EMAIL DELIVERABILITY CHECKLIST: What Every Email Marketer Should Routinely Examine

Whether it’s financial, fitness, business or nutrition, all of us seek to establish routines robust with goals, checklists and reminders to motivate us on the daily to keep us on track and focused on the task at hand.

I’ve created this post specifically for email marketers as an EMAIL DELIVERABILITY CHECKLIST that every online marketer should routinely review as a reminder of the foundational stepping stones to solid email deliverability.

Before we can understand and can tackle email deliverability, we need to first understand and ask ourselves – “WHO OWNS THE INBOX?”

Is it Senders, Subscribers or Inbox Providers who own the inbox? 

Litmus did a survey recently and asked its community what they thought. Here are the results:

I personally think it’s the subscriber who owns the inbox and the minute you forget that is when all your email deliverability nightmares will reign true!

Now that we got that out the way, let me present the crucial pillars of email deliverability.

TECHNICALS

I’m going to assume that you have the technicals covered:

• Using a quality Mailing Transport Agent (MTA) such as PowerMTA from Port25 (Don’t worry about this if you’re using an email service provider)
• Email Authentication – DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DMARC, Reverse DNS, etc.
• Feedback Loops and Whitelisting

LIST HYGIENE

You need to make sure that your email list is clean. What do I mean by “clean”?

A clean list consists of 2 parts.

First, you need to make sure that there are no invalid, “role” (info@, support@, etc.) or suspicious email addresses on your list (or added to your list).

Invalid email addresses are ones that no longer exist and will bounce back when sent to them. A high bounce rate can indicate a bad list and may cause deliverability issues if overlooked.

There are many list hygiene companies out there that can help you clean up your list.

Quick Tip:

A double opt-in signup process will tackle most of these types of bad addresses and prevent them from ending up on your list.

However, if you do NOT have a double opt-in list collection process in place, you’ll need to routinely monitor your new signups to ensure that such problematic email addresses do NOT get added (and most importantly continue to linger) on your email list.

Second, you need to ensure that “inactive” email addresses are either re-engaged or purged.

Inactive email addresses are “unresponsive” subscribers that have not opened or clicked on an email for a very long time. It is best to either re-engage these subscribers with special incentives and offers or to remove them altogether from your list.

Quick Tip:

Since the risk factors for having “inactive” contacts on your list are not fully validated, I always prefer to keep them on the email list and segment these subscribers, emailing them less frequently.

IP REPUTATION AND BLACKLIST MONITORING

Much like your credit score, your sender reputation consists of metrics (that can go up or down) monitored by ISP’s and inbox providers to assess the risk level for your email campaigns.

A poor history and sending reputation will result in emails ending up in the spam folder or even worse – totally blocked!

You should routinely monitor your sending reputation and major blacklists to ensure that there are no major problems with your sending reputation.

Quick Tip:

You can user Sender Score from Return Path for a quick overview of your sending IP reputation.

ENGAGEMENT

So, let’s assume you’ve got all the points mentioned above covered and all your data is super clean (with proper bounce management), your list collection methods are following best practices and you’re on top of your sending reputation (IP’s and domains).

Now comes the “Engagement” part!

To fully optimize your email deliverability you’ll need to direct your focus on overall engagement, open & click rates and low spam complaints.

Although the normal email metrics (i.e. opens, clicks, etc.) provided by your email service provider play a role, ISP’s look at engagement a bit differently by also monitoring a subscriber’s inbox actions in deciding whether your email ends up in the inbox or not.

Here are the inbox engagement metrics ISP’s may consider:

Positive Engagement Metrics:

• Reply Back – when your subscriber replies back to a message they received from you, it is one of the highest levels of engagement.
• Not Spam – when your subscribers marks an email as “Not Spam”, it tells the ISP that the message should not be considered spam.
• Archive or Move to Folder – when your subscribers move messages around and store them, it signals to the ISP that they care about your emails.

Negative Engagement Metrics:

• Mark as Spam – when your subscribers mark an email as “Spam” or “Junk”, it signals to the ISP that the email was unwanted.
• Delete Without Open – when your subscribers glance and delete (without opening), it may signal that they didn’t like it or are not interested in your email. (this is negative if it keeps happening over and over…)

How do you get more of the “positive” actions in the inbox you ask? Here’s a quick list of items:

1. Killer Content – Send valuable content (that’s reliable and reputable) to build trust.
2. Targeted & Relevant – With advanced marketing tools, you can target emails based on your subscribers behavior and interests to deliver a more personal and relevant email.
3. Segment Your List – Further optimize by segmenting your list by interest to increase engagement.
4. Sending Frequency – Stick to a consistent schedule. By over-sending, you’ll cause list fatigue & high churn or unsubscribe rates. By under-sending, your subscribers will forget about you and who you are.
5. Listen – By listening to your subscribers or customers you gain their loyalty and they won’t be able to wait until your next email!
6. Evaluate Metrics & Response Rates – How everything is looking from open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, conversions and more…

Overall “engagement” can only be measured over time and that is why it is vital to routinely go through your entire email program (from top to bottom) to ensure that all checks and balances are properly in place…

… AND… always remind yourself that being proactive and maintaining a good sender reputation is much better than trying to repair a damaged reputation after the fact.