deliverability
Some emails never make it to the recipient’s inbox. Sometimes it’s due to a hard bounce generated by an invalid email address. Other times it’s because the sender’s IP address and/or domain has been blacklisted. Are email blacklists as bad as they sound? How easy is it to get removed from one? This article will cover all you need to know about email blacklists. What is an email blacklist? An email blacklist (or ‘blocklist’) is a collection of domains and/or IP addresses blocked from sending emails to email users because of spam activity. There are different kinds of blacklists including internal ones run by webmail providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), external ones run by security companies (Proofpoint, Barracuda, Cloudmark, etc.), and finally, those managed by non-profit organizations (Spamhaus, SURBL, etc.). My IP/domain’s been blacklisted, how did this happen? ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook use spam filters to
When it comes to emails, we spend so much time creating the perfect subject line and images that will hit just right. But none of that matters if your your emails land in spam, or worse, don’t get delivered. While we understand the need and urgency for marketers to communicate with their audience, it’s also important to be mindful of the impact these emails have not only on your sender reputation, but also the experience of the person receiving them. As your trusted email service provider, the deliverability of your emails and protecting your (and our) sender reputation is top priority for us! We’ve listed some key factors to consider before sending your next email. Permission to send emails is not evergreen Permission to send emails can expire quickly as people forget where and how they signed up to your email list. This is especially true if you haven’t been
Did you know? Spamhaus has a free eBook to help email marketers know how to do the right thing.With an introduction by Annalivia Ford, one-time postmaster for AOL (remember them?), this deliverability guide from Spamhaus will walk senders through the concepts of deliverability and email reputation, how to not look like a spammer, and other important things you need to know to stay on the right side of email marketing best practices.And they don’t even make you opt-in to get access to it. Click here to download.And don’t forget to join Spamhaus’ Matthew Stith and me on Tuesday, March 21st at 9am central time for a live webinar where we’ll talk blocklists, Spamhaus, domain reputation and more. You can register here.
I’m busy as a bee this week, with so much going on with work (and outside of work), that I’ve not been able to update the blog as much as I would like to. But, I can spare a few minutes to talk about helping a client out yesterday, connecting with them just after he running their first inbox tests and sharing understanding on how to interpret the deliverability results. We walked through this snapshot data showing what it can show, with an eye to identifying difficulties. This time around, like is so often the case, Microsoft was the main problem/focus area found. No mail delivered means they’re probably blocked at Outlook.com/Hotmail.com (but not Office 365). Even before the client checks for the text of bounce messages in their sending platform, we know that they’re going to look like this: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [x.x.x.x] weren’t sent. Please contact
Discover what happens to your messages after they leave in the new infographic by MailUp. Email is still the channel with the highest average return on investment. That’s why you most likely decided last year to invest your marketing budget in a series of email campaigns. You must have worked hard to make all your campaigns flawless. But it may well be that your hoped-for outcome (and investment return) has not arrived, with opening rates below expectations and disappointing interactions. Why these low performances? The answer must be found upstream: did the campaigns you sent actually reach your recipients? In recent years, only 80% of emails sent worldwide on average were actually delivered to the inbox. This means that, on average, 20% of the emails sent never reached the recipients. Among all the possible causes of your low performance, the most important one almost never receives the attention it deserves:
I can’t believe that with this email deliverability test, we’ve completed ten tests to date! It was four years ago that we started testing the top email marketing platforms to determine which had the best email deliverability (and which were the worst email marketing providers). I have to say that there are always surprises, showing just how important it is to monitor the email deliverability of such tools. After all, what use is an email newsletter if no one reads it because it’s been marked as spam? If you’d like to make a comparison between this deliverability test and the previous one, check out our results from April 2022. For those of you who are coming across our deliverability tests for the first time, we have been monitoring the email delivery rates of email marketing services like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber since August 2017. What started off as ten
Email authentication is a process of verifying the identity of an email sender. This helps to ensure that the email is coming from a trusted source, and not from a spammer or phisher. This will help improve your email deliverability, as the likelihood of your emails and newsletter going to spam increases if you aren’t using any authentication methods. There are several methods of email authentication, which we are going to discuss now. Why is email authentication even a thing? The main issue with email is that it’s an open protocol that allows spammers to use email addresses they don’t own. You may wonder how they do that. Or how I once managed to send an email with the sender address barack.obama@whitehouse.gov? Only as a test to myself, of course. Because if you sign up for an account with a legitimate email marketing service, one of the first things they
You probably know that email deliverability and sender reputation are vital if you’re sending out email newsletters and campaigns, but why is it important? And more importantly, what can you do about it? In this post, I’m going to look at the importance of email deliverability and all the things you need to do to improve your deliverability rate. There are many things you can do to improve email deliverability. Some of these are more time-consuming than others, but all of them will help in some way to increase your chance of reaching someone’s inbox, instead of the spam folder. In this article, we’ll include information on the most essential practices, including: How to authenticate your email account; How to improve your sender reputation; How to improve your email content; How to increase email engagement Sometimes, it seems like it would take too much time to do things the right
I started out with the best intentions to get back into the swing of things with blogging more regularly. But between MAAWG recovery, COVID recovery and life it’s not worked out that way. This is an excerpt of something I wrote over on slack to explain why someone was still struggling with delivery even though best practices weren’t working. Hope it will be helpful for some folks. (and now I’m off to my next call…) When the issue is a mailstream that has problems that aren’t being addressed by common best practices. In order to address that we need to understand more about why the common best practices aren’t working. They may not be zebras, but they might be donkeys. So I started with listing “these are the problems I’ve seen with mailstreams of your type and why those problems aren’t being resolved by the normal practices.” Email delivery really
Hey! Just a quick note to let you know of an upcoming webinar. This time around the topic is Deliverability 101. What does that mean? The basics. Where to start. What to keep in mind and be aware of to maximize your ability to get to the inbox successfully. This is a beginner level course meant for folks who are new to this whole realm and who are wondering how it all works.My friends at Insightly are hosting and we’ll have an overview of deliverability concepts and best practices, CAN-SPAM basics, what the sending platform does for you (and what is your responsibility) with regard to inbox success, and I’ll also briefly touch on the Kickbox deliverability tools suite and how it can help with monitoring and understanding your deliverability current state.If you’ve been reading Spam Resource for the past ten years and have been sending email marketing for longer