Hit those inboxes and stay there!
In a talk that I gave recently (in the video below), I explored a challenge that on the face of it sounds pretty simple, but it’s a very real and quite complex issue hitting many of us in business right now; getting emails delivered to our recipients.
As email is the biggest attack vector for cyber-breaches, it’s right that emails are more stringently filtered before reaching a user’s inbox. This does, however, pose a real challenge for those of us that are attempting to get our legitimate emails delivered for the gaze of our target recipients eyes.
Whether you’re conducting email marketing – with well-tailored messages that have been carefully curated for your target audience – or sending newsletters, or other forms of media to your contact database; it is now a lot tougher to achieve the same deliverability and read-rates of your emails as in the past, fact.
There are several practical steps that you can undertake to improve the security best practices of your own domain in order to ensure your emails are better trusted by the recipient’s email filter.
Getting started
There are three main categories of problems; content, technical setup, and reputation/history.
First off, run some tests to see where your problems are:
- Get started with something simple like https://www.mail-tester.com/
- This basic tool gives great feedback on the technical setup of your domain, the quality of the content and also your domain reputation
- Start getting serious with Inbox Insight from https://glockapps.com/spam-testing/
- More advanced tool that plugs into over 20 email platforms and pulls real-time information on what they think of emails sent to them.
Content
Don’t look like a spammer. Remember the following:
- Avoid pictures that are full of text
- Avoid dark backgrounds with brightly coloured text
- Make sure links work as expected
- Don’t “rewrite URLs” – If it says microsoft.com, it should GO to www.microsoft.com
- If you are using tracking links, add them to buttons or general words, not a web address that says something different
- A good user experience! What’s the “call to action”? Preferably clicking a link or replying to the email. Interaction with the email boosts your reputation
- And more! Check this out https://influencermarketinghub.com/email-marketing-best-practices/
Technical Setup
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
- A standard email authentication method. SPF helps protect your domain against spoofing, and helps prevent your outgoing messages from being marked as spam by receiving servers
- In your DNS, you need to add a record of where you send emails from so people trust you
- You should only have one SPF record
- Any typos or wrong spacing invalidate an SPF check
- Example:
v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com include:sendgrid.net include:spf.uk.exclaimer.net ip4:20.93.203.168 -all - Check your SPF is valid here: https://www.spf-record.com/spf-lookup.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
- An email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain
- Some email systems call this “Domain authentication” and should force you to set it up when you add your domain but not always
- You can have multiple DKIM records
- You can check you have DKIM enabled by using https://www.mail-tester.com/. Send a separate test from each system you send emails from.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)
- Designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, such as email spoofing. A DMARC policy allows a sender’s domain to indicate that their email messages are protected by SPF and/or DKIM, and tells a receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes
- Powered by having correct SPF and DKIM records
- Not for the faint-hearted! Add a passive DMARC record for starters, which lets anything ride
- If you need to “enforce” DMARC, get a monitoring service like https://dmarcian.com/
- Learn more https://postmarkapp.com/blog/best-dmarc-tools.
- Google Postmaster Tools
- A great free tool from Google! https://postmaster.google.com/
- You can use Postmaster Tools to track data on large volumes of emails sent and find data about your sending domain. You can view different dashboards to understand details like Gmail delivery errors, spam reports, feedback loop, and more
- You have to send a fair chunk of emails on a regular basis to get any data in here.
- Warming up your new domain
- Don’t buy a new domain and start hammering out thousands of emails every week
- Start light and get some actual engagement; people replying to your emails and ensure they are NOT MARKING THEM AS JUNK!
- You can do this manually or setup a dedicated email address and connect it to email warm-up tools like:
- https://www.lemwarm.com/
- https://www.warmupinbox.com/
- https://www.mailreach.co/
- Make sure you disconnect from them when you’re finished!
Reputation – Changing history
The domain is the first thing that a mail server or service comes across when you send your email. Based on the pattern of your sending history, along with the reputation that your domain has, will influence if your email lands in the desired recipients’ inbox or their spam folder.
If you’ve had technical setup issues in the past, or people have marked your emails as Spam/Junk; then your reputation might be poor. You can’t go back in time and undo a bad reputation, but you can influence the future.
Get all the content and technical setup right now, and work to ensure you achieve engagement from people to whom you send emails. From this positive activity, you’ll work to re-teach the world’s email systems that your recipients want and value the emails you send – and that you are a legitimate emailer!
Need help with your email setup?
If you are stuck working through my advice from above, or simply need a technical pair of eyes to take on this challenge for you, then I encourage you to reach out to the expert team at Blucando today. Our friendly team of technicians will take ownership of your email issues and work with you to improve the rate of deliverability for your email campaigns.
We are Blucando, the Southeast’s Premier IT Support Provider
From our base in Farnborough, Hampshire; we are a full-suite IT provider offering technology support, management and consultancy to businesses across Surrey, Hampshire, London and the wider southeast region. We pride ourselves on delivering robust, dependable IT systems our clients can rely on, coupled with strategic guidance that helps unlock business potential through technology. Get in touch today to find out how Blucando could help level up your business through technology.
