Boosting Your Inbox Reach: The Power of Email Deliverability Tools

Let’s understand the main factors that impact email deliverability:

• Email sender reputation: Your sender reputation — which includes your domain and IP reputation — plays a significant role in email deliverability. ESPs and ISPs assess it to determine whether your email should be delivered to the inbox or filtered as spam.
• Authentication protocols: Implementing authentication protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) can help verify your authenticity and reduce incidents of email spoofing.
• Content and engagement: The content and engagement of your email matters. Irrelevant, poorly formatted, or excessively promotional content can trigger spam filters.
• Your list quality: Maintaining a clean and engaged email list is crucial. Besides cleaning your lists, you should segment them and use segmentation strategies that can help make your emails more relevant to subscribers, translating to better engagement, which then gets you better deliverability.
• Spam complaints: High numbers of recipients marking your emails as spam can negatively impact your sender reputation and email deliverability. It’s important to provide clear opt-in and opt-out options and honor unsubscribe requests promptly.
• Bounce rates: A high rate of bounced emails, whether due to invalid email addresses or other issues, can affect your deliverability in the future.
• Frequency and consistency: Sending emails too frequently or inconsistently can lead to deliverability problems. Spread it out and be patient!
• Compliance: Adhering to email marketing regulations, such as CAN-SPAM in the United States or GDPR in Europe, is essential for email deliverability. As a bonus, it helps build trust with your subscribers.

Here are several common functions of email deliverability tools:

• Email testing: Deliverability tools also offer built-in email testing. This allows you to test your emails and identify and address any issues.
• Spam testing: These tools assess email content to determine the likelihood of an email being flagged as spam by email filters and provide suggestions to reduce the spam score.
• Deliverability monitoring: They track your email deliverability rates over time, offering you excellent insight into which emails land in the inbox and which end up as spam.
• Authentication: Email deliverability tools often analyze authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify your identity and ensure proper authentication setup.
• Sender reputation monitoring: Some tools offer sender reputation monitoring, helping you understand your reputation with ESPs. For example, we will shortly include Google Postmaster Tools directly into the Campaign Refinery dashboard so our clients get insight into their sender score with the Gmail subscribers on their lists.
• List quality checks: They assist in maintaining a clean and engaged email list by identifying and removing invalid or unengaged email addresses. At Campaign Refinery, our clients enjoy the benefits of the list-cleaning feature, which automatically removes invalid emails, inactive emails, spam traps, and dormant email IDs.
• Inbox placement testing: Certain tools provide insights into where emails land, whether in the inbox, spam folder, or another email folder, helping senders understand how emails are filtered.
• Compliance: They assist senders in complying with email marketing regulations and standards, such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR, to avoid legal issues and improve deliverability.
• Email analytics: Many tools provide detailed analytics and reporting on email performance, including open rates, click-through rates, and other stats, helping senders make data-driven decisions.

Here are the biggest reasons to use email deliverability tools:

1. Your outgoing email volume is high.
2. You are concerned about sender reputation — deliverability tools can assist in diagnosing problems.
3. You want to run complex email campaigns with A/B testing, personalized content, and multiple segments. 
4. You struggle with maintaining email lists, including identifying and removing inactive or invalid email addresses. In such scenarios, deliverability tools can automate and streamline these processes.
5. You want to know where your emails are landing (inbox, spam folder, etc.).
6. You want to adopt best practices. These tools continually remind you about best practices until they become second nature.

Below, we have listed the different challenges you face as a sender when tackling spam filters:

• False positives: Spam filters are designed to be cautious and may sometimes flag legitimate marketing emails as spam. For example, the use of blacklisted phrases or excessive/incorrect use of HTML can cause filters to incorrectly mark your messages as spam.
• Content restrictions: Spam filters analyze the content of emails for spammy elements. This can limit creative freedom in email marketing and make it challenging to craft engaging content.
• Image-to-text ratio: Excessive use of images with little text can trigger spam filters. 
• Link tracking: Links in marketing emails, especially short or redirected links, can raise suspicion for spam filters. Marketers often use link tracking to gather analytics, but this can be a trigger for spam filters.
• Sending frequency: Sending emails too frequently to the same recipients can lead to unsubscribes and spam complaints. 
• Authentication: Spam filters consider your authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) before they let your emails through.
• Engagement: Filters may track recipient interactions with emails, such as open rates and click-through rates. Low engagement can signal to spam filters that recipients find your emails irrelevant.
• Regulatory compliance: Compliance with email marketing regulations (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR) is essential. Violating these regulations can trigger spam filters.
• Adapting to spam filter changes: Spam filter algorithms constantly evolve to catch new spam tactics. Email marketers need to stay up-to-date with these changes and adapt their practices accordingly.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of having an excellent sender reputation:

