The biggest task facing an email marketer is first off getting the email into the recipients inbox. Here, we outline a checklist to make sure you are giving yourself the highest possible chance of high deliverability.

1. Email Deliverability
The most critical thing for successful Email Marketing is getting your emails into the inbox – ie Email Deliverability.
Below we will compare email deliverability to the deliverability of physical mail (through Royal Mail).
The basics of email deliverability compared to the Royal Mail:
In the offline world:
1. A business gets the Royal Mail to deliver their communications to a number of recipients
2. The Royal Mail aims to deliver every piece of communication for the business
3. The recipient deals with the piece of communication as follows:
responds
stores
puts in the bin/ignores
contacts the business in order to be removed from future communications
registers themselves with the MPS
In the online world:
1. The business gets an email sending system (could just be Outlook) to deliver their communications to a
number of consumers
2. The communications sent by the sending system are delivered to a number of ISPs (the bit after the @ sign,
could be hotmail.com, gmail.com, myfunsite.com, etc)
3. Each ISP checks the communication and decides if they want to deliver it to their users, the checks include:
Looking at the content:
o How much image is there compared to text?
o Is it information our users want to receive
Looking at where the email has come from:
o Do we trust this sender?
o Do others trust this sender?
How have our users previously reacted to communications from this sender?
4. Once the ISP has run all their checks they do one of the following with it:
Deliver it to the recipient’s inbox
Deliver it to the recipient’s spam folder
Bin it and not deliver it
The recipient may interact with their emails via a number of tools. If they use the webservice of their ISP (eg they
log into hotmail), they will see the email as supplied by the ISP. Or they may use other software to interact with
their emails, such as Outlook or Thunderbird. In this case the software will run its own set of checks on the email
and decide what to do with the email – inbox or junk folder.
If the recipient receives the piece of communication they will deal with it as follows:
Respond
Store
Bin
Click the unsubscribe link in the email to let the business know they don’t want to receive any more emails
Click the “SPAM” link provided by the ISP to tell the ISP they don’t want to receive any more emails from
the business (if too many do this, the emails won’t be delivered in that ISP)
The key difference in the online world is that there are many stakeholders you can have a direct impact on if
consumer X receives your communications:
Your recipients
Each ISP
Consumer themselves
© indium online 1
01865 980 630
info@indiumonline.co.uk

2. How we maximise your email delivery for you:
At the core of email delivery are the following 3 things:
1. Using best of breed technology
2. Closely managing your data to keep it clean and active
3. Using best practice in the way we put together the content of your emails
In practice, this means we:
Suppress hard bounce notifications
ISPs notice if you keep sending dud data
Suppress “report as spam” requests from ISPs / treat them as unsubscribe requests
To avoid annoying the recipient and the ISP
Suppress inactive data, the “emotionally dormant” – those who aren’t engaging with emails
To improve reputation with the ISPs
Monitor performance of all data segments
So we can deal with any issues before the problem spreads
Never use 3rd party email data
This is potential deliverability suicide – hence we avoid this
Multi-part messages
Our email are all sent in both html and text parts
Good text to image balance
Providing brand restrictions allow
Good quality email html
Ensure we trigger fewer spam filters (plus makes emails look better in different systems)
Email layouts that appeal to consumers
To reduce the chance of them thinking it’s spam (and increase chance of response)
Email content / messages that are relevant to the consumer
To reduce the chance of them thinking it’s spam (and increase the chance of response)
Check emails against spam tools pre-send
To double check everything we have already done and ensure nothing slips through
Obvious unsubscribe links
To encourage recipients not to report us to the ISP, but report to us
Not over-emailing
Too many emails from a business has a negative impact on deliverability
Consistent From Name
Build trust and recognition with the recipient
To find out how you can benefit from email marketing visit our website today!
© indium online 2
01865 980 630
info@indiumonline.co.uk