Improving email deliverability is crucial for ensuring your emails reach inboxes and not the spam folder. Here are some key things you can do to enhance email deliverability:
Maintain a clean and engaged email list
B2B contact data decays as fast as 70.3% per year
Gartner
Sending emails to non-existent or inactive addresses can hurt your sender reputation and deliverability rates. Remove inactive or invalid email addresses from your list regularly. Engage your lists with relevant and valuable content to keep them interested and interacting with your emails. High engagement signals to email providers that your emails are wanted.
Warm up new email addresses.
If you’re using a new email address, gradually increase your sending volume over time. A sudden spike in email volume from a new email can be flagged as spam, hurting deliverability. If you are using your own mail servers to send emails ensure you do this for your IP address.
Monitor Engagement Metrics
Track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. Low engagement can signal to email providers that your emails are unwanted, impacting deliverability. Ensure you A/B test your email sequences and tweak headers to improve open rate and click-through.
Maintain a consistent sending schedule
Establish a consistent sending schedule and avoid sudden spikes in email volume. Erratic sending patterns can be seen as spam-like behavior by email providers.
Images:
Using images in emails generally does not directly reduce deliverability.
However, there are some caveats:
Image-only emails with little or no text can be flagged as spam and hurt deliverability. Large image file sizes (over 100KB) can trigger spam filters or cause emails to be clipped by providers. Emails with a poor image-to-text ratio (too many images compared to text) may be seen as spam.
To mitigate issues, it’s recommended to:
- Include sufficient text content (at least 500 characters) along with images.
- Optimize image file sizes and use compressed formats.
- Maintain a balanced image-to-text ratio.Provide alt text for accessibility and when images are blocked.
Authenticate Your Emails
Set up email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These verify your identity as a legitimate sender and protect against spoofing, increasing trust with email providers.
Why is authentication important?
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) are two important email authentication protocols that work together with SPF to improve email deliverability and protect against spoofing and phishing attacks.
DKIM:
DKIM uses cryptographic authentication to verify that an email message was indeed sent and authorized by the owner of the domain it claims to originate from.
- · It allows the receiver to check that an email was authorized by the owner of the sending domain by affixing a digital signature to the message header.
- · The signature is verified using the sender’s public key published in the DNS records.
- · A valid DKIM signature guarantees that the email content has not been modified since it was signed.
DMARC:
- DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM by providing a way for domain owners to specify how receivers should handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
- It allows senders to publish policies in DNS instructing email providers what to do with unauthenticated emails, such as rejecting, quarantining, or just monitoring them.
- DMARC checks for alignment between the “From” address and the domains specified in SPF and DKIM to detect spoofing attempts.It provides reporting mechanisms so domain owners can receive feedback on how their emails are being processed by receivers based on DMARC policies. By implementing DKIM and DMARC along with SPF, organizations can significantly improve their email authentication, protect their domains from being spoofed, and increase deliverability by building trust with email providers. DMARC in particular gives senders more control over how unauthenticated emails claiming to be from their domains are handled.
Can Pipelyft help with delivery?
Absolutely – Using a reputable sales engagement platform can help improve email deliverability by helping implement some of the steps above.
Platforms such as Pipelyft encourage and emphasize email best practices such as. properly authenticating your email domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols. This verifies you as a legitimate sender and builds trust with email providers, improving deliverability. Sales platforms provide tools to segment lists, personalize emails, and only send to engaged recipients – avoiding spam traps.
Unlimited Mailboxes and Email Accounts:
Pipelyfts commitments to allow users unlimited email addresses allows you to authenticate and warm up multiple email addresses from multiple domains allowing you to ensure you always have a way of utilizing email as a way of contacting.
Pipelyft’s automation and sequencing capabilities allow you to schedule and send emails at optimal times, control sending cadences, and avoid sudden spikes in email volume that could trigger spam filters.
With unlimited data imports and integrations, Pipelyft enables you to maintain a clean, up-to-date email list by seamlessly removing invalid or inactive addresses, a key factor in improving deliverability.
Pipelyft’s multichannel capabilities allow you to combine email outreach with other channels like LinkedIn and phone, enabling you to segment your audience and send more targeted, relevant content, which can boost engagement and deliverability.