Keep your mass emails from ending up in spam?

If the bulk emails you send end up in your spam folder, it’s a serious problem that damages your company’s reputation and email delivery capabilities.

Learn in this definitive guide how to prevent your bulk emails from ending up in spam and thus improve the metrics in your mailing campaign.

Authenticate your IP address with DKIM check and SPF records

the amount of spam messages was 59.33% of global mail traffic. Email providers are concerned and are addressing the problem with more intense anti-spam penalties.

This is why DKIM and SPF authentication are important and email providers are using these technologies to confirm the identity of senders.

If it cannot be authenticated, providers can reject the message or pass it through additional filters to determine whether it should be delivered. Therefore, without authentication, the chances of your email being filtered or blocked increase.

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mails) is a method for validating domains by means of a publicly available cryptographic signature. This signature is verified at the recipient end using a DNS record.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is used to compare the sender’s IP indicated in the domain’s DNS record with a list of IPs authorized to send from that domain.

How to check your DKIM and SPF record?

You can use these tools to validate your DKIM and SPF records, verify sender reputation, blacklist appearances, among other criteria:

  • DKIMValidator
  • Mail-Tester
  • MXtoolbox

These tools work as follows: you send your text messages to indicate the email address, IP address type or domain in the form.

Then you receive the report on your domain results, problem areas and proper operation, and correct configuration of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.

Monitor your sender’s reputation

When choosing your email account, take into account which one is used by the majority of your subscribers or set up the email managers of different providers. This is the information you can evaluate when using an email account:

  • Deliverability
  • Compliance rate
  • Delivery errors
  • Domain name and IP address delivery reputation

You can also analyze other metrics in AOL, Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.

Choose the right IP address

Shared IP address

These IPs are used by multiple senders, which helps to increase the frequency and volume of sending, keeping the IP active. However, you cannot control their reputation, as it depends on the actions of other senders as well.

Unique IP address

It is used by only one sender, who is fully responsible for its reputation. It is a good option if you send more than 50,000 emails per month.

If you are sending bulk email, we recommend that you register the addresses separately. This way, you can use one for active emails and another for your newsletter.

Keep your IP address active

Send email to no less than 50,000 messages per month. If you have registered a new IP and have not sent any mail yet, activate it by gradually sending small amounts of mail.

How to activate your IP address?

Let’s say you need to send 60,000 mass emails. If you send that many from one provider, some provider may reject it. Instead, divide your email list into 6 groups of 10,000 users.

Send emails to the first group every day for the first week. During the second week, add another group of 10,000 users to your mailing list and so on. If your bounce rate is greater than 10% and the fulfillment rate exceeds 0.1%, reduce your delivery volume to 5,000 messages per day.

Check the appearance of your IP address in the blacklists

You can use these tools:

  • MXtoolbox
  • What Is My IP Address
  • DNSBL
  • Multirbl
  • RBL Watcher

Analyze delivery errors in your mass emails

Delivery errors are divided into two groups:

Soft Bounces

These usually occur from temporary causes:

  • Full inbox
  • Technical problems with receiving the mail transfer agent
  • Very large email size

Hard bounces

They are presented for the following reasons:

  • Non-existent mailbox domain
  • Syntax error in the email address
  • The mail transfer agent (MTA), spam filter or MTA protection software has identified your content as spam. In this specific case, you should check the design and content of your email.

When the hard bounce rate reaches 5%, the mail server blocks the sender.

In the event that the email bounces, the recipient’s server returns a message with a three-digit delivery error code and a description of the reason for the bounce.

To understand why your email can’t reach the recipient, please have the enhanced set of delivery error status codes and their meaning available.