This is part 3 of our Email Deliverability for Marketers series, here you can find part 1 and part 2.
Authenticate your email domain
Email authentication is a technological verification of the origin of an email message and is one of the many ways the industry is resolving the challenge of spam. Authenticating your emails is important to secure a positive reputation and earn an ISP’s trust in your brand, with more chance an ISP will actually deliver your email. Without email authentication, you will never get great email delivery, plus it is good to protect yourself against spoofing.
The three most important email authentication protocols are:
● SPF – Sender Policy Framework: You achieve authentication by having IP addresses published in your DNS.
● DKIM – Domain Keys Identified Mail: This assigns a digital signature to a domain to allow it to associate its name with an email message. Verification is achieved using a signer’s public key as published in DNS.
● DMARC Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance: You will need to have SPF and DKIM in existence for DMARC to work. DMARC offers an extra layer for authentication and directs a receiving server on how to handle emails that fail SPF and DKIM validation. This makes DMARC a super powerful tool.
Secure your reputation with a dedicated IP and conduct its initial warm-up
To be able to build and protect your own reputation, every email marketer should use dedicated IPs that are not used by others. The risk of using a shared IP, is that all your efforts to send good emails are meaningless if there are a couple of bad actors on the same IP. A dedicated IP means just that, an IP address for your exclusive use. You are responsible for all activity good and bad, and for most businesses, a dedicated IP is the best option.
An IP warm-up plan is critical to ensure that ISPs will regard you as a legitimate email sender, as when they detect emails from a new IP they can get suspicious. By sending emails to the engaged recipients first, the ISP will boost your reputation due to the high email engagement. At Inboxroad we have written a guide on warming up IPs.
Make sure your sending domain is an existing website
An existing website is absolutely essential for email marketers, and without one you’ll lose the trust of ISPs. ISPs are able to detect spammers by verifying the sender’s information, and if your domain is found to non-existent, a red flag could be raised leading to you being marked as a spammer.
Conclusion
As an email marketer, your ultimate goal is to maintain high email deliverability, so regularly evaluating best email practices and following them is essential to the future of your brand or business. Not only you should always provide your subscribers with a simple unsubscribe process, but make sure that you are complying with all anti-spam laws if you want your email deliverability to improve.
You are not alone. Our Inboxroad team is dedicated to get you the highest possible deliverability. We strongly believe in customer relationships – similar to what you would like to see with your clients. Feel free to reach out to us.
