What’s Deliverability or Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the capability of delivering emails in your recipient’s inbox. There are many factors that influence inbox-placement of emails. Following industry-best practices of email deliverability helps to ensure maximum results.

What is DKIM?

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an email authentication method to validate the authenticity of email through cryptographic authentication. The authentication is done by giving the mail a digital signature. The signature is added in the header and secured with encryption.

What is SPF?

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an authentication protocol used to prevent spammers from sending messages on behalf of your domain. It authorizes ISP to verify that a mail server (IP address) is authorized to send email from the domain name they have registered in the DNS.

What is DMARC?

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting &Conformance) is an email validation system that allows you to set policies on who can send an email using your domain based on DKIM and SPF. This email validation system is set up in such a way that if the DKIM and SPF fail, DMARC would initiate action.

If the record detects a misalignment between email sender and the address, DMARC activities a protocol which tells the receiving server to accept, quarantine, or reject the message based on the policy defined by the sender.

What is a Feedback Loop?

Feedback loop allows senders to receive alerts from users who complained or reported this particular sender as a spammer. The mailbox provider forwards this message to the sender's specified email address that has been set up, so the sender can suppress or permanently remove this user from their active list.

What is Email Authentication?

Email authentication a process that verifies that an email comes from who it claims to be from. It allows the mailbox provider to approve that the sender is the one who he assumes to be. Most common email authentication standards are DMARC, DKIM, and SPF.

If the authentication fails, mails are likely to be filtered as spam or rejected.

What is an Email Bounce?

Email bounce refers to the non-delivery of an email message. It will be rejected by a recipient's mail server and returned to the original sender.

There are two different types of bounced emails, Hard and Soft.

Hard Bounce: Permanent rejection of the message either because of invalid email address or address doesn't exist.

Soft Bounce: Temporary failure of the message either because of server issue or already -full inbox.

How is Soft Bounce (Block) difference from Hard Bounce?

Hard bounce needs to be taken seriously because it is a permanent failure and the domain reputation might get affected. For reducing hard bounce, target double opt-in users or clean up the contact list before sending (There are multiple platforms which help to remove invalid ids).

How can hard bounces can be reduced?

Hard bounce needs to be taken seriously because it is a permanent failure and the domain reputation might get affected. For reducing hard bounce, target double opt-in users or clean up the contact list before sending (There are multiple platforms which help to remove invalid ids).

What is List Hygiene?

List hygiene is the process of manging email addresses, subscriptions or opt-ins in a systematic manner by reviewing email ids periodically to remove bounced email addresses and remove unengaged subscribers. It’s a very important process to ensure good email deliverability rates.

What is Complaint Rate?

Complaint rate is the rate of spam complaints reported by the users. A spam complaint is registered when a user clicks the “Spam” button in the mail. ISPs track the number of people who complained about your mail relative to the amount of email you sent to them, which is termed as “complaint rate”.

Why do users report my mails as spam?

There are many reasons for users to report your mail as spam, some of them are listed below:

• Passive opt-in users • Unsubscribe process too complicated • Purchased database • Increased email frequency

What are some of the ways to reduce Spam Complaints?

Every marketer is exposed to spam complaints. It can happen even to a good marketer who is sending permission-based email. Below are some measures which can be taken for reducing spam complaints.

• Only get the right opt-ins • Be recognizable • Don’t hide the unsubscribe button • Don’t use a no-reply address

What is Permission Email Marketing?

Single opt-in: It is a subscription process where in which a user is allowed to become a subscriber immediately without requiring the owner of that email address to confirm definitively that they knowingly and willingly opted in.

Double opt-in: Process where a new id is added to the list only after the user clicks the confirmation link that’s sent to them after they opt in via a form or checkbox.

What is a Spam Trap?

Email addresses that may or may not exist and are used to judge the reputation of the sender. It doesn’t belong to a real person or may have been owned by someone at one time but are now abandoned and used by Internet Service Providers, anti-spam organizations, and blacklist operators to detect and identify spammers.

What is an IP Address?

IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a numerical label assigned to network hardware. Which will help to connect your computer to connect to other devices all around the world. All devices which are connected to the internet have unique address.

What is IP Warmup?

It is a process that is done by adding email volume to new IPs in a systematic way over several days to build a positive reputation with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ISPs need to see that you send relevant and permission-based emails before they begin to trust your bulk mailings to be sent through to inbox folders.

What is an IP Reputation?

IP reputation refers to the reputation of the IPs which is built with ESPs, it’s taken into account to determine if the mail should be sent to the inbox or spam folder. Poor IP reputation will lead to more bounces and slower delivery.

What is Sender Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)?

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the communication protocol for sending electronic mail transmission over the Internet. It is a set of commands that authenticate and direct the transfer of electronic mail. Emails are just strings of text; SMTP helps servers and email clients categorize and organize the information you send.

What is SNDS (Smart Network Data Service)?

SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) provides the data which is needed to understand and improve the reputation. It maintains data based on mail sent to Outlook.com subscribers. This data needs to be used to keep the mailing list clean.

What is Gmail Postmaster Tool?

Postmaster Tool is a free online tool provided by Google that provides marketers direct access to reputation, deliverability, security and performance diagnostics straight from Gmail about their email domains and IPs. This tool will also show data about SPF/DKIM/DMARC failures, spam complaints, IP reputation, encryption success rate, and more.

What is CAN-SPAM?

CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) is a law that was passed in 2003. It gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

What is CASL?

CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation) protects consumers and businesses from misuse of digital technology, including spam and other electronic threats. It is one of the world’s strictest anti-spam laws, and it has been keeping email marketers busy since its introduction in 2014.

What is GDPR?

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a game-changing data privacy law passed by the European Union. It was enforced on May 25th, 2018. It’s is a legal regulation issued by the council of the European Union and The European Parliament. The main purpose of GDPR is to protect personal data of EU citizens.

What is an email blackhole?

First and foremost, an email blackhole is a valid email address- messages sent to it will not generate errors. However, all messages sent to this email id are automatically deleted.

What is image or file hosting?

Uploading images to an external or third-party image hosting site stored on a different server.

It helps save your bandwidth and ensures your email size remains small.

The hosted Image will have a URL that can be inserted in to an email. When you choose an external hosting site, make sure the host server is a publicly accessible one and reliable.

What is URL shortening?

URL shortening is a technique that translates a long URL into an abbreviated/ shortened format.

Essentially, a URL-shortening service is a third party, serving up a link that sits between the email user and the end result. The long URL is converted to a short alphanumeric code. The success of this shortened URL (its viability) in the future depends on how reliable the URL shortener is.

However, URL shortening hides the final destination, so spammers extensively use shortened URLs to promote their nefarious links.

What is email spoofing?

Email spoofing is the forgery of the email header which misleads the recipient to think that the message originated from someone other than the original, intended source.

Email spoofing is an unethical practice that encourages recipients to open an email and take action in the pretext of being someone else.

Explain A/B testing for emails

A/B test also known as a split test, is an experiment where two variations of the same campaign are tested with a small percentage of the total recipients.

Version A will be tested with half of the test group and the rest of the users with version B. The version which received high open or click rate will be the winning version and it will be targeted to the remaining users.