People often asked me how email deliverability works, and let me tell you that email deliverability can be a daunting process if you don’t know what you’re doing! 

So, here are the key steps to explain to you precisely what you need to do to increase your open rate:

1. Set up your DNS records 

You’re going to set up your DKIM, SPF and DMARC, but if you don’t know what any of these means, make sure that you hire a professional that will help you. Because if you’re doing the wrong thing, your emails might not even be delivered at all.

2. Set up Google Post Master

Google Post Master will allow you to see your IP and domain reputation and user-reported spam. And this is very important because depending on how your IP and domain reputation is. You need to take further steps into getting the situation into a place where you are getting your emails delivered to the inbox – see best practices below…

3. Get your list validated

So, every time you’ve got someone going through your opt-in forms, it’s ideal to have a platform like Mailgun to validate the emails before they enter your list.

Any emails that are classified as spam trap, bounced emails or incorrectly spelled emails won’t be going to your email list, which prevents the email list from being dirty.

4. Set up engagement tracking

In engagement tracking, you will be tracking every contact into the following: engaged, disengaged and inactive.

Engaged will be any contacts who have either opened your email, clicked on a link inside the email, or gone to your website.

Disengaged, are contacts who haven’t engaged in the past 30 days and Inactive are contacts that haven’t engaged in the past 60 days.

5. Warm-up

If you have recently moved email platforms or if you have a new domain, it’s important to warm up the sending.

Another good reason to warm up the sending is if you haven’t emailed your entire list recently. It’s a good idea to set up the engagement tracking first, so you can categorize if they are engaged, disengaged or inactive.

Okay, so for the warm-up process itself, you need to send a single email that will allow people to open your email, preferably clink on a link and if possible, reply to it.

6. Blacklist removal

If you have been on a blacklist, make sure you finish all the steps above before trying to delist your domain from it.

7.  Best practices:

• Keep your list clean.
• Never buy any email lists, instead, collect emails from real prospects using ads and organic traffic.
• Verify your Google Postmaster for IP and domain reputation.
• Only send campaigns to active contacts.
• Implement re-engagement campaigns for disengaged contacts.
• Unsubscribe inactive contacts. This will allow you to save on costs on platform subscriptions, and will also help you get your deliverability up because you’re not sending emails to people who are not interested in your emails.
• Continue to optimise your email content and subject
• Provide options to people that want to unsubscribe, and by doing this, you will be able to retain roughly 25% off your lists.