Customers engage with your business in many ways and email is just one of them! Your full contact list is used for many things inside your application... tracking customers projects, sales pipeline, email lists, and content engagement. The full contact record of your customers is important to your business, it tracks your history with your customers. But, what if some of your contacts just don't engage with you via email? They call, they text, they view your website, they buy services... but they don't prefer email? That's ok! Tailoring how you communicate to your customers is an important part of running a small business and helps you focus your emails on customers who regularly engage with your content.
Deliverability is affected by many things but here are the two you need to look at first: List Hygiene and Sender Reputation.
List Hygiene
List hygiene is the practice of continuously cleaning or maintaining a contact list to ensure all email addresses are actively engaging with your content and are receiving your content without issues. Regular maintenance removes disengaged addresses from your marketing list and decreases your risk for spam traps, spam complaints, and invalid hard bounces.
Best practices for growing and maintaining your email list include:
Collect good data - Email addresses are notoriously cryptic so confirm whether that email address is "flyinghigh@keap.com" or "flying.hi@keap.com" and enter carefully!
Use double opt-in, not single opt-in - When a customer completes a webform, they are immediately sent an email to confirm their email address. They are required to click on a link in the email to verify their email address. By verifying their address you know you have a valid address and they want to receive your content!
Avoid buying an email list - They are usually riddled with invalid email addresses that can ruin your sender reputation!
Maintain your email marketing lists:
Send a re-engagement campaign - for any customers who haven't engaged with your content in 3-6 months, send a campaign asking them if they are still interested in your content and confirm they still want to receive it!
Opt-out any unengaged contacts - any contacts that haven't engaged with your emails in over 6 months likely won't. Mark them as opt-out in your lists so your deliverability rate increases to the customers who actually want to receive your content!
Opt-out any hard bounces on your list - some part of the email address doesn't exist or is not functioning so remove it!
Monitor soft bounces and mark them opt-out after 3-5 bounces - they are currently unreachable so no point in sending!
Use Infusionsoft by Keap's Automated List Management tool - this tool automatically manages your unengaged contacts marking them "unengaged, marketable" at 3-months and "non-marketable" at 6-months!
Segment your contacts and send emails based on your customers interests - using tags you can mark each contact with a tag that indicates their interests, then you can tailor email sequences and campaigns directly to your customer's interests and avoid spamming them with everything you send!
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the reputation that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) associate with your email domain, but in reality, it includes your content, your server or email service provider (ESP), and your sender domain.
Your content
What you put in the body of your email impacts your reputation and your deliverability. This includes:
Spam-like content, headlines, or images
Your image-to-text ratio (industry standard is 80:20)
Your links. If you link to other domains that have low reputations, their reputation will reflect poorly on you.
Your server/ESP
An ESP is the engine behind the marketing emails you send... like Keap, Emma, or MailChimp. An ESP is not Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook: Gmail and Yahoo are web mail providers, and Outlook is an email client.
ESPs have reputations and their reputation directly impacts your email deliverability.
Keap works hard to keep deliverability rates up. Including:
Monitoring and vetting customers' lists
Authenticating emails
Handling bounces
Monitoring IP reputation
Throttling email delivery of large batch and new email lists to maintain IP reputation
Having an active compliance and review team
Your sender domain
The reputation of your sender domain follows you everywhere - no matter which ESP you use or whether you switch ESPs.
Your domain is the part of your email address that starts with "@" and ends with ".com" (or .org, .edu, or .anything else).
Best Practices Email deliverability is a partnership between the email service provider and the email senders. Help us maintain our stellar deliverability rates, so we can help you connect with your customers by following email marketing best pract...
Click here if you are looking for step-by-step instructions for importing records into Infusionsoft Building and maintaining a quality email list will maximize the success of your marketing efforts. A quality email list starts with ensuring p...
List hygiene is a crucial part of email marketing best practices. With Automated List Management you have access to customize two email statuses. Unengaged Marketable Status - These contacts are eligible to receive your automated marketing emai...
