You may not realize this, but an Email that is delivered to the inbox or the junk folder is technically delivered. So, paying attention to deliverability rates doesn’t mean that your email actually made it to the inbox! An email is a formidable tool – often resulting in the highest returns than any other online medium… but investing in the email tools and the creatives for deploying an email marketing strategy isn’t going to provide any return if your emails aren’t actually visible to your subscriber.

We recently assisted a national retailer that said Yahoo! subscribers weren’t seeing their office-based emails. The emails were being delivered, but Yahoo! was routing them directly to the junk folder. The company had recently migrated to Microsoft 365 but their IT team failed to update their DNS records to fully authenticate the ISP. We were able to add the necessary records, validate their email headers, and now they’re getting to the inbox. A simple fix that likely saved them a lot of frustration.

Email service providers (ESPs) and ISPs do not provide any reporting on whether or not your email was routed to the inbox or the junk folder. They typically only measure open rates (which is often inaccurate) and click-through rates (CTRs) on marketing-related bulk email sends. In order to accurately measure your inbox placement, you must deploy an inbox placement service. They will provide you with a seed list of emails that span different ISPs and then they will report back to you on where your email wound up.

Factors That Impact Email Deliverability and Inbox Placement

• Email Authentication – Email authentication includes technologies (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI) that ISPs use to validate the domain that you’re sending for is authorized to send from the IP Address you’re sending from. If you’ve not set up email authentication, ISPs may assume that your email is a phishing email, and they’ll route it to the SPAM folder.
• No Sender Reputation – Every email is sent from an IP address. Some are corporate servers; most bulk emails are from ESPs. Regardless, the email is coming from a specific server. ISPs monitor these IP addresses, the sender, and store whether or not the emails received are generating activity or being reported as SPAM. When you first start sending, it’s assumed that you’re a spammer. So if you’re sending on a new IP address (or have migrated to another ESP) with no reputation, you must warm the IP address to build that initial reputation.
• Industry Blacklists – Most ISPs and many companies subscribe to industry blacklists. Spamhaus is a well-known blacklist service. Organizations like Spamhaus monitor the volume of complaints a business gets, and the thresholds are fairly low. If your company finds itself on a blacklist (DNSBL), each ISP may block all emails from your sending domain and IP address.

Check To See If Your IP Is Blacklisted

• ISP Blacklists – Major ISPs also maintain blacklists. You can do several things to ensure high deliverability rates, including getting your company whitelisted with them. If you’re sending emails from your own system, challenge your IT teams to put the necessary precautions in place.
• Hard Bounces – If an email address is no longer valid, the provider will often reject the email with a specific code. If your system doesn’t do anything with that information and you continue sending it to the address, you will get in trouble. Resending messages to bad email addresses is an easy way to get on the bad side of an ISP. They’ll begin dumping all of your emails into the SPAM folder. We often cleanse their email addresses and remove any known hard bounces for large senders to avoid a poor sender reputation. If you’re a B2B sender, you should cleanse your subscriber list regularly as businesses have a significant turnover annually.
• Soft Bounces – sometimes inboxes are full and the host or provider doesn’t accept the email. They send a bounce message back. This is called a soft bounce. If your system doesn’t have any means of handling a soft bounce, you won’t send another email when the user finally cleans up their inbox. This is called bounce management, and it’s a complex methodology. Email service providers will attempt to resend emails dozens of times if necessary to maximize deliverability rates.
• Content – Email subject lines and content may contain some words that trigger SPAM filters. Unbeknownst to you, your email is sent directly to the junk folder, and your recipient never reads it. Most email service providers (and some external tools) have content analysis filters. It’s a great idea to validate your message to improve the chances of making it to the inbox.

There’s no need to break the bank on these tools, either. While signing up with an ESP may cost thousands of dollars, you can also just opt into some email tool services to monitor your deliverability and inbox placement.

If you’re having difficulties, contact Highbridge. We can verify your email authentication records are accurate, check blacklists, and even measure your inbox placement.

©2023 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved.

Originally Published on Martech Zone: Are Your Emails Making It To The Inbox?