9 Email Deliverability Best Practices

Nearly half of all emails sent today are spam. To keep customers from being inundated with wave after wave of spam mail, email services use something known as an Email Deliverability Score. This important score is used to determine whether an email is reputable before passing it on to the user. If your emails don't have a high deliverability score, they may never be seen!

Email marketing, long speculated as “dying,” is in fact, quite the opposite — and it’s still the most effective way to reach your customers. But if your emails don’t make it to the inbox, it’s lost time, money, and opportunities. 

Following email deliverability best practices is key to ensuring more eyes see your emails. Here are nine best practices you can — and should — implement for your email marketing program:  

1. Protect your domain reputation. Your domain reputation tells the email service whether your email is likely to be spam. Use a dedicated email server and “season” it by sending emails with a slowly increasing frequency.
2. Become familiar with GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws. These new laws carry hefty fines and penalties if you don't follow them. GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws relate to how you use personally identifiable information and how you send emails to customers. For example, under CAN-SPAM, you cannot send unsolicited or misleading emails.
3. Avoid spammy content. Make sure you don't have common spam phrases in your emails and make sure both your grammar and your spelling are correct.
4. Honor opt-outs. It should always be easy for customers to locate an opt-out option and use it. Honoring opt-outs is a part of CAN-SPAM. If you don't allow easy opt-outs, you increase the likelihood of your emails marked as spam and deleted as junk mail.
5. Avoid spam traps. Spam traps are fake emails that are sometimes seeded onto mailing lists by email service providers. Send an unsolicited email to a spam trap, and you could end up blacklisted. Tip: MassMailer can be used to identify spam traps and validate email addresses, protecting you from this issue.
6. Get people to opt-in. Don't purchase email lists or send emails to people unsolicited. Make sure all emails have opted-in. That ensures that you're sending your emails to a willing audience.
7. Verify your sender domain. Use the correct email address in the From Address and authenticate the sender domain properly, so email services know that the email is coming from whom you say it's coming from. Authentication services such as DMARC can be used from within MassMailer.
8. Use a dedicated IP. Get a dedicated IP address to ensure your email sender reputation is intact. Moreover, the sender's reputation is not compromised by the actions of other senders on a shared IP address.
9. Check your deliverability score. Your deliverability score is the likelihood that your emails have of making it to the inbox. From there, you can begin to improve upon your score and ultimately grow your email marketing effectiveness and engagement.

MassMailer Can Help

You can now improve the deliverability and effectiveness of your email campaigns using MassMailer. Improve engagement, detect spam traps, and avoid common spam phrases, all with this versatile Salesforce utility. The MassMailer platform provides everything you need to create a successful marketing campaign.

Check out MassMailer on AppExchange today.

Siva and Arti Devaki are cofounders of MassMailer, and have been a part of the Salesforce ecosystem since 2007.