How to ensure your emails get delivered

“Email services don’t deliver every email to the intended recipient. So how do you make sure your emails get the seal of approval? Our sixth clinic tells you how…”

Ronen Yaari, OpenMoves
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You have your emails ready and a list of people waiting for them. Now it’s just a matter of clicking the “Send” button and watching your messages drop into your customers’ or prospects’ inboxes.

Or is it?

Your email can get deleted or banished to the junk folder before the recipient ever sees it. Why?

The services that provide email addresses to users pass incoming emails through a range of potential checks to see if they’re spam.

The simplest checks evaluate your email’s content for typical signs of spam (such as multiple exclamation marks). Increasingly, though, these checks look at the reputation you’ve built up as a sender of email.

This reputation is linked mainly to whether recipients are reporting you as spam, and whether the addresses you email are valid and working.

Those judged to be bad senders find themselves on one or more blacklists used to automatically delete messages before they’re even delivered.

So how do you ensure your email doesn’t become an unwitting victim of these anti-spam checks?

Know the formal rules

The first way to protect yourself is to follow some basic email marketing rules:

• Make sure you send email only to those who’ve expressed the desire to receive it. Look back at the section on permission in our third clinic, on building an email address list.
• Comply with all relevant email marketing law. In the U.S., this means federal CAN-SPAM legislation. Among the requirements:
  • The email must include a valid postal address.
  • It also must include a simple online response mechanism that allows people to opt-out of receiving future emails.
• Run your emails through a spam content checker before sending them out and correct any identified problems. Your email service provider (see Clinic #3) should provide such tools as part of its service package.

Don’t look like spam

The above practices are little help if your recipients still perceive you as spam — and report you as such to their email address service. Enough reports and you’re on a blacklist.

Email users define spam largely as email they don’t want. So it’s your job to keep them engaged and happy. Here’s how:

• Once someone signs up for your email list, send an immediate, automated welcome message to begin developing a positive relationship.
• In this message, encourage the recipient to add your email to their address book, so their user software won’t filter your emails into their junk mail folder.
• Make sure your emails are easily recognized. Look back at what we said about “From” lines, logos, preview panes, and so on in our clinics on email copywriting (#4) and design (#5).
• In your email, remind the user where they signed up for your list.
• Email regularly, but not too often. If you send too little email, users forget they signed up for your program. Too much, and they get annoyed. Unless you have good justification, email no less than once a month and no more than once or twice a week.
• Most important, send relevant email. Send email that has valuable, timely, useful, relevant information or offers.

Keep your list clean

Many email services will consider you a spammer if you continue to send email to broken addresses.

When you send email to an address that’s not working properly, normally you get a reply — a “bounce message” — detailing the problem.

If this problem is temporary (perhaps the receiving website has an outage), you need do nothing. However, if several successive emails to an address keep kicking up the same problem, consider it a permanent one.

If the problem is permanent (perhaps the bounce message says the account no longer exists), remove the address from your list. Your email service provider (ESP) usually has tools to take care of this easily.

Use professional email delivery tools

Unless you’re very comfortable with delivery issues, it’s better to outsource the actual delivery of your emails to an ESP.

Apart from providing the list management tools described in Clinic #3, a professional ESP simply has the technical setup and expertise to ensure more of your email gets through.

Get whitelisted or certified

You can also turn the blacklist concept on its head and get on approved-sender lists. A listing on a so-called whitelist lets you bypass many of the normal spam checks.

Unfortunately, there is no global whitelist recognized by all email address providers. Indeed, many such services run their own independent whitelists. Each requires you to meet various criteria before you can be listed.

Email certification is a similar concept, in which an independent third party audits your email program.

If approved (and after payment of a fee), you become certified and are effectively whitelisted by those email address services partnering with that particular certification agency.

In both cases, your ESP should be able to help you decide whether and how you should get whitelisted or certified with relevant organizations.

OK. You now have the insight required to devise an email strategy, build your list, create your emails, and get them delivered. All that remains is to understand how to properly evaluate your efforts, so you can refine your approach appropriately.