If you are an email marketer, you would want your marketing emails to go to the inboxes of your target audience. Sometimes you may not succeed in it due to email deliverability issues. While you can switch over to spam folders to find out why it happened, the details can be overwhelming or insufficient.
Even if you add great designs, the right picture-to-text ratio, and clear subject lines, you may face this issue. The only solution for you to address this problem is to identify the email deliverability issue and fix it. The guide below will help you traverse through the different ways by which you can fix email deliverability issues.
4 Proven Ways to Fix Email Deliverability Issues
You may face a problem in the delivery of emails due to many factors. It can be due to email compliance laws, authentication involving domain/IP configuration, email content, IP reputation, and email filters.
You may also encounter a problem in delivering emails if your email list does not have email hygiene. It may increase the vulnerability of your emails to spam traps, blacklists, complaints, and bounces.
Here are some proven ways by which you can address the problems that relate to the deliverability of your emails.
1. Test the Content of Your Email
In the past, content played a significant role in Email Deliverability. It includes the subject line, plain text, and HTML code. Email content filtering is tricky due to the emergence and use of spam filters.
Apart from keywords, spam filters also focus on many other aspects. Examples of such elements are image to text ratio, HTML code, the version of the plain text, content pattern,
Testing your email content is a simple and easy process. All you need to do is to perform the steps given below.
- Check the basics of the subject line: The first thing you must check while testing the content of your email is the subject line. Make certain that it isn’t too long. Try to wrap it up within 50 characters. Check if all the characters are in caps or if you have used excessive punctuation. Also, remove any word that may trigger a spam filter.
- Remove URLs and images before testing a plain text message: Some links provided by a click tracking company may relate to spam campaigns. If you use these links in your email content, your email may face a delivery problem. Remove such URLs and also images, if necessary. Thereafter, check the plain text message and see if it improves the delivery of your emails.
- Correct other problems in the content of your email: Use a tool such as SpamAssassin to find out the loopholes in your email content. The advantage of using such tools is that you get detailed reports. Based on these reports, you can identify the issues causing a lag. These include hyperlinks that are different from URLs, links to fishy sites, and image-text rates.
In most cases, making the above tweaks to the email content helps resolve the issue. If it doesn’t solve your problem, proceed with the next steps.
2. Fix the Issue with Missing Authentication Records
A misconfigured mail server can prevent the movement of your marketing emails to the mailboxes of your intended recipients. You are most likely to face this issue due to the unavailability of authentication records such as DKIM and SPF.
Test email authentication records using the same mail server you use to send your marketing emails. If the SPF fails, check the details of SPF in your DNS server and match it with your IP. Both must be the same. Also, conduct a DKIM test on the server.
If you cannot send your email altogether, it can be due to a configuration issue.
3. Address the Problems Related to the Domain of Your Email Address
Spam filters maintain a list of suspicious domains and email addresses. If you use either one of them in your email, a spam filter can block it. If the email address you use for sending your emails stops the delivery of your emails, consider changing it. If the issue with Email Deliverability is due to your domain, change it as well.
4. Test the Reputation of Your IP Address
If the problem persists even after trying out the above steps, you need to review the reputation of your IP address. Check whether or not your IP is blacklisted. If not, then send emails from another mail server.
Send an email from your account under another email service provider. For this purpose, you can use Mailgun, SparkPost, Amazon SES, and other such delivery services. If your sender’s reputation is low, improve it by adopting the best practices.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing email marketing is vital for the success of your email marketing campaign. Alongside it, you must also ensure that your emails go to the inboxes of your intended recipients without any interruption. For this to happen, you need to improve Email Deliverability. Follow the above tips and implement them to succeed on this front.