Deliverability Toolbox: Learn how to keep your emails from landing in spam
Are you unsure if your emails are landing in spam?
We get it. Email is a top revenue channel for most DTC businesses, and from time to time, you stop to wonder if your emails are landing in your subscriber’s inbox or spam.
Especially when your campaigns don’t perform as you’d hoped they would.
So how can you make sure your email health is in good standing? Here are several tools to check your deliverability health:
IP Reputation and Blacklists
If you’re using an email service provider (ESP) like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Sendlane, etc, you should be covered under their deliverability practices. Typically these ESPs will warn you before you reach a level where you are placed on a bad IP. However, you are responsible for building your domain reputation and staying off blacklists. Use the IP and domain checker Multi RBL (https://multirbl.valli.org/)to keep an eye on your IP reputation. There eight blacklists you need to keep an eye on and steer clear from being blacklists. Read more about them here.
Sender Score
Use Return Path’s Sender Score (https://senderscore.org/) to monitor your email’s sending score health. Your sender score helps inbox service providers (ISPs such as Gmail and Yahoo) determine whether your IP address is trustworthy enough to deliver your emails to the inbox. You typically want to keep your sender score above 80. Anything below that will need attention to build a better IP reputation.
Feedback Loops
You will need to check TWO feedback loops
For Gmail: https://postmaster.google.com/ (Sign up, register your domain, add txt record, and verify)
How to Register your domain for Postmaster:
Step 1: Create a postmaster account or assign one under your gmail account.
Step 2: Add a domain (there will be a large red + button on the bottom right hand)
Step 3: You will have a “Getting Started” box pop up. Enter your domain and hit next.
Step 4: You will be asked to copy a text record and add it to your host site part of your DNS records.
Add the record and it should look like this inside your DNS host:
Step 5: Verify you have added the record correctly by clicking verify on the Domain Verification Box:
You are now verified. Your data for Gmail emails will now start populating inside postmaster.
Your other feedback loop should populate inside your ESP. You should be able to see spam complaints directly inside your email campaigns broken down by the other ISPs (Outlook, Yahoo, Aol, other).
If your IP, domain, sender score, and feedback loop look good, but you suspect you have deliverability issues, then the next step is to check your open rates history.
Checking Your Open Rates
Have your open rates dipped recently?
If your open rates have hovered around 40% historically (for 30+ days) and you see a sudden drop to 10-15%, then you are likely facing deliverability issue.
To confirm this you can check your list makeup and see which inbox service provider (aol, yahoo, outlook) are you spamming for. If you are using Klaviyo, you can check your deliverability tab under the campaign that is suspected of spam.
Here’s what it looks like:
*Remember your Gmail spam complaints will not show on your ESPs deliverability dashboard because there is no feedback loop. Check it under your postmaster account.
If you have a heightened spam complaint coupled with low rates over 3-4 sends continuously then you have a deliverability issue with your emails.
Here are several ways to protect yourself from landing in spam:
Set your domain authentication records (read more here). Your ESP should have a step-by-step on how to create your SPF and DKIM records for your domain. Once you verify the SPF and DKIM through your ESP as passing, you can generate your DMARC record here and add it to your host provider.
Use a clean segmented list that only includes engagers (openers, clickers, active on site, buyers) based on your products lifetime cycle. For example, if majority of your subscribers buys your product every 60 days, then that should be the parameter you use to define your list’s segment for weekly/monthly sends.
Use a “@domain.com” from email. Aligning your from/reply-to email to your domain increases your trust with the ISPs (gmail, yahoo, etc).
Use clean (and short) links.
Keep your images compressed (don’t exceed the 5 MB limit).
Send emails your subscribers actually want.
If you are still experiencing deliverability issues while implementing the above recommendations, we can help!
Send us at hello@thewinbox.com to get started with subject line: Deliverability.
