How to Increase the Deliverability of Your E-Mail Campaigns

Do you rack your head over a sophisticated e-mail communication with perfect design, but it eventually ends up in spam anyway? Does your effort have to be wasted?

According to some estimates, up to 70% of the global volume of e-mails are considered spam, which refers to unsolicited messages. Therefore, spam filters enjoy great times as they can identify spam with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

Spam is any unsolicited communication sent to an addressee without his permission or expression of interest. Special categories of spam include phishing, virus and hacker attacks. Spam filters that avoid the delivery of unsolicited emails are used by many email clients and free mail services, such as Outlook or Gmail, to protect their users from unwanted messages.

Recipient’s Reaction Is Crucial

Spam filters are algorithms which, based on a score, decide if they deliver your message to a recipient while taking into account the reputation of a sender, the amount of mail sent and recipients' reaction. Each spam filter uses its criteria and, therefore, it is challenging to meet all its demands.

"The greatest influence has the content of e-mails and the behavior of recipients; in other words, the way they react to your email. The heuristics of free mail services, such as Gmail or Office 365, is based on it", adds the commercial director of Commerce Media, Mr. Martin Stoilov. eWay-CRM uses the platform Emailkampane.cz, represented by Martin Stoilov, to send email campaigns.

eWay-CRM Offers Its Spam Assassin

Professional E-mails developed by eWay-CRM offers many useful features that help increase the deliverability of your business communications. Thanks to Spam Assassin, it is easy to create an effective e-mail campaign because the system informs you about the identified deficiencies and offers you detailed instructions on how to create a perfect campaign.

Thirteen Tips for Your E-Mail Campaign

What steps can you try in order to maximize the deliverability of your business communications?

1. Work on the Reputation of Your Domain

The most important is to act as a legitimate sender. The reputation of your domain depends on several factors:

• Spam rate: the number of e-mails sent from the domain which were filtered out and sent directly to the Spam folder.
• Rejection rate: the amount of e-mails sent from the domain which were rejected by the recipient’s server and returned to the sender.
• Spam messages: if the recipient marks your message as spam, it is considered a spam report. And this is the last thing you want as a sender because this step immediately activates spam filters and negatively affects the deliverability of your messages.

It is crucial to regularly monitor the metrics mentioned above and keep them on the minimum level possible in order to support the reputation of your domain.

2. The Correct Setting of Your E-Mail Infrastructure

Correctly set e-mail infrastructure is another factor that helps you fight the spam filters. In other words, you have to authorize the domain from which you send e-mails. It is a technical standard that allows the server on the receiving side to confirm your identity and verify your e-mail address. To authorize the domain, you have to set the following three protocols: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This e-mail authentication method validates the identity of a sender by verifying the IP address of a particular domain.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): This protocol adds a digital signature to each outgoing message and thus, ensures its correct transmission.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): a system that verifies the sender's domain and its compliance with SPF and DKIM protocols. It also determines what should happen to a message if it does not meet the requirements (place the message in the spam folder, refuse it, etc.).

The administrative setting of the SPF and DKIM protocols should check your IT department.

3. Monitor Your IP Reputation

An IP address is a number registered for your domain, which is authorized to send and receive messages on its behalf. To send e-mails, use only validated IP addresses. Each IP address has its score, and the lower the score, the more likely are the e-mails sent from this address considered spam. Sender Score is an online tool that determines the sender's IP reputation. If you find that your score is going down, it is time to limit the number of messages sent. However, a high-quality tool for professional e-mailing solves this problem for you.

4. Focus on Your Customers

Only recipients who are interested in your services will read your message. Each open e-mail or answer sent improves your score in the eyes of the recipient's server service. Mr. Martin Stoilov from the platform Emailkampane.cz considers this point the most important one.

5. Follow the Involvement of E-Mail Recipients

Spam filters react to recipients' responses to your e-mails. They monitor metrics such as response rate or click rate and determine recipients' interest in your message. If the recipient replies to your e-mail or adds your address to the list of contacts, your credibility will grow.

6. Minimize Rejection

Follow the amount and reasons for which your e-mail was rejected. An e-mail message is considered rejected if it cannot be delivered for reasons such as unconfirmed sender domain or fake e-mail address. The more rejection you have, the more negative score you trigger. Therefore, you should regularly check the reasons for rejection and try to prevent them.

The best way to prevent the rejection of your e-mail messages is to keep a regularly maintained list of contacts. A well-maintained list of contacts drops the rejection rate to less than 1% percent.

A higher rate warns the spam filters that you use unverified e-mail addresses which can be checked by web services such as Briteverify, Findthatlead or Clearout.

7. Make the Unsubscribe Process Easier

It is a simple way that reduces the reporting of your messages as spam. If the recipient has the possibility to unsubscribe easily, he does not have to mark your message as spam. Do not try to re-contact the addresses that already checked out and respect their decision.

8. Pay Attention to Anti-Spam Laws

If you respect anti-spam laws, you reduce the amount of both authorized and unauthorized complaints.

In particular:

• Indicate the correct e-mail address of the sender and other contacts.
• Do not use misleading terms in the e-mail subject line.
• Respect unsubscribe requests.

9. Personalize Your E-Mails

If you manage to personalize your messages, you convince recipients that you know who you’ve addressed. In this way, you increase the probability that the addressee opens and reads your messages.

10. Do Not Use Expressions That Look like Spam

Try to avoid words such as for free, order now or make more money and do not use exclamation marks and capital letters. Some tools act as spam filters and draw your attention to controversial expressions. One of them is Mail Tester.

11. Change the Content of Your Message

The recipient’s provider continuously monitors your e-mail activity, and if you keep sending e-mails with the same content, it alerts spam filters. Experiment with different parts of the e-mail and regularly change its text, CTA or subject.

12. Do Not Overuse Link Tracking

Limit the number of active links in the body of your e-mail because if an e-mail message contains too many links, it activates spam filters. In exceptional cases, turn off the tracking rather than risk a clash with anti-spam systems on the receiving end.

13. Pay Attention to Text and Images

Spam filters block emails that do not follow the ratio of 80% text to 20% images.