What Causes Deliverability Issues?

Deliverability is probably the biggest talking point in the email marketing world at the moment.  Your companies email reputation is basically the deciding factor between your campaign reaching the recipients inbox and the recipients’ bulk folder.

To help you in improving your reputation, we’ve compiled a list that will go through each area.  This article will also offer you guidance on how to resolve the issues.

Authentication
When an email reaches an email providers’ filters, one of the first checks it does is to assess the authentication of the email sender.  One of my previous articles goes into greater detail about the layers of spam filters.  You can see that here.
At present there isn’t a standardised authentication checking system and different email providers use different authentication ID’s.  Here are the main list of them:
SPF - www.openspf.org
SENDER ID - www.microsoft.com/senderid
DomainKeys (DK) http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) http://www.dkim.org/

List Hygiene
Making sure your list hygiene is up to date is a really good way of maintaining and improving your reputation.  We have included an article of this problem in this issue.  Find it here.

Poor HTML coding
Having poor or incomplete html coding in your newsletter will cause you deliverability issues.  To avoid such problems try not to copy and paste text from programs such as Word as it has a tendency to add hidden code that spam filters don’t like.  If you’re unsure whether you have poor coding in your email, use this handy little tool (it's free).

http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_uri

Whitelisting/Blacklisting
Getting your recipients to whitelist your email address can greatly improve your deliverability.  We have an article going into depth about how to best get your recipients to white list you in this issue. 
View it here.

Blacklisting is obviously the last thing you want to happen to you.  This is when you have had a large amount of spam complaints made against you.  The specific email provider will then block all incoming emails to their servers and you will see open rates plummet.  You can test to see whether your company has been blacklisted using the below links.

Blacklisting test –
1. Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org
2. Spamcop http://www.spamcop.net

To remove yourself from the blacklist you will have to contact the respective email provider and ask to be removed.  To prevent it from happening in the first place you can set up feedback loops with the main email providers.  Of course, if you are a mailingmanager customer you won’t have to worry about that as we have them set up for you

 

Alex Fenwick