Improve Your Email Deliverability In Under 5 Minutes
by Sam Davis
If you’re a small company like me, you probably heavily rely on email as a marketing tool. Whilst it’s all well and good to rigorously collect email addresses via your website, at some point – you’ll need to be emailing them, therefore it is important to check that you are doing all the right things to ensure your emails are more funky and less junky.
To do this, I’d advise starting with a great online tool called Mail Tester. It is so simple to use – just visit their website and they’ll randomly generate an email address, and you’ll need to email that address from your own account.
Once you do this, you should then click the blue “Check Your Score” button on the website, which will then grade your email when it is received, checking for the all important factors such as:
- SpamAssassin’s rating of the message sent – based on image to text proportion, external images and more.
- The checking of your server SPF record to see if you are fully authenticated.
- Making sure your message is signed with DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail is a method for associating a domain name to an email message).
- Ensuring the message passes the DMARC test.
- Checking your domain has a Reverse DNS lookup.
- Making sure your domain and hostname is assigned to a mail server and server respectively.
- Checking your images have an ALT tag.
- Seeing if you provide a List-Unsubscribe header.
- Validating against Spam Blacklists.
- Parsing your email to ensure no broken links.
Once you do this, you are then given tips and advice to change various settings on your email account, your domain or within your DNS, which can improve deliverability of your emails. For example, here were my “before and after” results when I started out…
As you can see, the score went from 5.7 out of 10 to 9 out of 10. To put that in perspective, if we were to treat that as a percentage, that means that out of every 10,000 emails I was to send, originally, only 5,700 would be received, whereas after the fixes, that figure would rise to 9,000. That is 3,300 people I may have been missing out on! This begs the question, can you afford to miss out on that many people just for the sake of putting a few quick fixes into action?
I simply cannot afford to be losing out on business by people not seeing my emails.
I have now made my own email address 10/10, because I simply cannot afford to be losing out on business by people not seeing my emails – so whether I am sending out an offer, a discount, a newsletter, or simply an emailed reply, I can be assured that my server is in optimum condition to be able to successfully pass on the message to my clients or leads without any unnecessary hurdles in between!
If you’re looking for some assistance in making sure your email systems are delivering messages to your clients at a near 10% success rate, then I can help you get things purring for you.
CONTACT ME TO TURN YOUR EMAILS FROM JUNKY TO FUNKY
Sam Davis
I am fanatical about providing useful web experiences, via bespoke websites which engage, inform and entertain. I have been making websites since a young age, and am a keen supporter of AFC Bournemouth.
