How-To: 5 Ways to Increase Email Deliverability

It feels good to get through

Return Path's Q2 2008 Reputation Benchmark Report (pdf) found e-mails sent from "legitimate" e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56 percent. 20 percent were rejected; 8 percent filtered out of the inbox. The rest — 16 percent — were bounces.

So nearly half of the time, e-mail marketers' messages don't get through. But t
here are ways to increase deliverability, insists George Bilbrey, Return Path's general manager of delivery assurance. Here are five:

1. Make sure your e-mail server—or ESPs—is configured correctly. If you maintain your own e-mail server, it's crucial that it's set up correctly. This means making sure your reverse DNS settings, which map an IP address to a host name, are correct and use your domain name. "You don’t want to have a big string of numbers. You want it to say, 'mail.domainname.com,'" said Bilbrey. Otherwise you may be classified as an illegitimate server.

2. Keep your unknown user rate down. When you send a message to an illegitimate email addy, the ISP or server handling it keeps track of that delivery attempt. Log too many of those attempts and you might be put on a blacklist — worse still, blocked at the server level.
If either of those things occurs, none of your emails to that domain or ISP will get through.
Fake emails aren't the only worry. This can also happen when e-mail recipients change jobs or don't log in to their email address frequently. Your best bet, Bilbrey said, is to check for unknown users after every mailing and remove them immediately. Your IT person or ESP can provide you with a list of bounced e-mail addresses and help you remove them.

3. Track your reputation. Many email deliverability services track email senders' reputations based on information like inclusion on blacklists, complaint rates and e-mail volume. (Return Path provides a free service at senderscore.org.) Keeping a vigilant guard of your reputation score gives you a better sense of your deliverability rates; one tends to correlate with the other.
"It’s definitely a case of the higher the score, the higher the deliverability," said Bilbrey.

4. E-mail often. If you don't email your list often enough, addresses go stale and you may end up with a higher number of undeliverable messages. And even if some messages do get through, recipients may forget they signed up for them and report you as a spammer.
Reach out to your list at least quarterly, but monthly is better.

5. Don’t get caught in a spam trap. ISPs and large domain holders sometimes set up "spam traps," placing email addresses that don’t belong to anyone on their homepage or around the web to thwart spammers engaged in email harvesting.

You might inadvertently mail one of these addresses if someone maliciously puts one on your list or if a legitimate e-mail address is entered incorrectly. There are two ways to prevent this problem: implement a double opt-in so every email address on your list is verified; or send double opt-in messages from a separate domain and a separate IP address.

Double opt-in also serves as a handy defense against blacklisting: "If you do hit a spam trap and get on a blacklist, you can go to the ISP or the domain owner and say, 'This is my confirmed opt-in welcome stream. I can't control what people input. That's why I have a double opt-in in place,'" said Bilbrey.

"The ISP sees you're trying to do the right thing and, as long as you provide some evidence that that's what you’re doing, you won't have a problem getting off the blacklist. And at the same time, the rest of your e-mail list is safe."

Source: MarketingVox