Deliverability: the checklist to give your campaign the best chance of hitting the inbox

Hitting the inbox is the most important part of using any email marketing solution. If you can’t hit the inbox, the chances of the recipient seeing the email lowers significantly affecting your ability to engage with your contacts. So, what can you do to give yourself the best possible chance of hitting the inbox? 

Bounces

The first obvious indicator about whether an email has reached its target is whether it bounced. You can check the contacts that bounced in your campaign reports to whether the contact received an email. A soft bounce typically means that the email address is legitimate but won’t accept an email at this time. This could be because the mailbox is full, or the system is unable to make a connection with the receiving mail server. A hard bounce means that the email address does not exist and cannot be sent to. This can either be because the email address has been incorrectly inputted, and doesn’t represent a real email address, or the address has been deactivated, for example when a contact leaves a company. Bounces mean that the email address has not been received, and why a contact hasn’t seen an email.

Sending Domain Configurations

Sending domains need to be configured to authorise Concep Send to send emails on your behalf. Incorrectly set up sending domains could be marked by mail filter as spoofing, so make sure you have the SPF record set up with our sending domain configurations to prevent this.
You can also use advanced domain authorisation with DKIM. DKIM pairs a unique key on the sending domain and the sending mail server to authorise that Concep Send is allowed to send your emails to give you an even better chance of reaching the inbox.
If you haven’t had this set up, get in touch with our Client Experience team to get started.

Junk Box

An email could be received by a contact, but still reach the junk box. It’s hard to tell whether this has happened; but typically, if the contact shows 0 views in your reporting then this might be the cause. You may need to reach out to them via other means and ask them to check their junk box to see whether the email can be found there. You should also suggest that your contact adds the domain/email as a safe sender, to make sure that in the future it reaches the inbox.

Finding trends with views and/or clicks

You may be able to find trends with other contacts from the same company to see whether they are viewing and engaging with your campaigns. If you notice some contacts from a company are regularly viewing and engaging, but some are not, it may be a case that they’re not as interested in that type of content. It may be worth reviewing the type of content you send to this contact, as well as how often you send to them.
If you’ve noticed that the no one else in the company is viewing or clicking links in the email, it may suggest that the company’s security filters are preventing all your emails from being received. In this case, you may need to get in touch via other means to get Concep Send emails added to their allow list, so that they can arrive safely in the inbox.

Email security filters

Some companies will have security filters on their mail servers such as Mimecast or Barracuda. These filtering systems prevent spam from being delivered to their employees. But, this can occasionally affect legitimate emails from an email marketing platform getting through. In this case, you may notice that a section of contacts clicking plain text links, or soft bounces from a delay in the mail server processing the email.
In this instance, you may need to reach out to your contacts to get Concep Send emails added to their allow list on their security filter. For more information, get in touch with our Client Experience team.