You may think that the key to a successful email marketing campaign lies in factors such as an attractive subject line, an effective call to action, and even an innovative and responsive design.
Undoubtedly, these are relevant indicators to evaluate the impact of a campaign, however they take a back seat when we consider the importance of deliverability. If the message is not received in the inbox of your contacts, all previous efforts come to nothing.
We want to tell you how MasterBase® plays a fundamental role in the deliverability of your messages and how you can collaborate in this important mission.
5 factors that determine the deliverability of a message:
Reputation:
This is a crucial aspect and the most difficult to achieve, but don't be alarmed because it is up to us as email service providers.
A good reputation with ISPs (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) can only be achieved by being consistent over time, sending appropriate messages to audiences that are interested in receiving them.
At MasterBase® we have been working for more than 20 years taking care of our prestige before the ISPs, complying with all the technological standards to ensure that more than 600 million mailings reach the recipients' inboxes every month, which makes us the best allies of our clients for the success of their campaigns.
Operating with integrity for so many years has earned us a serious name in the market and the recognition of ISPs, which allows us to ensure that we do not send, but deliver messages.
2. Authentication:
This topic is covered in more depth in our article Authentication in the Email world: The prominent role of SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
This is the most technical aspect of what we present and has to do with a series of validations, both in the message and in the senders of the mailings, whose compliance puts us at the forefront of the industry and of the requirements of the main ISPs, who have devised these validations to deal with spam and phishing.
There are three main validations and, if you work with us, you have almost certainly already heard about them:
- Sender ID and SPF: These are IP-based authentication methods. With this methodology, the sender specifies which IPs are authorized to send messages from a particular domain. When a sender requests a connection from the ISP, the ISP verifies that the IP address of the server that is sending the message has permission to do so from the domain listed as the sender.
- Domain Key and DKIM: It is an authentication based on cryptography. The sender of the message adds a digital signature (a key) in the message header, which can only be verified by ISPs. They detect the sending domain name and its digital signature and perform a DNS lookup to verify that the digital signature is authentic.
- DmarcA somewhat more recent validation among the many being promoted by large ISPs to ensure the validity of messages and is based on an identifier alignment, which checks the SPF and DKIM of the message, as part of a more robust verification process than its separate components.
3. Relevance:
It is also one of the key strategic factors. But in this case it is your company that is responsible for ensuring that your messages are as relevant as possible to your customers.
An email marketing strategy that does not focus on relevance is like the chronicle of a death foretold, as it disenchants your contacts, saturates your communications and generates rejection of your mailings, and, in the worst case, your communications are marked as spam.
Relevance, like reputation, are strategic aspects that are built over time; however, there are simple ways to measure relevance, for example, indicators such as CTO (Click to Open) and CTR (Click through rate) that reflect how actively your contacts engaged with your message.
We recommend that you do not settle for openings, but always seek to motivate an action in your message, to confirm that there is a real interest in your communications. You have to go step by step, campaign by campaign, learning from your contacts and how to delight them with relevant messages.
Currently, ISPs monitor the behavior of contacts on messages and through complex algorithms can estimate the destination of future messages from a company.
Specifically, if an ISP detects that one of your mailings was marked as spam by a considerable number of contacts, the rest of the mailings of that same campaign (and, potentially, of future ones) will fall into the junk folder. In other words, they rely on the behavior of their users to apply early protection measures.
4. Subject and design:
This is perhaps the most glamorous aspect of deliverability, but it is also the most cosmetic. It is well known that care must be taken with the words used in the subject lines and with the content of the message itself.
There is a lot of help material on this point in our blog. In addition, we strongly recommend using responsive template formats that can be adapted to different current devices (mobile, tablets, desktops).
5. Debugging of contact bases:
Another important aspect of deliverability: It is essential to continuously review the metrics of your campaigns to eliminate contacts that generate hard bounces, as well as to obtain the permission of each new contact you add to your records in MasterBase®.
In this way, your company ensures that it is working with a valid and permitted base. To ensure this good practice, ISPs have developed different techniques, such as the use of "spam traps": When some mailboxes of their own domain -which are obsolete or in disuse- show a sudden activity, they deduce that you are sending to purchased and outdated databases. In such cases they also generate mechanisms to block future mailings.
Deliverability is the gateway to getting the most out of your email marketing strategy. A powerful partnership between the sender (your company) and the sender (MasterBase®) contributes to a successful outcome.
