Email continues to be one of the most effective marketing channels, with an average return of $ 42 for every dollar spent (according to the Data and Marketing Association – DMA) . But, contrary to what one might imagine, it is a complex marketing tool. Achieving your true potential requires hard work and the ability to handle unexpected problems. To help marketers take advantage of this channel, Validity has created an email marketing basics guide that includes tips on how to improve your trusted source, have a strong reputation, and clean content.
When a marketer clicks send, the email journey is just beginning. Before reaching its final destination, it goes through many filters designed to determine the validity of the message and decide where it should be delivered. Only when email successfully passes through all spam filters does it reach the inbox. Filters were originally designed to distinguish spam from legitimate email. Currently, some providers also use them to categorize messages and organize inboxes (for example, social networks and promotional emails). You need to understand how they work and what they check to make sure messages get approved.
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“Email providers have a strong motivation to use spam filters. In addition to being annoying, spam can be dangerous. Malware and phishing practices are highly profitable for scammers and costly for both customers and providers who face intense market competition. In addition to protection, spam filters drastically reduce the load on server resources. Considering that nearly half of all emails sent globally are spam, there are many messages per analyze “, says Rodrigo Mesquita , director of Customer Success LATAM at Validity.
In this tour, filtering considers three aspects of email: the origin of the email, the reputation of the sender, and the content of the email. When evaluating the origin of an email, spam filters look at factors such as past sending behavior, the age of the source email address (IP address and domain), and the authenticity of the sender. Mesquita explains that “providers treat emails sent from new IP addresses and domains with care, while old ones, along with those that use authentication techniques, are considered more reliable.”
Advice on the origin of the shipment
- Do not change the IP address unnecessarily, even if there are delivery problems. Otherwise, it could make the situation worse as providers restrict messages from new IP addresses.
- Use a dedicated IP address – In a shared IP address, the user is not the only one contributing to the reputation. Despite efforts to the contrary, if another sender of the shared IP address does not follow good sending practices, the entire program will be affected.
- When using a new IP address, you must “set” it correctly. It is important that you slowly start sending emails to a small number of email addresses, preferably more engaged users, to improve the reputation of your new IP address.
- Authenticate the email program – providers will find it more reliable and that will make delivery to the intended recipient more likely. The most important email authentication protocols are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
The reputation of an email sender is measured by a score that indicates whether it is considered legitimate or a scammer. It is calculated using algorithms that use millions of data points to assess past submission behavior and judge its validity. Vendors make filtering decisions based on the strength of this score. Analysis parameters include complaints, spam traps, list hygiene, volume, and block lists.
Tips to improve sender reputation
- Monitor sender reputation – Always check the score so it doesn’t affect your campaigns.
- Keep the list clean – Spam traps, unknown users, and unengaged subscribers can all have a detrimental impact on reputation. To validate that the addresses on the list belong to a real person, it is necessary to send them to a list hygiene service.
- Subscribing to feedback loops : To avoid potential damage caused by subscriber complaints, it is important to subscribe to feedback loops. Each email provider offers its own service that alerts you when a subscriber complains about a particular message. Depending on the composition of a list, it is not necessary to subscribe to all available feedback loops; therefore, it is necessary to identify the most valuable for the program.
According to Validity’s Customer Success LATAM director, content analytics technology has the ability to verify all parts of an email (header, footer, code, HTML, markup, images, text color, date stamp / time, URL, subject line, text / image ratio, language, attachments, among others). Some content filters examine all parts of the message, while others only examine the structure of an email or simply the URLs outside the message to compare them with the block lists, he concludes.
Tips for checking content
- Check HTML – Most current emails are created in HTML. Having a well-formatted HTML message is a good start. Corrupted HTML can result in a poorly rendered message and generate complaints if recipients believe it is a phishing attempt . Verify that the HTML is free of syntax and formatting errors.
- Test Your Messages Before You Send Them – Using a pre-delivery tool like Everest’s Inbox Preview helps identify potential spam filtering issues. Once the content flagged by spam filters has been identified, continue testing to isolate the cause of the problems
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