Email Deliverability: How To Prevent Emails Landing In The “Junk” Folder?

If you want your email to be sent in the inbox instead of the junk folder or to be considered as spam, we recommend you to comply in 3 steps:

• Reputation
• Infrastructure
• Authentication

First, let’s define the three terms:

• Reputation: this term means your own server, that is to say your IP address and your domain name.
• Infrastructure: this term refers to your servers’ infrastructure or system design.
• Authentication: this term allows you to verify, or to validate, an identity in an electronic exchange to control access to a network or a software.

Reputation

Your reputation is based on your standard score. You have to make sure that it always fluctuates and stays close to 100. Getting caught with spam traps will make you fall to zero value rather immediately. As a general rule of thumbs, your emails must be properly formatted, it means that it cannot contain only pictures (high ratio of image to text content) and your keywords used must be filtered against spamming phrases such as “click here” or “free”.

Furthermore, the email sending trend shall be consistent by spreading sending quantity over time rather than sending a very high volume of emails within a day in a month. Lastly, your email database has to be clean to reduce bounce rate as much as you can.

Infrastructure

We categorized it into 3 main components:

• Web (Software Application): this is the email marketing software application you’re using every day. The application must be securely hosted to avoid potential hacking and data leakage.
• Database: the database system is the system that records all the activities run by the software. Database system together with application hosting should be well-planned to increase the efficiency of sending.
• MTA (Mail Transfer Agent): this is the email servers which push out the email messages. In our case, we are using multiple dedicated IP address to increase inbox placement rate.

Authentication

When an email says that it comes from a registered organisation, then what does it mean by email “authentication” ? Therefore, email authentication is the verification of a sender which is from the domain company address or a third party sending in the name of the domain company itself. The authentication will help you understand who the email sender is.

Thus, the email verification is the backbone of the company reputation, because if the email has authentication clashes and it lands on the subscribers’ junk or spam folder instead of being in the inbox, then people will think that the company is a spammer instead of a legit company. This will cause the users to mark your company emails as “spam”, and this can really hurt your company reputation which can affect your revenue input negatively.

There are 2 main methods of authentication:

• DKIM > Domain Keys Identified Mail
• SPF > Sender Policy Framework

Together, they form the DNS, the Domain Name Server. In brief, with this addition to your DNS entries, you’re telling recipients that you’ve authorized your email marketing service provider to send emails on your behalf. Without this change, your email has a higher chance of being marked as spam since the email was addressed from your domain but was sent from an IP address with your email marketing service provider’s domain.

You may think “okay, but what’s the relationship between all of them?”

Well, despite the authentication being optional, if you don’t monitor both your IP reputation or build a proper email marketing infrastructure, you might encounter major email deliverability issues, which would eventually get you a low response rate because a lot of your emails go to spam mailbox; and worst case is that your sent emails fail to arrive or blocked.

If you would like to learn how Wave Evolution can help you with email deliverability, please email info@waveevo.com or visit www.WaveEvo.com