Deliverability is the process an email must go through from creation to receipt. To successfully complete this journey, a few factors have to be included. See what role ESPs have in email deliverability, how can sender’s IP be verified, and how to use feedback loops to your advantage.
Contents
- The role of ESPs in the email deliverability
- Dedicated or shared IP address
- Warming up the IP address
- Verification of Sender IP
- Feedback loops
1. The role of ESPs in the email deliverability
Email Service Providers (ESPs) deliver infrastructure for sending emails – they own IP addresses which are used to physically send out the message and are signed as actual message senders, despite the “from” envelop the sender may use.
The role of ESPs in email delivery is to pre-screen sender’s account before sending in, to protect a good reputation with email providers. Whenever they let a spammer account send thousands of messages, it also has an impact on their account. This is the reason why most of ESPs have constant interaction with email services – every time someone marks a message as spam, they will be reported back and flagged.
2. Dedicated or shared IP address
Internet Protocol (IP) address is a signature tag of a computer connected to the internet. IP reputation is based on the address where the email originated from – either a dedicated IP address or a shared IP pool (email volume is increased, protects smaller senders from costly mistakes).
We recommend using a shared IP pool because it can be allocated based on your overall quality score, customer engagement, or the type of industry you operate in.
As a sender, you need to monitor the reputation of your sender’s IP address. Reputation is a basic score of whether you are worth being trusted as an email sender. Each Inbox Service Provider (ISP) has its own way to evaluate it however analysis of positive subscriber behavior is the best way for boosting the reputation. Using dedicated IP addresses limits the amount of IPs in use – it makes a company more vulnerable if the reputation for some reason will drop – there is no easy way to quickly replace the bad IP with the better one.
3. Warming up the IP address
Warming up the used IP address means focusing on more frequent shipments to smaller groups of recipients instead of a single large shipment to the entire contact database. This method allows you to gradually gain the position of a trusted sender in the eyes of ISPs, which translates into a decrease in the likelihood of your emails hitting the “Spam” folder
If you are using a shared pool of IPs you don’t need to worry about the warming up process – they are already in use and warmed up.
4. Verification of Sender IP
Lack of verification of the domain from which you send correspondence or newsletter may cause that the subscribers’ inbox recognizes the email address as spam. In order to be sure and positively reduce the number of spam emails you need to configure:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) guarantees that you are the owner of the domain and gives the possibility to contact people using the domain name to selected IP addresses owned by ESP,
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) gives you not only ownership authentication but also email validation,
- Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) add an extra check – ‘alignment test’ which gives the extra tip why an email hasn’t passed it.
5. Feedback loops
Feedback loops are one of the functions of ISPs that notifies the sender in the moment of marking an email as spam by a subscriber.
Some providers send information every time the complaint is being generated by a recipient, others are concentrating on data aggregation.
By analyzing feedback loops you are able to control sending emails to the subscriber who has generated a complaint.