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Wikus Engelbrecht is a writer, journalist and digital poet at GraphicMail, an international email and mobile marketing service provider. His professional career in language and media has traveled the film, print advertising, magazine publishing, food theatre and online content industries since 2003.

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Four Tips for Better Email Delivery

Written on
Oct 10, 2011 
Author
Wikus Engelbrecht  |
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Four Tips for Better Email Delivery

GRAPHICMAIL – Good email delivery rates are money in your pocket. The more people get your email, the more conversions you will have.

But if you’re new to email marketing, you might wonder just what issues there could be around delivery. After all, you write an email, you put in the recipient’s email address, you click send and you expect it to arrive immediately, right?

Unfortunately, there are various hurdles each email must overcome before its intended destination is reached

When you send a marketing email to your mailing list, not all of your subscribers are going to get it. And since nobody can click on a link in an email they never see, improving your newsletter deliverability is really important.

There are various strict systems in place for identifying which emails are spam. The bad news is that it’s often not just spam that gets tangled by delivery nets: some emails that people have opted in to also get snared and then never get to the inbox.

Internet service providers keep making their spam traps more sophisticated, which is why you always need to keep few things in mind that might be restricting your deliverability

When an email isn’t accepted by the receiving address, it’s usually due to some technical issue. These rejections will trigger an automatic notification which tells you that the email couldn’t be delivered and, usually, why.

Some of the common reasons are:

1) Bounces: categorized as either “hard” or “soft.” A hard bounce represents a permanent problem with delivery, such as when you send mail to an email address that doesn’t exist. A soft bounce refers to a temporary problem, such as when the recipient’s email account is full. Email addresses with a permanent delivery issue should be taken off your mailing list; otherwise they’re wasting precious send credits. And remember, sending emails to “dead addresses” is one measure used to identify “bad” mailers.

2) Throttling: This refers to a recipient restricting the amount of email that can be accepted over a set period of time from one source. It normally impacts only those sending huge volumes of email, so consider breaking bulk email sends down into smaller chunks, rather than regularly sending newsletters out to your entire list at once.

3) Content filtering: The way your email newsletter is written has a large impact on your spam score. After all, we can often tell a junk email apart ourselves even just by reading the subject line. Every word of your newsletter counts though, and Spam-checking tools can be used to test how your content looks to popular filters. If there are any problems, it will give you feedback and then you can take whatever corrective action is needed.

4) Blacklisting: When an email arrives from a blacklisted sender (i.e., one whose emails produce a large number of spam complaints) it’s immediately treated as junk. So as an email marketer, you’d want to do everything humanly possible to avoid going over to the dark side of sender reputation! On the other side of the spectrum, whitelists are lists of trustworthy senders who are known to be sources of legitimate email. An email coming from a whitelisted sender will usually bypass many of the spam filters and tests, so play it safe and make sure you are using a white-listed ESP such as GraphicMail for your email campaigns.

Cross-published at the GraphicMail blog. Read more of Wikus’ email insights here.





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