Improve the deliverability of your e-mails with these 10 best practices

Good e-mail deliverability means that e-mails sent by your company arrive at the right destination, i.e. in your customers' inboxes.

But how can you improve the deliverability of your e-mail campaigns ?

Marketers, discover the 10 best practices to adopt when it comes to emailing, as well as many tips for optimizing your deliverability rate!

See all software Email Marketing

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability: definition

The deliverability of an e-mail campaign is defined by the fact that the majority of e-mails sent arrive correctly in the recipients' inboxes.

But a good e-mail deliverability rate depends essentially on :

• your reputation,
• and your ability to maintain it. That's why you need to adopt a continuous improvement approach.

Mail deliverability factors

Several factors and quality criteria contribute to your reputation in order to optimize your e-mail deliverability rate:

• your domain name,
• your IP address,
• your professional e-mail addresses,
• ISPs (Internet Service Providers),
• webmails, messaging clients,
• anti-spam filters,
• technical rules and html code,
• the content of your messages,
• the interest and reactions of your recipients,
• management of your subscriber lists,
• your degree of commitment to the fight against spam,
• the professionalism of your ESP (Email Service Provider) or emailing platform.

The challenges of email deliverability

Email deliverability has become a major issue for companies.

Indeed, emailing remains an important lever for communicating with your customers, and thus developing your marketing and sales. But if a certain percentage of your e-mails don't reach their destination, part of your strategy falls by the wayside... with negative impacts on your business.

On the other hand, poor deliverability reveals problems with the reputation of your e-mail address, which you need to take into consideration.

Here are 10 best practices for improving e-mail deliverability.

1. Take care of the quality of your IP address

IP addresses are associated with your emailings, and therefore with your reputation as a sender. If you don't have an IP address to identify yourself, ISPs may simply stop you from sending your e-mails.

So you need to choose an IP address to prove your identity.

💡 We recommend buying an IP address. That way, you can keep it, no matter how you move from one provider to another. On the other hand, it helps you maintain the reputation you've taken time to build.

2. Use security protocols

Why use a security protocol?

• It allows you to be clearly authenticated by your IP address;
• ISPs and messaging services prefer sound, security-alert senders;
• You avoid having your domain name borrowed and your ID stolen;
• You protect your contacts from hacking, spamming and phishing.

All factors that improve the deliverability of your email campaigns!

💡 There are 4 authentication methods:

• The SPF (Sender Policy Framework) protocol: it examines your domain name and its correspondence with the server(s) used to send your emails, thanks to the IP ;
• Reverse DNS protocol: reveals the domain name linked to an IP address;
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) protocol: uses a cryptographic signature in your message;
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance): authenticates each e-mail by combining SPF and DKIM techniques.

🛠️ If all this sounds complex, the good news is that there are tools available to help you set up your security protocols. Merox, for example, can help you deploy a DMARC policy. In this way, you can secure your e-mail domains, and confirm your identity with the recipient for a better deliverability rate.

3. Associate your e-mail addresses with your domain name

Associating your domain name, i.e. your Internet address (e.g. appvizer.fr) with your own e-mail addresses enables ISPs and messaging services to identify and authenticate you as the sender. Here again, the challenge is to maintain your reputation.

Examples of dedicated e-mail addresses

• postmaster@nomdedomaine.fr: to communicate with the technical manager;
• alerts@nomdedomaine.fr: this type of address can be used to automate certain actions relating to alerts, by setting up triggers;
• business@nomdedomaine.fr: reserve the use of this e-mail address, for example, for sales partners, or even customers, if you work in BtoB.

💡 4 beginner's mistakes to avoid to preserve your domain name:

1. Never change the original intended use of an email address: you risk damaging your reputation.
2. Don't use your specific addresses, such as the server administrator's postmaster@votredomaine.com, for prospecting!
3. Don't use webmail addresses (gmail, orange.fr, hotmail.fr, free.fr etc.) for prospecting or mass mailing: they are not linked to your domain name and are reserved for personal, not professional, use.
4. Don't send an e-mail marketing campaign from a commercial partner using your own domain name: it's the death of your reputation.

4. Clean up and qualify your contacts' email list

A quality list meets several criteria:

• It's made up of "clean" email addresses, without too many hard bounces (non-existent or erroneous email addresses).
• Your contacts show an interest in the messages they receive: they open the email, click on your links, etc.
• The e-mail address has been collected by your own means, legally and "fairly".

