Email deliverability and reputation management are often under-represented in digital marketing, yet they play a critical role in ensuring your campaigns reach the right audience. With providers like Gmail and Yahoo constantly refining how they evaluate incoming messages to protect their users’ inboxes, ignoring these aspects can lead to costly outcomes: lower deliverability rates, reduced engagement, and lost revenue.
Now, more than ever, it’s essential to stay informed about the latest best practices for email deliverability and reputation management. The good news? We’ve made it our mission to stay ahead of the deliverability curve, so you don’t have to. Keep reading to discover actionable tips that could make all the difference in whether your emails land in your audience’s inbox – or their evil spam folder.
Set Yourself Up for Success
When migrating to a new customer engagement platform, you are required to (re)establish and warm up a new IP address for sending emails. At its most basic, IP Warming is the process of methodically increasing the volume of email that you send from your new IP address in a calculated manner to not invoke any SPAM sensors by the email providers. Try following these IP Warming best practices so you can build a positive reputation with email providers and improve your deliverability rates. Remember to be patient as this process is both art and science, and requires a well-thought-out process before you begin.
Here are a few tips for warming up a new IP:
Analyze your audience and segment by email provider.
Start by sending a small volume of email to your most-engaged subscribers.
Create a plan on paper that programmatically increases the volume of email sends over time.
Monitor your deliverability rates closely and make adjustments as needed, even if that means reducing volume.
Consult with deliverability experts who can streamline the process.
Your Reputation is Everything
After warming up your new IP address, don’t forget to continue monitoring your email delivery metrics and your overall reputation. This will help you to identify and address any potential problems that could affect your ongoing email deliverability rates down the road.
Here are a few tips for monitoring your email delivery and reputation:
Use a tool like Google Postmaster to track your deliverability rates.
Monitor and analyze your bounce rates and spam complaint rates.
Mail providers (e.g. Google, Microsoft) can also supply additional insights.
Use a feedback loop to collect feedback from email providers about your email program.
Establish baseline metric levels so can you detect if there are any anomalies in performance.
If you’re relatively new to sending large amounts of email, we understand this may be a little (or a lot) overwhelming. The good news is that there are numerous resources that can help you to warm up your new IP address, monitor your email delivery and reputation, and improve your overall email deliverability rates.
To kick start you on that journey of learning, check out this post on understanding the difference between human opens and machine opens and how to track them separately in Braze.
Additionally, here’s a post on understanding your deliverability metrics at the ISP level.