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👋 Hi friend,
Email deliverability is a very important metric in email marketing among others like open rate, click rate & conversion rate. It measures the percentage of the emails that don't land in spam when you send an email campaign.
Imagine a traveling salesman. The first task for the traveling salesman is to gain entry and then he's able to sell the product.
Image Credit: Pexels
Similarly, for an email marketer, the first task is to gain entry into the target user's inbox. Then the SL impacts the open rates, the copy, design and user intent determine the click rate and conversion rate.
But the game begins with the email landing in the end user's inbox.
💡Did you know?
Mailbox providers eg. Gmail tag inboxes. Gmail has different categories of inboxes like primary, updates, promotions & social. Deliverability measures what percentage of your emails land in any of the categories of inboxes.
Newsletters
Like other marketing emails, newsletters are sent to subscribed users with engaging and informative content. They sometimes follow the AIDA model with a CTA to the marketer's product or website towards the end or embedded in various hyperlinks in the content.
Segmentation plays a key role in a newsletter strategy as you should be sending your newsletters to only people who have the brand affinity and expecting the newsletters from your brand.
Deliverability and Newsletters
Like for all other email marketing campaigns, the deliverability of your newsletters depend on three key factors :
a) The end user response
A report to spam is a negative response; A click is a positive response. This depends a lot on the segmentation strategy.
b) The reputation of your infra
The domain and IP reputation play a key part. Also, the email headers-whether you are compliant with the new Yahoo & Google policies and following all the authentication protocols.
c) The reputation of your email template
Since most spam filters use an AI-ML method to tag emails as spam or not spam, whether your content has landed in spam earlier or not is a very important factor. If your content has landed in spam earlier, eliminate common parts like address, phone number and placement of your logo so that the email gets a new look and feel.
What's the new Yahoo Google(Yahoogle) Policy?
In February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo implemented new email authentication rules, primarily targeting bulk email senders who dispatched over 5,000 emails daily. These updates were designed to protect users from spam and phishing attacks, ensuring a safer inbox experience. While many of these rules aligned with existing best practices, compliance became mandatory to avoid deliverability issues, such as emails being marked as spam or rejected outright.
The key requirements included email authentication through DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, maintaining spam complaint rates under 0.3%, and enabling one-click unsubscribe options in commercial emails. Bulk senders were required to adhere to these standards by February (for Gmail) and the first quarter of 2024 (for Yahoo). Additionally, Gmail began rejecting non-compliant emails starting in April, with full compliance expected by June 1, 2024, when one-click unsubscribe became mandatory.
Non-compliance could have severely impacted email deliverability and damaged sender reputations. To comply, senders needed to
- Authenticate their emails with DKIM, SPF & DMARC
- Keep spam rates low(<0.3%)
- Allow easy unsubscription
- Follow specific technical standards like RFC 5322 and PTR records.
- Implementing TLS encryption was also essential for securing email transmissions.
You can refer to the actual guidelines by Gmail here
What's DKIM?
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) allows domain owners to automatically "sign" their emails, similar to how a signature on a check verifies the sender's identity. This DKIM "signature" is a digital signature that uses cryptography to confirm that the email originated from the domain.
DKIM employs public key cryptography:
- The domain's public key is stored in a DKIM record, which mail servers can access to verify the email.
- The private key, kept confidential by the sender, is used to sign the email's header.
- When the email is received, the mail server uses the public key to verify that the private key was used to sign the email, confirming its authenticity.
What's SPF?
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method that allows a domain to specify which servers are authorized to send emails on its behalf. It functions like a publicly available directory, listing the IP addresses of all approved email servers for the domain. When a mail server receives an email, it checks the message against the domain's SPF record to verify if it comes from an authorized server.
If the server is listed, the email is allowed to proceed to the recipient's inbox.
Image Credit: https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-marketing/what-is-an-spf-record-for-email/
This helps prevent email relays and ensures that only mail servers allowed to send emails are sending the emails.
What's DMARC?
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) provides instructions to receiving email servers on how to handle emails based on the results of SPF and DKIM checks. A domain's DMARC policy can be configured to direct mail servers to quarantine emails that fail these checks, reject them outright, or still deliver them.
💡Did you know?
PayPal led the development of DMARC technology with the goal of improving existing email authentication methods. As a common target for phishing attacks, PayPal took the initiative, and the solution was swiftly adopted by other major brands and mailbox providers.
These DMARC policies are stored in DMARC records, which may also include instructions to send reports to domain administrators. These reports detail which emails pass or fail the checks, allowing administrators to refine their DMARC policies, such as adjusting how to handle legitimate emails that are erroneously marked as spam.
Image Credit: Proofpoint
Do you want to hear about the new authentication requirements from the horse’s mouth? Here’s a list of FAQs by Google.
💡 Implementing sunset policy is very important for newsletter campaigns. What's the sunset policy? It's the process of culling out users who aren't responding to your newsletters at all.However, don't stop communicating with them. Send them feedback and understand the reason behind their inactivity.
At Letterstack, we’re here to support you to get your newsletters in your target audience’s inbox. Let’s make it happen! Happy emailing 😊
Cheers,
The Letterstack Team