💡 A few tips:

• Aim for quality of email addresses rather than quantity: sending "the right message, to the right person at the right time" leads to customer satisfaction.
• Avoid buying mailing lists: if an Internet user has never been in contact with you, by subscribing to your newsletter for example, their natural and legitimate reflex is to declare you spam.
• Clean up your database: don't leave bounces, unsubscribers and contacts who've lost interest in you in your customer file; they're detrimental to the quality of your list.
• Maintain your subscriber list : send them regular messages, with interesting content, to arouse their interest over the long term.

5. Segment your contact lists

Your contacts have different uses, expectations and needs, and each of them is looking for a personalized offer.

To meet your customers' or prospects' expectations as closely as possible, segment the profiles based on your statistics, but also on criteria :

• social
• demographic,
• relating to centers of interest, etc.

💡 If you have several campaigns underway, define lists for each of them. Personalizing the conversation with your web users is essential to meeting their needs.

6. Ask permission with opt-in and double opt-in

To engage your recipients naturally, there's nothing better than asking for their consent before sending any email. A quality list includes only :

• email addresses collected internally, on your proprietary spaces,
• and by means of a clearly identified proposal.

But what exactly do opt-in and double opt-in mean?

• Opt-in means asking permission to send content to a web user, for example, via a checkbox in a registration form on a landing page of your website.
  
  

• Increasingly used, double opt-in is defined as sending an email to your contact following their registration on your form, which includes a confirmation link. This technique is more secure, as it clearly identifies the subscriber: anyone can enter someone else's e-mail address.

☝️ An unsubscribe or unsubscribe link should also be present and clickable in your emailing. On the one hand, this is a legal obligation. On the other hand, it's an excellent way of encouraging uninterested readers to unsubscribe. Your list will be the better for it!

7. Improve subscriber engagement

Users of Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook have discovered that these e-mail services place a large proportion of unsolicited e-mails in the spam folder. After a certain period of time, unopened messages can be automatically classified in this category: we can see that "disengagement" has become a key factor on which messaging services rely... to place mails in spam.

That's why it's so important to develop the engagement of your contacts, through regular, daily work. If you respect your audience and sustain your efforts over the long term, they pay off and translate into a better mail deliverability rate.

💡 A few tips:

• Start by saying hello. With a welcome email, thank your contact for their interest in you. This is also an opportunity to make an appointment, encourage them to consult your online tips, etc.
• Personalize your messages: personalizing an e-mailing is still the most important factor in opening a message.
• Deliver interesting, consistent content: adapt your content and offers to your contacts' profiles. It's all about communicating the promise you made when you signed up!
• Monitor your performance indicators: regularly analyze each of your KPIs (opening rate, click-through rate, deletion rate, etc.) to make any necessary adjustments.
• Revive inactive contacts by reawakening their interest. And if you can't, then remove their addresses from your lists.

8. Define the right moment to send your e-mails

An over-solicited database loses its quality. Targeted Internet users often become reluctant to open your messages, even if it means declaring you a spammer. To avoid this, adapt your content and choose the right times and rhythms for your mailings.

To do this, you need to know your customers inside out. Determine customer habits and segment your lists accordingly. Gradually refine your list to identify the most opportune times to send your e-mails.

9. Take care with the subject line and avoid spam filters

The subject of your e-mail or newsletter should be neither too long nor too racy, and should entice the recipient to open your message, while respecting the rules of anti-spam filters:

• If you use only capital letters, YOU'LL GIVE THE IMPRESSION OF SHOUTING. So avoid them.
• Use special characters sparingly (€, $, *, etc.) or excessive punctuation (!!!, ????, etc.).
• Avoid spam words ("free", "earn money", "viagra", etc.).
• Perform A/B testing to simulate the effectiveness of your subject line on a sample of contacts, then choose the best one.
• Keep your subject line to 35-50 characters.

10. Work on your email header

Finally, in terms of deliverability, anti-spam filters prefer a header that includes several of the following elements:

• information identifying the sender,
• an unsubscribe link (again),
• an "abuse@" email address for complaints,
• a "Precedence: bulk" header field to indicate that this is a mass emailing.

Gmail support confirms and makes mandatory the last point.

See all software Email Marketing

How to guarantee your marketing strategy?

Make sure you optimize your emailing deliverability right away, maximizing the return on investment of your digital marketing campaigns: apply the best practices outlined above to ensure that your messages reach their destination in the best possible conditions.

To ensure that your actions are profitable, it's clear that the main challenge lies in building and maintaining an excellent sender reputation. Between infrastructure, IP, security protocols, domain name, ISP vigilance, etc., the quality of your reputation depends on many elements converging in the same direction: showing your credentials.