When selecting an email service platform most marketers look for a proven solution that claims to have “high deliverability,” but what does that really mean? Essentially, deliverability is a buzz word or marketing term aimed to measure the success rate of an email campaign. Most email platforms break it down to a percentage and write claims such as
“We maintain a 98% inbox deliverability.”
To have an email campaign that subscribers engage with you have to get your message in-front of the recipients via their inbox, not the spam folder. This is why marketers need to select an ESP that has a proven track record. But, are you aware that your own sending habits can negatively impact your inbox deliverability? Many marketers don’t believe their deliverability issues are a result of their poor marketing practices and tend to jump ship a lot to find a new mailing platform once the previous one begins to get lower rates of inbox deliverability.
The first thing you are going to want to do is take a look at your senderscore. When you send off an email, you are sending it from an IP. That IP must be ‘credible’ if you want to have a good email deliverability. Your sender score can be thought of like your personal credit score. It is a way for the ISPs to determine if your message is worthy to get delivered to their users.
Again, similar to a credit score it can take a while to build up your reputation, but a few wrong moves can also get you blacklisted. It is important that you are following best practices if you want to continue to maintain high rates of inbox deliverability. So, let’s take a look at some common problems that cause negative impacts on your sender score.
Learn about average email open rates, and how you can improve yours!Problem 1
Your goal is to have less than a 3% hard bounce rate. If you exceed this rate it will be big problems for your reputation. Hard bounced email addresses are usually a result of typos at point of collection, or email accounts that were once good have become old and closed. However, there may be other more hazardous reasons you collect invalid email accounts.
If you are paying affiliates to send traffic to your site, some black-hat affiliates will try to send you harvested data. Often these are either fictitious email addresses, mass created email addresses, or email accounts that are so dated they no longer exist. You have to really pay attention when working with affiliates because a lot of this stuff will fly under the radar if you don’t have a layer of security in place.
Today typos are more prevalent than ever. More users are on the go using mobile devices, and it seems like it is ten times easier to create a typo with your thumbs rather than on a full sized keyboard. Plus, auto correct keeps trying to make real words out of nick names that are often frequent email ids.
Bots are often attempting to do attacks on web forms and it is just another thing that is compromising your inbox deliverability. Cutting back on malicious attempts will start to make a big difference in your data quality. Learn how we helped a client prevent a spambot attack by having Xverify boot out the bad leads.
This is exactly why we built our tools to help you eliminate your hard bounce headaches and improve your sender score. Xverify has intelligent send shield technology to only allow good email addresses in, and kick bogus accounts out at point of collection. This means in milliseconds advanced processes are happening to validate email addresses.
Xverify sits at the top of your marketing funnel, so as you collect data it gets verified. This is not just a syntax check but a full check to ensure the username actually exists at the email server. Once you have implemented real time email verification you will have peace of mind that the data you are collecting is legit.
Problem 2
Each time a user marks an email message you send as spam, this chips away at your reputation. When a user marks your email message as spam this tells their ISP that their user(s) did not enjoy your message or that you did not have permission to mail this client.
If you are working with third party data, it’s likely the user is unfamiliar with your brand and therefore will have a higher chance of marking you as spam. This is something you want to avoid. Another common reason users start marking messages as spam is because of your sending frequency. If you are sending too often you are overwhelming their inbox, and that is something you want to reduce.
Bait and switch is another big factor to getting spam complaints. If you have subject lines that scream spam or you make your subject line completely different than the content inside of your email, which is going to upset your subscribers. Your best bet is to follow best practices.
If you are serious about cleaning up your spam complaint rate don’t use data brokers. Collect leads on your own landing pages and enable email validation. Xverify has the latest send shield technology which can help you flag complainers before they create a problem.
Our proprietary solution is connected to thousands of feedback loops from various industries. We monitor for spam complaint trends and frequent complainers to our suppression list. Sometimes users don’t understand how to go through the unsubscribe process and instead simply mark messages as spam to get them out of their inbox.
With Xverify in place we can help you improve your inbox delivery by reducing your spam complaints. Our present database has over 3 million high volume complainer email addresses. If any inbound leads match a complainer on our list, we will send you a red flag.
Problem 3
You should not email every address you collect because some can be very dangerous to your list. Toxic email addresses are designed to identify spammers. Mailing to one of these accounts can really get you in hot water and lead to black listings. They are a way of testing marketers to really identify if they are following data quality best practices. High risk email accounts could be email addresses that were once real accounts that have become dormant or completely new email ids.
You cannot always trust the data you get from data brokers, or affiliate marketers. This is why it is always a best practice for you to have organic double opt-in data. However, in the world of marketing that is not always possible. So if you are working with third party data, and getting paid traffic to your site you have to be extra careful.
If you have been working on growing your list for a long time and not maintaining it that could be another reason you run into toxic email addresses. Next time you send out an email campaign check out your soft bounces and keep and eye on it because they will likely turn into a hard bounce. It is your responsibility to have bounce handling in place to remove hard bounces from your list.
You need to keep a close eye on your data quality. Cleaning data as you collect it is necessary, but it is equally important to do a scrub of your entire email list at least on a quarterly basis. The Send Shield technology knows marketers are working with affiliates and data brokers and can quickly scan your leads to identify hazardous email addresses before you hit send.
Reduce your chances of becoming blacklisted by taking advantage of the information we already have found. We maintain a database of over 12 million potentially toxic email addresses that are worth avoiding. Wouldn’t you rather be more safe than sorry?
Things To Remember
Your email list is important to your business, but it is also important to us. We want you to be able to maximize your ROI and continue to keep your rates of inbox deliverability high. Putting email verification in place will help keep your list clean and efficient. Email verification will eliminate hard bounces, reduce spam complaints, avoid high risk email addresses and minimize fraud.
Want to get a free list assessment to get a review of your own data quality? Click here to get in contact with us so we can perform an evaluation, and discuss the results with you.
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