Email Deliverability Problem? Read This.

One of the biggest challenges email marketers face is email deliverability.

In layman’s terms, does your email land in Primary, Promotions, or Spam? For many bulk senders, hitting Primary consistently is a challenge.

ISPs look at a few things to determine how to classify your email:

1. Authentication. Does your sending domain have the proper DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records in place?
2. Domain Age. Is your sending domain more than 90 days old? Newly registered domains are penalized. Older is better.
3. Domain Privacy. Is your domain registration set to private? It’s better if it’s set to public as this indicates you don’t have anything to hide.
4. Website. Is there a website attached to your sending domain? Does it have a privacy policy and terms of service? (It should.)
5. Domain and IP Health. Do Gmail and other ISPs see that you’re mailing from a healthy domain and IP address?
6. Subscriber Behavior. What do subscribers do when they receive your email? Do they ignore, open, click, reply, complain, or trash?

The first four items on the list are structural. Once you’ve ticked all those boxes, it mostly comes down to subscriber behavior. The reason I say that is because domain and IP health are strongly linked with subscriber behavior. They both influence each other.

That said, there is the possibility your list is put on a bad IP to start with. Or, if you’re using a shared IP pool, perhaps the majority of them are bad. If this is the case, you’ll be in a tough spot from the get-go.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume you’ve got a good IP or at least one that is starting from neutral.

Alright, so if all the items from 1-5 have passed the test, then all of your focus should be on subscriber behavior.

Good Signals:

• Opening an email
• Clicking a link in an email
• Replying to an email
• Forwarding an email
• Marking an email as “important”
• Starring an email or marking it as a “favorite”
• Moving the email out of Spam
• Moving the email from the Promotions tab to Primary
• Creating a filter that puts the email in Primary and marks it as “important”
• Adding the sender to your contact list

Bad Signals:

• Ignoring the email (not opening it)
• Trashing the email (without opening it)
• Marking the email as “spam”
• Leaving the email in spam (if it lands there)
• Creating a filter that trashes the email before you even see it

Regardless of how clean your list is and how valuable or entertaining the content you send, you will at some point get some negative signals. It’s inevitable. Some will lose interest in what you have to say. Some will be triggered by something and complain.

The key is to have more positive than negative signals. The bigger the gap between positive and negative signals, the better your deliverability will be.

“But Ryan, we send promotions everyday and we’ve had some spam spikes above Gmail’s 0.3% threshold. Our domain reputation has dropped and now all our emails are going to the Promotions tab. Is there anything we can do to get back into Primary?”

The traditional approach to this problem is to tighten up segments to your most engaged contacts, temporarily reduce sending volume, and… wait.

By wait, I mean you have to follow this protocol for a few weeks and monitor Google Postmaster to see if and when your domain reputation recovers. If your domain rep goes back to High, then you’ll probably find that you’re hitting Primary again.

Of course, if you don’t change your mailing patterns and you start mailing daily promotions to your larger segments again, your newly recovered domain health may only last a couple of weeks or a month. Without changes to content or strategy, those negative signals will come right back.

A less traditional “gray hat” option is to utilize something called “warming.” Warming works by tapping into seed emails that will open, click, and move your emails into the Primary tab. The basic idea is that these seeds will send enough positive signals to the ISPs to balance out any negative signals, thereby reducing spam rates and increasing domain reputation.

Using a warming service to improve domain reputation has two main advantages compared to the traditional approach:

1. You don’t have to change your mailing habits or reduce segment sizes, which means you don’t have to sacrifice short-term revenue for domain health.
2. Done properly, warming will boost your domain reputation faster than tightening segments.

If warming sounds like something your email list could benefit from, my company Upsender now offers a Gmail warming service. It’s priced very competitively compared to other warming services.

All you have to do is pick a plan and update your DNS settings with the MX records we provide. We handle it all from there.

One of our larger clients used our warming service and we were able to increase his domain reputation from Medium to High in one month. We went slow at their request, which is why it took as long as it did. I suspect we could have done it in two weeks or less if we’d been able to send our normal volumes.

Immediately after the increase, the client was able to see their emails hitting Gmail’s Primary tab anywhere from 60-100% of the time (after being at zero for weeks).

You can learn more about our Gmail warming service here. If you have questions or would like to move forward, just reply to this email.

Keep pushing the limits,

Ryan “email deliverability” Healy