1. High deliverability: The most obvious benefit first — a positive sender reputation greatly increases the likelihood that your emails will be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. ESPs and spam filters will give your emails priority, as they are less likely to be spam or unwanted.
2. Avoiding spam filters: A good sender reputation helps your emails avoid being flagged as spam. When your score is high, spam filters are less likely to scrutinize your emails with suspicion, reducing the chances of false positives.
3. Improved open and click-through rates: If your emails land in the inbox, they are more likely to be opened and engaged with, leading to better open rates and click-through rates. This, in turn, contributes to better campaign success.
4. Consistent engagement: A positive sender reputation will encourage consistent engagement from your subscribers. As recipients continue to open, read, and interact with your emails, your reputation further improves.

As the experts on email deliverability, here are must-do guidelines to follow if you want to improve your inboxing rate. 

• Maintain a clean email list: Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive and invalid email addresses. Implement a double opt-in process to ensure subscribers’ interest and accuracy of email addresses.
• Segment your lists: Segment your email list based on recipient preferences, behavior, or demographics. Send targeted and relevant content to specific segments.
• Implement authentication protocols: Adding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to authenticate your email domain validates your identity before ESPs.
• Quality content: Create valuable, relevant, and engaging email content that recipients want to open and read. Focus on content and design excellence to avoid spam triggers.
• Maintain consistency: Be consistent in your sending frequency and timing to establish familiarity and trust with recipients.
• Feedback loops are your friend: Set up feedback loops with ESPs to receive notifications when recipients mark your emails as spam. Remove such recipients from your list promptly.
• Check for blacklisting: Regularly check whether your IP address or domain is listed on email blacklists. If listed, follow delisting procedures.
• Engagement tracking: Track recipient engagement metrics like open rates and click-through rates. Remove or re-engage inactive subscribers.
• Regulatory compliance: Comply with email marketing regulations and laws, such as CAN-SPAM or GDPR.
• Test extensively: Use email testing tools to test and preview how your emails will appear on various devices and email clients.
• Warm-up new IP addresses: If you’re sending emails from a new IP address, gradually increase your sending volume to establish a positive reputation.
• Monitor your deliverability: Regularly monitor your email deliverability rates to identify and address any issues proactively.
• Monitor your sender reputation: Prioritize ethical email practices and maintain a strong sender reputation with ESPs.
• Provide unsubscribe options: Make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe from your emails, and promptly honor such requests!

Let’s study the features offered by email testing tools.

• Rendering: Email testing tools allow you to preview how an email will appear on different email clients and devices. They help ensure the email design, images, and formatting of your emails are consistent across various platforms.
• Spam warnings: These tools can tell you if your email is likely to be classified as spam and provide recommendations to reduce the chances of being flagged as spam.
• Deliverability: They evaluate the deliverability of your emails by assessing aspects like sender reputation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication, and other elements that impact email deliverability.
• Links and image testing: These tools can check the links and images in your emails to make sure they are working correctly.
• Content testing: Some email testing tools offer A/B testing for subject lines and email content to determine which variations are most effective at maximizing engagement.
• Accessibility: Some tools even check for email accessibility, ensuring that emails are readable and usable for people with disabilities.
• Compliance: They help ensure your emails comply with email marketing regulations, such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR.

We tell you what to look out for and why.

1. Simple UI: This is the first thing you should look for in a good tool, and it can be a dealbreaker. Your tool should have a UI you are able to understand and operate easily. 
2. Integrations: Support for various third-party tools is important. For example, you want this testing tool to work well with list management tools and sending tools.
3. Excellent analytics: This is the most important part of your email testing tool — what it tells you once the test is over. You should be able to view all possible metrics of your test and gain valuable insight.
4. Scalability: As you get better results from campaigns and your work scales up, you need a testing tool that scales proportionately.
5. Optimization suggestions: What good is a tool that won’t tell you how to fix your issues? There are many testing tools that will give you great suggestions for preventing delivery or deliverability shortcomings.