The Ultimate Guide To Email Delivery (Series 5 of 5)

Within this last section of our Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing, we will cover all aspects of Email Delivery and explain what data you should use to help better your next campaign.

Improve your delivery using an ESP

One of the main benefits of using an Email Service Provider (or ESP for short) is the consistently excellent delivery rate you can expect from any email campaign that you send out.

If you were to send your emails in bulk from your personal Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo accounts, then not only will it take an awfully long time but it is also likely that the emails will start to get rejected. This is because you will likely look like you are spamming, whereas if you were to send via an ESP then they would go through as expected as they have rock-solid relations with all of the major ISPs.

With an ESP you will not only receive brilliant rates of delivery, but you’ll also have a dedicated delivery team working on your behalf. This team will ensure that no matter the volume of your campaign or time of day that you are sending it it will be delivered very quickly for you. The speed of delivery will also increase allowing your campaign to be delivered within an hour or two as it will usually be sent through a pool of IP addresses via their powerful servers.

Spam prevention techniques

Now you know the benefits of having it delivered by an ESP, the next step is to make sure that when it is delivered that it lands in the inbox, and not, the dreaded spam folder.

No doubt you have sent an email and received no reply due to it landing in the recipient’s spam folder. Well ESP's will have tools for you to use to help reduce the possibility of your email landing in the junk.

So how is this done?

The first method is to use a spam checker, which will give you an indication of the likelihood of your email being caught in your recipient's servers spam filters. Not only will the spam checker provide you with the result of the check, it will also tell you the steps that you need to take in order to reduce the spam score as low as physically possible. It may even be something as simple as the subject line was all in capitals, or the ratio of images to text is a little high. Once you know the cause, you can then make the necessary changes to reduce the spam score.

Email authentication is becoming more and more important and as a result ESPs offer all of their clients email authentication technologies such as SPF and DKIM to further combat spam. These are extremely simple to setup within your account as it’s usually just a case of copy and pasting a record into your website’s DNS settings. Once that has been done it and you have confirmed the records are matching, it will give the ESP more authority to send on your behalf.

Now this one is quite simple so it can easily be missed. Ask your subscribers to add your 'from email address', the one you are sending from, as a trusted sender (as a contact within their email contact list) as that will help the email to be trusted. It's best to include this request within the first point of contact with your subscribers, generally an ESP will have this information in an email header, or if not you can simply add some text into the body of the email. This can be presented within the welcome email, an automated shopping cart email or even when you have an email triggered to send after a certain action.

Reports & Statistics

When you send out a newsletter using an ESP you will have a wealth of reports and statistics which will let you know exactly how the send has went; how many have been delivered, who has opened your emails, which links in your email have been clicked and so much more.

The depth of the statistics available to you is something that you would never have when sending through your personal email account, and these statistics are vital to ensure that your email marketing is as effective as it possibly can be.

You can even track your subscribers’ access to your website by enabling Google Analytics within your ESP, meaning you can see exactly which traffic has been driven to the website from your email marketing campaigns, which again is extremely useful information to have at hand.

So what data should I be paying attention to? 

Regardless of what you've heard there is no straight forward answer to finding the best day/time to send your email campaign. This is because every list is different and you need to find out what works for your subscribers rather than anyone else. This can easily be achieved by checking your 'opened' statistics to see what time the majority of your emails were opened.

The rest of the data is up to you, you can of course follow up your hot leads (those that have taken action) or you can focus on a retention campaign to get interaction from those that appear to be on the edge of unsubscribing.

What's next?

All in all, we hope we’ve demonstrated the immense benefits of sending your newsletters using an ESP rather than through your own personal email account; the deliverability will be vastly improved, you’ll have a team of professionals making sure your emails are sent in a timely manner and you’ll have access to an endless amount of statistics which will tell you exactly what has happened with your email campaign since you clicked ‘Send’.

Don’t just take our word for it though, why not start a free no-obligation trial with GraphicMail and try it all out for yourself: http://graphicmail.co.uk/get-your-free-trial