Maintaining a good reputation as a sender is vital if you rely on email delivery as part of your business – if you have a good reputation, your emails have the best chance of arriving in your recipients’ inboxes. If your reputation is questionable, your messages could get dropped or banished to the spam folder.
This article provides best practices to help you keep your email-sending reputation and deliverability high by focusing on the source of most deliverability problems: list acquisition and management.
1. Use double opt-in
The verification process is straightforward. When a user provides their email address on your website, it's essential to confirm its legitimacy before incorporating it into your regular campaign mailing list. This is achieved by sending a verification email to the provided address.
Verifying email addresses serves a dual purpose: identifying fake email addresses and preventing a high bounce rate. It also acts as a re-confirmation from your audience, ensuring their willingness to receive emails from you.
If you generate new readers with a free subscription method through Joomag, you can use the double opt-in functionality.
2. Process bounces and complaints
If you get a hard bounce or a complaint, you should remove that email address from your CRM, although Joomag won't send emails to the already bounced emails, it's recommended to clean your lists. You should also identify the root cause of the bounces and complaints. For example, say that you notice that your bounce rate for new subscriptions is rising. This could be an indicator that people are signing up for your service using fake email addresses. While it is not unusual for someone to sign up using a fake email address, you need to make sure that you are not encouraging your customers to do so.
3. Remove non-engagers
You need to operate under the assumption that if a customer is not opening or clicking your email, then they are not interested in what you’re sending. Define a timeframe that makes sense to your business, and if a recipient doesn’t interact with your mail within that timeframe, stop emailing them. This tactic is a great complement to double opt-in and should be standard for any email sender. Regardless of whether a customer originally opted in through double opt-in or just a regular signup, an email address can go stale and become a spamtrap. Spamtraps are silent reputation traps, which means that you will get no indication that you are hitting them – removing non-engagers is the only way to avoid them. They are used by many organizations to measure a sender’s reputation, and particularly how well the sender is measuring engagement. If you continue to email spamtraps, your mail could end up in the spam folder, your domain could be blacklisted, and SES could suspend your service.
Discover additional information on monitoring the engagement of your recipients through Campaign Statistics in this article.
4. Make it easy for your recipients to unsubscribe
It is important to respect the preferences of your customers when it comes to receiving emails. If a customer does not want to receive your emails, it is best not to send them. Sending emails to someone who is not interested can have negative consequences on your email reputation. If you are sending a bulk email, it is crucial to provide an easy way for customers to opt out. Joomag simplifies this process by automatically including an unsubscribe link in the sent email notification. While it is possible to remove the unsubscribe block from system templates, this feature is specifically designed for scenarios where you want to include your own unsubscribe link. Remember, sending emails to unwilling recipients can cause more harm than good. In many regions, such as the US, Canada, and parts of Europe and Asia, allowing recipients to easily opt out of your emails is a legal requirement.
5. Keep your mailing lists independent
If you operate more than one website, you should never mix your subscriber lists. Customers who sign up for website A should never (under any circumstance) receive an email from website B unless they sign up for that one too. The reason is simple: these customers have only agreed to receive email from website A. Furthermore, if your customers get mail from a website unknown to them, they are likely to mark that mail as spam, thus hurting your email reputation.
The information provided in this article is sourced from a blog post by AWS.