Are you about to launch an extensive email marketing campaign in Salesforce? If you’re concerned about email deliverability, you’re on the right track. Poor email deliverability wastes your marketing efforts. If you have a poor email sender reputation, no one will get your emails at all—and once your reputation starts going bad, it can be an upward battle to fix.
Email deliverability is concerned with where an email ends up with after it’s been received by a sender. If your emails are being delivered into trash or spam, they aren’t being seen. If you want to improve your email deliverability, you need to ensure the quality of your emails. Here’s what you need to know.
1. Start with your own email server.
You need to watch your domain reputation and IP reputation. If you’re sending emails from a shared email server, it may already have been blacklisted by email service providers. Using a dedicated IP address is one way in which you can protect and build your email reputation over time.
2. Begin your email campaign slowly.
Don’t begin your email campaign in full force. Instead, start ramping up your campaign slowly, day by day. If you send a large volume of emails at once, your server is more likely to be marked as spam. Further, you won’t have the time to identify any problems with your campaign before the first waves of email go out.
3. Use a sender policy framework (SPF).
A Sender Policy Framework is a type of email authentication service, which ensures that emails aren’t sent from a forged sender. Many email servers today check to make sure that an email has an SPF. If yours does not, it may be automatically discarded.
4. Periodically check to see whether you’re blacklisted.
Email service providers keep a list of servers they believe to be spam or malicious. These lists are often shared, so if you get on one blacklist, you’re more likely to get on others. You should periodically check to see whether you’re blacklisted; if you are, you’ll need to make some changes to your email sending processes.
5. Don’t use purchased or scraped emails.
Purchased email lists are the easiest way to hurt your domain reputation. When you purchase email addresses or scrape them from the web, you’re virtually ensuring that you will get a high volume of bounced emails. You want to send emails to people who are interested in them, not just anyone.
6. Send your emails on a schedule and test frequency.
To build your email sender reputation, send emails on a schedule and test out the effectiveness of different frequencies. You can try to send emails daily, every other day, or even weekly; eventually, you’ll hit a “sweet spot” of engagement. Testing is critical to the process; different audiences respond differently.
7. Have users opt into emails and verify their address.
Before you start sending emails, you should have users both sign up for the emails and also verify their email addresses. This ensures that the users are already engaged. It’s better to have active users than users disinterested in your product. Verifying emails also make sure people aren’t using dummy email accounts.
8. Use software that can identify potential “trap” email addresses.
Trap email addresses are email addresses that are seeded by email service providers in spots where people would be purchasing or scraping spam emails. If you send an email to these trap email addresses, you’ll get blacklisted and your IP reputation will go down. The best way to avoid this is to use software that can identify them, like MassMailer.
9. Avoid “spam” email phrases.
There are certain phrases that email services don’t like to see, such as “make money now”. Avoid anything that sounds too promotional or “spammy”. There are certain industries, such as gambling and pharmaceuticals, that often find it more difficult to get their emails delivered. If you’re in a “high risk” industry, be particularly careful about your email sender reputation.
10. Remove users who don’t engage with your emails.
If users aren’t opening your emails, they’re likely not interested. If users haven’t engaged in your emails for a long time, you may want to remove them from your list. The better your open rate, the less likely you are to be marked as spam. Further, having a list of more engaged, interested users is better in terms of efficiency.
11. Personalize your “from” name.
From name shouldn’t be something generic: it should usually have the name of your customer support professional or whoever handles your email accounts. “Bob at Company” looks more personal than “Company” and makes it more likely that someone will open the email rather than immediately deleting it.
12. Use a compelling subject line.
The best way to improve your domain reputation is to make sure people are interested in reading your emails. Not only should you have a compelling subject line, but you should also make sure that the subject accurately reflects the body of your email. If users click on an email to see that the content doesn’t match the subject, they may just delete it and mark it spam.
13. Make it easy to unsubscribe from your emails.
If users can’t unsubscribe to emails easily, they will likely start marking it as spam so they don’t have to see it anymore. Being marked as spam is the fastest way to destroy your IP reputation.
14. Deliver only the best email content.
Finally, one of the best ways you can make sure that your emails are received is to make sure they have interesting content. The more interesting the content is, the less likely it is to be deleted or marked as spam. You can test different types of content and analyze it through the use of MassMailer, which can track whether the content is being interacted with.
Key takeaways
Deliver emails to only the people who want them, make sure you provide the best email content and check your sender reputation—as long as you do these things, you should be able to improve upon your email deliverability.
MassMailer can help. MassMailer has a variety of tools such as domain, IP, and link white labeling, email verification, and the ability to track whether emails are bounced, opened, or ignored. With the MassMailer Email Monitor, you can find your Sender Email Reputation and take the right measures to increase your email engagement.
To start improving your email deliverability today, sign up for a free MassMailer trial.
Author bio
Siva Devaki is the co-founder of MassMailer and is responsible for the overall company and the product strategy. Siva co-founded two other IT companies earlier and had one exit for a product company, SynqCloud which focused on ServiceNow Integration. Siva’s background in Enterprise Applications and the passion for software product development lead him to build MassMailer, which is now a popular native email marketing solution for Salesforce CRM customers.