Know-How to Improve Deliverability of Your Emails

Email deliverability: best practices for you to implement

Before we get started, it’s worth saying that you shouldn’t look for the most recent techniques on improving email deliverability, for there are none. It all starts with you and the way you use your resources. There are tools and programs that can merely assist you with monitoring and organizing your email campaigns. However, if there is something wrong with your deliverability, they can’t fix it for you. 

With that said, let’s see what you can do as a credible sender. 

Monitor your sender reputation 

We’re starting with one of the most complicated steps. Sender reputation is not a score that you can look up somewhere. It’s a combination of your domain reputation and your IP reputation. Both these factors have individual KPIs and are hard to calculate. 

As you can see, both shared IP and dedicated IP provide an individual set of benefits. From our personal point of view, we suggest investing in a dedicated IP early, no matter how tempting the shared IP growth looks.

After all, even if you start out as a small company, you’ll get bigger in time, so you’ll get a dedicated IP anyways. However, in that case, you’ll also end up spending time and resources on warming it up and adjusting your email campaigns to the change. Therefore, it’s better to start early.

Your domain reputation either lets you into your prospects’ inboxes or results in you getting banned from sending emails. It all depends on how well you take care of it. Think of building your domain reputation as if you’re building a brand.

• Is it respectful to its target audience?
• Does it comply with the rules and quality standards?
• How does it speak to users and potential buyers?

The more invested you are in your relationship with internet service providers and recipients, the easier it is for you to manage your domain reputation. 

Is there a way to check your sender reputation?

In the world of modern online technology, everything is possible. For example, there are services that compile all spam reports and responses to your IP address and domain in order to generate an approximate sender score, showing how well you’re doing. 

Folderly provides a faster and more reliable way of viewing your sender score. You can launch an email deliverability test for your chosen domain. In that case, Folderly will run an in-depth analysis of your domain settings, scan all major blacklists, evaluate your IP and provide a general Sender Score as well as tips for improvement.

Never send to random employees

Sometimes, senders get overwhelmed by an org chart of their target company. Therefore, they select a title that seems to be relevant to their sales offer and send a sales template, speaking to the title as if they were their potential client. This approach has led to more emails getting rejected or sent to the Spam folders than you can imagine. 

When it comes to B2B correspondence, you’re dealing with busy people. They don’t have time to figure out what a sudden message has to do with them. They won’t bother with correcting you or navigating you… unless you ask. 

There is nothing wrong with asking for assistance if you’re feeling confused by the company hierarchy and don’t know where your decision-maker is. However, you must ask directly instead of beating around the bush. 

Therefore, don’t send a sales offer. Ask for a referral instead. 

There. With just a couple of phrases, you made your intent clear and reached out for information. Your recipients are human, too — they understand that you need a hand, and since you asked nicely, they’ll meet you halfway.

View feedback loops

Major internet service providers make sure to document every aspect of your behavior as well as the way your recipients respond to you. For example, there are Complaint Feedback Loops (FBLs) that contain information about complaints regarding a certain email. 

Accessing such feedback loops allows you to learn about disgruntled recipients before they start moving your emails to spam or complaining about your domain, thus keeping your sending reputation safe and intact. You can get this information easily from almost all large internet service providers.

For example, Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo! provide open access to their FBLs. However, the process of accessing the Gmail feedback loop differs a little from the way things are done in Yahoo! and Microsoft.

• Access your Gmail profile with Gmail's Postmaster tools
• Authenticate with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
• Publish a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record
• Published all sending IPs the SPF record and make sure that your reverse DNS (PTR) record is valid and resolves to a valid hostname (the DKIM domain).
• Insert the Feedback-ID header.

Personalize your emails 

The way to your prospects' hearts lies through personalization. This is the ultimate truth that our Folderly team has learned when building outreach and increasing deliverability for our recipients. 

What do we mean by personalization?

In any case, always make sure to avoid making your templates generic. Don’t use generalizations or assumptions, don’t try to play up to your prospects’ desire for profit. For example, don’t use such boring and outdated phrases as “Our solution will increase your revenue.” Instead, make them more informative, “The {ProductName} has increased ROI by 30% for our client {RelevantCompanyName}.”

Sometimes, it’s hard to nail which personalization technique will work best for you. Folderly provides a 24/7 monitoring of your campaigns, letting you manage your A/B testing easily and select the winning approach for every prospect group in your sales pipeline.

Provide your recipients with an opportunity to opt-out 

Whether it’s inbound or outbound email marketing, your recipients shouldn’t feel as though this communication is forced upon them. They mustn’t feel obliged to speak with you just because they opened your email or subscribed to your newsletter. It’s amazing how the best way to keep your prospects around is to show them that they can leave at any time they want. 

In the case of outbound emails, when you send unsolicited emails, you must make them extremely polite and tactful. Therefore, in addition to keeping your tone calm and your offer personalized, provide the following: 

• A return address. Your prospects must know that they can reach out to you in case they want to respond or make a request. A solid email address hosted on a business domain is a great trust builder, so it instantly puts your recipients at ease. 
• A disclaimer. Unlike spammers, credible senders do care about who they send to and why they do it. This is why they attach a small notification to their email signature, informing the user that if the received email addresses them by the wrong name and title or makes an irrelevant offer, it’s quite possible that they received this message by mistake and, therefore, aren’t obliged to interact with it. 

• Final push templates. In case of unresponsive prospects who seem to be opening your emails for weeks without leaving any meaningful reply, you can make the first step and offer them to make a decision: Either say “yes'' and acknowledge their interest in further communication or say “no” to any further emails. This is a good way to let your prospects opt-out from outreach while keeping your sender reputation and deliverability intact.