26 Expert Tips to Improve Email Delivery Customers often ask why emails are not delivered, get blocked or land in the spam folder. There are several reasons why it happens. Very often the main problem is that the sender hasn’t taken care of his reputation and email quality. We are offering 26 great tips on how you can improve your email quality and sender reputation in order to get your email campaigns delivered to the inbox and increase open rates. Email newsletter quality 1. Before sending an email campaign, check the spam score. You can do this at the 4th step of the email campaign builder. The maximum acceptable spam score is 5 but we do not recommend to send campaigns with more than 1 point. 2. Make sure that email content or subject field does not include spam words. 3. Due to spam filters, do not send campaigns with too large images. Keep image width at maximum 600 px. 4. Do not send campaigns where image size (px and kb) exceed the size of the text. Recommended proportion is 50/50. 5. Do not send campaigns with too large attachments. Keep the size of attachments below 1Mb. 6. Do not send campaigns with too long or too short subject fields. Keep their length from 18 till 52 symbols. 7. Do not send campaigns with too many CAPS LOCK LETTERS. Keep 1 caps lock letter for each 6 – 8 symbols. 8. If you track html clicks in your campaigns, do not send text links with full URL „http://…†formatting in the email content. Email programs can look at them as SCAM, or masked link, that spammers are often using. Build links as words or phrases. 9. Do not send campaigns with incorrect or non-existing destination links because spam filters may throw your message in the spam, not inbox folder because of these broken links. 10. Do not send campaings with “phishy†requests, where you demand personal information from clients in your email. This could be identified as phishing spam email. 11. Send only relevant content, so that your message gets good engagement. Our expert campaign managers will always be happy to help you with that. 12. Keep the subject field and email content similar to those in the previous newsletters. 13. Make sure your email campaign does not include too many HTML code errors. You can check this using W3 validator. 14. Do not include forms and scripts in the email content. 15. Do not send campaigns that recipients could probably mark as spam. In order to avoid it: -keep the contacts in one list and segment them; -insert unsubscribe link at to top of the newsletter. Sender reputation 16. If a newsletter has landed in the spam folder, the recipient should mark it as not spam. If he marks it as spam, then other, e.g. Gmail recipients may also receive it in the spam folder. But if he marks it as not spam, your reputation will be raised „in the eyes of Gmailâ€. 17. Ask recipients to add your email address to their address books in order for your newsletters safely land in their inbox. 18. Encourage recipients to reply to your message. For example, Gmail automatically adds email address to the address book if recipient does reply to an email. So don’t send campaigns from „noreply@†address. 19. Do not send campaigns to hard bounced or dead email addresses. 20. Do not send several campaigns to the the same recipient on the same day. do not send email campaigns too often; survey your clients on how often they want to receive newsletters from you and what topics they want you to include. 21. Encourage recipients to always load remote content within your emails, so your images open automatically in the future. 22. Segment your contacts. Send campaigns less often to those contacts who rarely open your newsletters because low open rates can negatively affect your email delivery. 23. Analyse regularly content and statistics of your campaigns. Set the best campaigns as examples and try to get better results, higher ROI for your further campaigns. 24. Send a re-engagement campaign with a special offer to those contacts who have been ignoring the last 10 of your newsletters. Encourage them to respond to your call to action, so they get back into your active list. 25. Encourage your customers to mark your newsletters as priority emails. For example, in Gmail they can add a star, in Outlook/Hotmail – a flag. 26. Use domain authentication for your email campaigns. Source: http://blog.mailigen.com/26-expert-tips-to-improve-email-delivery/
