Subscribe to the TST RSS Feed
Train Signal RSS Feed
Subscribe to the TST RSS Feed to get Real-Time Updates
Train Signal RSS by Email
Or recieve our RSS Feed via Email
8 Easy Ways to Improve Your E-Mail Deliverability
E-mail marketing is one of the most effective tools a small business can use — as long as it is targeted correctly to people who are interested in your message and what you have to tell them.
The problem is of course that SPAM has become so prevalent that your messages run the risk of getting flagged as SPAM before they even get to your customers’ inboxes.
The major e-mail providers are getting more stringent as to what they are letting get to their customers’ inboxes as they fight the never ending battle against SPAM.
With that being said, there are some things you can do to help get your e-mail deliverability up. Some are technical means, and others are more administrative in nature, but unfortunately none cover every e-mail provider out there. Some steps you take will help with some e-mail providers while others will just ignore it.
The best thing you can do is implement the ones that are feasible for your organization and keep a watch on any problems that might come up through customer complaints or bumped e-mail.
Let’s take a look at a few easy fixes that can help improve the deliverability of your messages.
1. Clean Up Your List
When dealing with e-mail marketers they all seem to be very impressed with the sizes of their lists. The problem with this is how clean are those lists? How clean is your list?
You should only be e-mailing people who are either customers who have agreed to the messages or people who have signed up to your list with full knowledge of what you are sending.
You should regularly go through and remove e-mails that are bouncing for any number of reasons and of course honor any unsubscribe requests. You should also avoid renting or buying any lists, especially if you’re not sure about how the list was compiled.
The last thing you need to have is a spamtrap included in your list to see if your e-mails get flagged for sending to it.
For those that aren’t familiar with spamtraps — a spamtrap e-mail is setup in a way that makes it easy for web harvesters to find it, but it is never subscribed to any lists or used in any way that would get normal e-mails sent to it. The spamtrap e-mail is not used for communication but rather to lure spammers, so if an e-mail does arrive at this address you can be 100% sure it is SPAM.
2. Check the Blacklists
One of the best tools to identify SPAM that e-mail administrators have is the various blacklists that are out there.
They are prone to mistakes though, and you could accidently end up on one by no fault of your own. Most of the major ones have procedures in place to help you remove your domain/e-mail server.
There are too many to list here but if you run a check at the following two places you should have a good idea if you are on a list somewhere and hopefully how to get off of it.
There are of course others and hopefully if you are getting bounced e-mails it will list the blacklist you are on so you can go directly to that list and file to get your domain/e-mail server removed.
3. Open Relays Turned Off
This is the basics of e-mail administration, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this because it can vary widely depending on the e-mail package you are using.
Open Relays will allow anyone, anywhere on the Internet to send e-mail through your server with whatever they want in it. That’s BAD, ok?
Make sure you are only sending e-mails for authorized users and processes. I am not going to give specifics because it varies based on the e-mail package you are using, but make sure you are not doing this. It is a quick way to get blacklisted across the net.
To check if your server is an open relay you can use this link to find a web based tester:
4. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
Ok, so we’ve gone through some administrative fixes to help you get your e-mails through to your customers. Now let’s look at a technique that’s a little bit more proactive.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an e-mail authentication method that is independent of the SMTP service.
The simple overview of the service is that it adds a header to all e-mail that is sent from your server that has a key in it; the receiving server if setup to recognize DKIM will then do a DNS lookup with that key to make sure that the e-mail originated from your server.
In this way the receiving server can be sure that it is not a forged email from someone else and can setup filters to lower any SPAM scores to help the e-mail avoid any automatic SPAM tagging.
You can find a full list of software implementations here:
5. Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
Sender Policy Framework is a means for an e-mail server administrator to give the means for other servers to verify that a server is authorized to send e-mail for a certain domain.
It does this by using a TXT DNS record that lists the authorized senders for that domain. This allows the receiving server to either reject the e-mail based on a failure or apply a score that in addition to other factors will either mark it SPAM or not.
You can find out more information and how to format your record at:
6. Yahoo Whitelist
Yahoo has a procedure in place to help get qualifying companies on their internal whitelist, so that your emails will go to your customers’ inboxes instead of the bulk e-mail or SPAM folder.
There are quite a number of things you must do including implement and verify for them on the form and then submit it to them. It is not immediate and takes some time, but if you qualify it will make sure your customers receive your communication.
You can find more information and the appropriate form here:
7. AOL Whitelist
Along the same lines as Yahoo, AOL has a system wide whitelist that you can apply to get on.
It has its own set of criteria (different from Yahoo) so be prepared to do some more verifying and information producing to qualify for this one also.
You can find the full details of getting on the AOL list at:
8. Sender ID Framework
Microsoft’s involvement in e-mail authentication is important because of the prevalence of Hotmail, MSN, & Live users.
It works with the SPF DNS records to verify the sender’s identity by checking the sending IP against all the published servers that are authorized.
To help you create Sender ID SPF records you can use the following wizard:
Summary
In take away there is no surefire method to make sure your e-mail is deliverable beyond getting every customer to add your domain to their personal whitelist.
But by applying the above guideline and implementing some additional technology you can help fight SPAM by providing the mechanisms to prove who you are.
Don’t Miss Dave’s Next Article — Grab Our RSS Feed
One Response to “8 Easy Ways to Improve Your E-Mail Deliverability”
Leave A Comment:
Subscribe To Our eNewsletter
pat evans Says:
September 24th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
I just got this domain. I got it from google to use on my site. I don’t even know how to get my domain name there. Thank You so very much I had no idea about these site or e-mail lists. I don’t know how to get any. I need to learn so much. I will be on this site for a while. Thank You again. The way it is worded is easy for me to understand.