Three Things You Can Do for Free to Boost Your Deliverability

Here are some of my takeaways from this post by Anne P. Mitchell about deliverability:

Increasing email deliverability is both an art and a science, and to really get results, you need to have some expertise in both.

But there are some fairly simple things that you can do on your own to help monitor and boost your email deliverability. Here are three things that you can do that can make a big difference to your email delivery, and all they will cost you is your time:

1. Open test accounts at each of the major free webmail hosts, such as Hotmail and Yahoo, and add them to your mailing lists.

2. Run your email through a spam filter like Spam Assassin before you send it!

3. Keep it Simple: One of the biggest problems that legitimate email senders run into is trying to make a single email do too much. So they put tons of unnecessary HTML and lots of links in their email, without realizing that the more they put in, the harder it is for that poor little email to run the gamut of spam checkers and filters, and to get to the inbox.

Comments

[Chad Horenfeldt]

I tend to run email bounce domain IPs through senderscore.org to see what the rating is. Reputation of the IP is more important then email content (at the moment)

[Chris Mueller]

Testing Titles is huge as well and I agree that IP reputation plays a big part as well.

[Karrie Pettit]

I also use conversion ruler for the basis of the pixels and measuring how effective the email campaign is.

[Annie Tsai]

I would add a fourth free thing you can do to increase deliverability - make sure your lists are clean and representative of email recipients who want to be getting emails from you. We recommend bi-annual (sometimes quarterly depending on your business) checks to make sure your lists are as clean as they can be.