Email Deliverability Best Practices
Collecting independent tips and suggestions on email deliverability best practices can be overwhelming, not to mention trying to understand what each suggestion/tip means. Don’t worry, Lead Liaison consolidated necessary tips and suggestions for you into a short checklist.
Enclosed are two separate checklists. The first checklist contains items your marketing team can do independent from your Email Service Provider (ESP). The second checklist contains items your ESP, in this case Lead Liaison, can do for you. Some ESPs do not offer such extensive services. Lead Liaison takes email deliverability seriously. As part of every Lead Liaison subscription license to our Revenue Generation Software a Customer Success Representative works with each customer to ensure they’re following email deliverability best practices.
Following this checklist will ensure your email messages successfully reach your recipients and will increase the likelihood of your messages being accepted, not marked as spam/junk, by your recipients.
Email Deliverability Best Practices Checklists
Things for you to do:
□ Send your initial lists to clean lists (people you know well who won’t hit the spam button)
□ Use lead nurturing to send relevant content based on roles, actions and interests
□ Only send to old database contacts once you develop a good reputation
□ Consider using a different but related domain for sending emails
□ Setup SenderID and SPF
□ Setup postmaster@ and abuse@ email addresses
□ Avoid buying, renting or borrowing lists from 3rd parties
□ Check the integrity of your contact lists before and after an upload
□ Create great marketing content
□ Segment your marketing content into smaller chunks vs. sending “clusters”
□ Get people’s permission before adding them to an email marketing track
□ Embed a “Safely Unsubscribe” and “Privacy Policy” link at the bottom of your messages
□ Do not be too aggressive with your email communications especially at first (think dating)
□ Use auto-responders that cross promote
□ Use an active email address as your reply-to email address
□ Make the unsubscribe process easier than the subscribe process
□ Use your colors and logo in your content so your recipients recognize you
□ Don’t include too many images (<=4) in your messages
□ Keep your messages small (< 37K Bytes)
□ Follow CAN-SPAM Act requirements
Things to do with Lead Liaison’s support:
□ Setup DKIM/DomainKeys
□ Send from a dedicated IP address, not a shared IP address
□ Start by warming up your IP address and sending a small amount (<1,000) of messages
□ Process hard and soft bounce emails and test
□ Check blacklist records occasionally to make sure your dedicated IP address is not on any lists
□ Make sure you tag your contacts with a lead source
□ Segment current and future contacts by building Lead Liaison Target Lists
□ Build several landing pages and web forms to increase lead capture and build subscribers
□ Keep web form fields simple
□ Send a text representation with your html email
□ Monitor feedback loops and resolve spam complaints
□ Avoid using spam-like words (“free”) in your messages
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How are you meeting email deliverability best practices? What would you add to this list?
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