A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain. Setting up your SPF with Keap is optional. Your primary email protocol is ...
What is a spam bot? A Spam Bot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. It is often a submission to a database that is created autonomously from a third party. The more sophisticated the spam bot, the more difficult it is ...
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is a complex email protocol that allows a sender's identity to be authenticated by the recipient to help combat email fraud. It's also a very important factor in your email deliverability. DKIM affords the ...
Changes at Gmail, Yahoo and others may impact your deliverability - are you prepared for DMARC? In an effort to reduce spam and spoofing, email providers are moving to a policy that will reject mail sent from outside of their respective...
"Email Whitelisting" is used to describe the act of allowing an email to reach your inbox. This is helpful if you want to make sure a certain business' email doesn't go to your spam folder. Whitelisting is typically accomplished by...
Most emails bounce because of a permanent issue with the receiving email account, a temporary issue with the receiving email account, or because the email is blocked by the receiving server. When an email bounces, the recipient's server sends a ...
Gaining explicit permission for email marketing is not only a best practice, but it's also required by Keap , and most email service providers in the industry. Email marketing without permission will negatively impact your sender reput...
Setting up DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) to allow email service providers to verify your identity, adhering to email sending best practices, and maintaining an updated email list of engaged subscribers will help you achieve high rates of email...
You can block domains from submitting web forms. This is particularly useful if someone keeps filling out your form and reporting your email as spam; this type of malicious intent is not common, but can happen. Please Note! This feature app...
You’ve crafted the perfect email for your next marketing campaign... complete with an attention grabbing subject line, compelling copy, and an irresistible call-to-action. You’re positive click rates will be through the roof! Unfortunately, your email campaign winds up filtered as spam, sent to the junk folders, or dropped by the Internet Service Provider. You may have been filtered by a content filter!
When email campaigns are sent, they undergo a third party checkpoint that measure the spam capacity of the email. This measurement is used to determine the probability of your mail ending up in your recipients’ inboxes.
Removing opt-outs helps to: Maintain a current and active list Open up free space in your contact list Remove dead leads from your broadcast and campaign stats Finding the Report Go to Marketing>Reports and click on Email Status Searc...
Engagement is a measure, in days, of how long it has been since a contact has filled out a webform, purchased a product, opened an email, or clicked on an email. Sending emails to unengaged contacts can drastically reduce the success of your email d...
If you send emails through Infusionsoft using a Yahoo, AOL! or Gmail email address, there is a high chance that your email will be rejected because it was sent from Infusionsoft and not the actual provider. Please note this concept is not specific t...
As a company, Infusionsoft sustains a deliverability rate of over 98%. That means that 98% (or more) of the emails sent through Infusionsoft servers are accepted by the recipient's email servers. However, your individual reputation also pl...
List bombing occurs when an email address is submitted to your web form by someone other than the owner of the address and causes you to unknowingly send unsolicited email. While one or two instances will surely go unnoticed, this problem can become...
This is a continuation of the article, Tag contacts unengaged 6-12 months for a re-engagement campaign . Navigate to Marketing and click Email & Broadcasts. On the Email & Broadcasts page click Get Started. ...
Spam is essentially unsolicited email. However, when it comes to the business of email marketing, spam is whatever an email recipient marks as spam. Every person you email is empowered to report any email to their Internet Service Providers (ISP) as spam.
Spam traps are commonly used by inbox providers and blacklist providers to catch malicious senders or legitimate senders with poor email marketing practices. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn’t belong to a real person n...
The Unsubscribe report shows you the contacts that have globally unsubscribed and what feedback they have submitted. When a contact clicks the unsubscribe link in an automated email, they are redirected to a page with the following options: Go to ...
URIBL is a domain-based reputation list and is independently operated. They currently maintains three types of lists: whitelists, blacklists and greylists. " Black " This lists contains domain names belonging to and used by spammer...
A common troubleshooting question that many Infusionsoft customers experience is "Why didn't a contact/user receive an email that I sent?" In this article, we'll dive into how you can troubleshoot this question just like our Suppor...