How do you make sure the emails you’re sending on behalf of your clients, or for yourself, get to the intended inbox? Unfortunately, email delivery is a complex topic making it difficult to provide a simple answer to this question. But, we’ve got your back! To help you understand the dos and don’ts of email delivery, our Partner Success Managers conduct delivery reviews specific to your email sending history to help you avoid the Spam trap and improve engagement from your email campaigns. Here’s a brief overview of the 5 topics covered in a delivery review:

Whitelisting:
Email servers can block or filter incoming mail from unknown domains. Even if your contacts have opted in, the recipients’ servers may have strict filtering rules and send them straight to the Spam folder or bounce them. To avoid being cast aside from the inbox, you have a couple of options:

• Add our domain to your safe sender list – @mail.vresp.com
• Whitelist our IP ranges: 

• 74.116.89.0/24
• 74.116.91.0/24
• 63.251.246.0/24

Along with whitelisting our domain and IP ranges, be sure you’re complying with anti-Spam laws.

List Collection:
Always stress the importance of building an organic opt-in list as opposed to a purchased or harvested list with your clients. Our delivery team’s job is to secure a reputable sending history for our servers in order to help your emails, along with the emails you’re sending on behalf of clients make it to the inbox. We need your help to make sure your clients are growing their lists the right way in order to ensure our solid sending reputation with Internet Service Providers. In return, you will get better results from your email campaigns.

Engagement Summary:
What is the average open and click rate? We get asked this question all the time and we can give you an answer, but it’s not specific to any given industry. It’s important to set your own standards based on the emails you’re sending on behalf of clients. We’re here to help you find the appropriate time of day to send your emails, as well as discover the appropriate amount of times per month to send in order to increase engagement.

Text to Image Ratio:
When designing your emails, aim for a ratio of 80% text to 20% images. Spam filters look for a good balance. An email consisting of all text or one huge image has a higher chance of being cast aside into the Spam folder than those that have a good balance.

Email Fingerprinting:
If you’ve been diligent about including the previous tactics in your email marketing strategy but continue to see low engagement rates, it’s possible your emails have been fingerprinted. A fingerprint can be placed on any piece of email to uniquely identify the message and sender. Basically, fingerprints are put in place to track duplicate messages and Spam. In most cases, this happens when the sender’s email list includes invalid email addresses.

Annoyingly enough, a simple mistake of including an invalid email address in your list can follow you because fingerprints track the structure of your email. Even if you change the content of your email, filters will recognize the structure and flag it as Spam.

When this happens, try changing the entire structure of your email and send the re-structured email to your responders first and your non-responders the next day.

We’ve given you an overview of what is covered in the typical delivery review. Schedule a delivery review with your Partner Success Manager (psm@verticalresponse.com) to learn specifically how your emails are performing and identify areas you can improve to increase engagement from future campaigns.

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