmarc is a DNS extension created to provide email authentication and validation to prevent fraudulent email messages from being delivered to the intended recipients. Dmarc relies on SPF (Sender Policy Framework) which provides data that specifies which servers or IP addresses are authorized or not authorized to send mail on behalf of the domain owner, DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) for message integrity checking, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) for reporting & conformance purposes.

Resources: http://www.dmarc.org

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Resources: http://www.dmarc.org Google AdWords Best Practices – https://adwords.googleblog.

 

DKIM, SPF and DMARC are email security protocols.

SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a DNS look-up that provides information about which servers are authorized to send email on behalf of the domain owner. The purpose of SPF is to prevent spoofing by spammers. If an email server receives a message and the DNS for that domain name does not contain SPF records, then the mail server will reject it as spam.

DKIM, or Domain Keys Identified Mail, is used to validate emails from the sender’s perspective.

This system uses keys and shared secrets to sign messages with a digital signature that can’t be forged by third parties such as spammers. DKIM allows senders and receivers of email messages with attachments from within organizations to automatically check whether (among other things) the email is authentic and has not been altered, by using public-key cryptography.

DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, is an internet Draft that provides a mechanism for domain owners to transmit their policies relating to message validation back to a Mail Receiver or Mail Delivery Agent.

 

 

This is extremely important and useful as it allows senders of email messages with attachments from within organizations to automatically check whether (among other things) the email is authentic and has not been altered, by using public-key cryptography. DMARC also allows a domain owner to indicate if they want all email to be authenticate regardless of which mailbox it was sent from (i.e., SPF cannot be used).

SPF specifies the servers or IP addresses that are authorized to send mail on behalf of a domain owner. DKIM provides data that validates the integrity of messages by using a keyed hash function to identify whether changes occurred in transit. DKIM signs each outgoing message with a digital signature. DMARC works by utilizing both SPF and DKIM data to stop messages from being sent from unauthorized sources, such as spam bots or spammers.

With DMARC, you can create policies to detail how your organization deals with incoming emails that fail DMARC authentication. Depending on what you set your policy to, the message will either be rejected (denied delivery), accepted (delivered with warnings), or marked for DKIM or SPF quarantine.

When setting up DMARC, it is strongly recommended that you leverage industry best practices, such as the “p=none” policy. This way, you won’t have to maintain additional tags in addition to your domain tags.

The DMARC protocol was designed to combat email spoofing where emails are sent that appear to come from a legitimate sender, but are actually sent by spammers or other attackers. The DMARC protocol was designed by a broad coalition of industry leaders including Google and Yahoo! as a standard for how email receivers should handle message authentication, message origination and message integrity.

DMARC is an acronym for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. DMARC specifies a mechanism for email receivers to validate messages that are purportedly from the domain owner.

DMARC is designed to combat email spoofing, where emails are sent that appear to come from a legitimate sender, but are actually sent by spammers or other attackes.

DMARC checks the Domain Name Service (DNS) record for a domain and then compares it to the message header of emails being sent from that domain. If the two don’t match, then the address is considered spoofed. DMARC queries a DNS server several times to ensure it is getting accurate information about the sending IP address.

/instruct [mailhost] to reject with the following

DMARC is designed to ensure that all domain messages are authenticated. This helps to protect from messages that claim to be from your domain, but in fact are not.

DMARC Metrics & Reporting

You can use DMARC reporting and analytics to assess email security and build trust for your domain. Use DMARC metrics and analytics to measure your efforts and then adjust your strategy accordingly.

DMARC Records

Typical deployment includes adding one or more DMARC-related TXT records per domain. A DMARC record includes the following fields:

The DNS domain name that has a DMARC record (also known as the Policy Domain Name)

Whether to take action on this domain (p=)

Reporting address for this policy (example: _dmarc.example.com)

Domain owners can choose from these two actions when sending a message:

Reject message/Quarantine message – This option specifies that the server should reject or quarantine the message but should not communicate back to the sender. Records take one of these two forms: “reject” or “quarantine”. Once set, this policy is enforced regardless of what server receives the message.autoresponders deliverability]

None – This option specifies that the domain should not take any action on messages sent from this domain.

DMARC include these extra fields to provide information about why certain actions are taken:

DMARC reason (example: “p=reject”) The result of the DMARC evaluation (example: “fail”) The alignment of the SPF policy (example: “none”) The alignment of the DKIM policy (example: “none”)

It is possible that a message will pass DMARC positively, but fail for some other reason. For example, you can have a solid SPF record which stops your message from being delivered as spam, but your DKIM record is invalid for some reason.

DMARC is designed to ensure that all domain messages are authenticated. This helps to protect from messages that claim to be from your domain, but in fact are not.

DMARC Metrics & Reporting: You can use DMARC reporting and analytics to assess email security and build trust for your domain. Use DMARC metrics and analytics to measure your efforts, then adjust your strategy accordingly.

Tips for increasing deliverability:

Use appropriate SPF and DKIM settings for your domain’s DNS records.

If the MRC matches, then send the email as it is. If a MRC policy does not exist, then send the email as it is.

If you are using an automated service to send email on your behalf, you must update your existing SPF and DKIM records with their respective values. For more information see Google’s Webmaster Tools guide to Analysis of Proper SPF and DKIM configuration for Automated Emails at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6531.