Maximizing Email Deliverability

Expanding your database is crucial, but not at the expense of neglecting data hygiene and quality assurance. Large database are costly. Both in terms of licensing fees but also in terms of the issues posed by poor data quality.

Regularly updating and cleansing databases can help mitigate the impact of these issues and maintain a high quality email list, resolving the following issues:

• Blacklisting: Emails may have been once valid, but can be turned into bots and spam traps to catch senders with poor database hygiene practices and put them on blacklists, heavily impacting your email sends. Once flagged, it is incredibly difficult to get off of a blacklist. Taking up to a year to fully recover.
• Invalid emails & inactive accounts: Companies rebrand and change domains, people change jobs and leave companies, resulting in unused email addresses. With the correct tools and processes, these can be caught and even corrected.
• Low interest of recipient: When recipients are uninterested or disengaged, they may ignore or delete emails or even mark them as spam. Decreasing deliverability and engagement rates. Essentially reducing your brand's reputation with email service providers. 
• Typographical or syntax errors: Misspellings or types during entry happen quite often. A good normalization process can filter these misspellings or even correct them, recovering conversations that otherwise would be lost.

Email deliverability is not only about database quality. While you need good email addresses to send to, it's not enough. There are many technical and content focussed aspects that may impact deliverability:

• Technical setup: Terms like DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC may be confusing, but without proper configuration of these records email service providers do not know you are who you say you are and may outright block your messages.
• Reputation management: Good sender reputation is paramount. The better your reputation, the more likely your message is to reach its intended audience.
• Content optimization & frequency: An optimized content strategy is paramount. Qualitative and well timed content ensures accuracy, engagement, and relevance to recipients, driving higher deliverability and engagement rates.
• Fallback mechanisms: Sometimes emails just don't get delivered, in this case the best course of action to take would be to have a fallback mechanism that identifies the issue and takes appropriate action.

These are just a few categories that have the potential to impact delivery and result in the loss of valuable customer interactions. Luckily, with adequate understanding and guidance, they can be properly implemented to ensure none of these valuable interactions are lost.