Ask a Deliverability Expert: How Do I Know If My Emails Are Actually Landing in a Reader’s Inbox?

These stories are presented thanks to Who Sponsors Stuff, which gives you and your team the tools to quickly find and reach out to relevant sponsors for your newsletter. They track 350+ newsletters, have direct contact information for 6,000+ sponsors, and keep you on the cutting edge of who’s spending money in the email advertising space. Find out how their Sales Pro product can supercharge your ad sales operation today.

I run an outlet that covers tech and digital privacy, so in my newsletter, I don’t collect data on readers, such as open rate and clicks. Any suggestions on how to guarantee that subscribers are receiving my messages without that kind of feedback?

As a deliverability specialist, you can only imagine the number of times I see businesses argue about their deliverability and domain/IP reputation based on their open or click rates.

“What do you mean our emails are landing in spam or are being blocked? My open rates are XYZ%!” — Customer in denial

For instance, a good B2B sender can find itself consistently with very low open rates if their list is filled with Microsoft Office 365 subscribers. A bad sender might actually see an increase in open rates as their domain/IP reputation goes down, because spam filters are triggering the tracking pixels and looking at the links of your email.

Open and click rates are interesting numbers to look at, and you’ll want to ensure they remain consistent through time, but as more and more changes are happening in the email world — looking at you, Apple iOS update — your strategy shouldn’t rely on these two numbers alone. And if, as is the case of the outlet that asked this month’s question, you’re not collecting any open or click data, that’s still OK — you don’t need that data to understand if your readers are receiving your emails! There are so many other things that can and should be looked at to ensure you’re making the right decisions and that your emails are actually landing in your customer’s inboxes.

To guarantee your subscribers are receiving your emails in their inbox you should start with best practices and authentication.

Best practices

Best practices are based on doing what subscribers want, and many are just plain ol’ logic. Do you like getting unsolicited emails? No. So buying a list of emails will probably affect your reputation and deliverability. How many unwanted emails can one brand send you before you start getting annoyed? It’s not that many — so over-emailing your audience (or sending campaigns just to remind your customers you exist) isn’t a good plan. Should you follow the law? Probably, don’t you think? And remember: The spam filters in every inbox are designed to make decisions based on all best practices. So even if a specific law doesn’t apply to you and your particular circumstances, spam filters might still be making decisions based on it.

Best practices are based on logical human wants or needs and the technical capacities of inbox service providers, email marketing service providers, spam filters, blocklists, and anyone in between. Maybe you’ve gotten away with ignoring some of these best practices for years — but I promise you, you can only get positive results by changing some of these email habits as soon as possible!

Authentication

To ensure your subscribers receive your email, authenticating your emails should be the first step. DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are here to protect your sender identity and to protect your subscribers from fraudulent emails. Every one of these authentication measures allows you to define different things. A passing DKIM shows inboxes you are actually the entity allowed to send these emails from a particular domain. SPF defines which infrastructure/IPs the emails are allowed to be sent from. DMARC, crème de la crème, allows you to define what happens to emails that don’t pass DKIM or SPF.

To implement these methods of authentication, you need to grab dome DNS entries from your email marketing provider and add them to your DNS hosting provider. As much as this may look like a job for Mr. Robot, it is simply a couple of copies/pastes. If you are having any issues, or feel uncertain about making these changes, here is the simplest way to get it done. Contact the support team of all tools you use that send emails using your domain name and ask them to send you the DNS entries you need to authenticate your domain with them. Once you have them all, contact the support team or whoever is managing your hosting and DNS entries and ask them to help you implement the changes. For DMARC reporting you have several tools out there, such as OnDmarc and dmarcian, that can help you monitor your DMARC reports and help you with the next steps.

The easiest way to see if your authentication is working (or to see if an email you received is authenticated) is by sending it to yourself and checking what your inbox says. Here is how to quickly check with Gmail or Google Workspace: Open one of your emails, click on the three dots in the corner, and then click “Show original.”

Then look down to where you see SPF / DKIM. If you’re seeing “PASS,” you’re in good shape! (The only options are PASS or FAIL.)

Now that you have proven your identity by showing you are the actual sender, the fun begins. You are authenticated, and when you send emails, they will reflect back on your relationships with the inboxes. This helps you build a sender reputation and a history with different email providers, such as ISPs, ESPs, blocklists, and spam filters. Never forget, just like with your personal credit score, things you did years ago can come haunt you today!

Monitoring

A lot of deliverability tasks consist of monitoring a plentitude of aspects, looking for specific signs that things are either going well or not, and being as proactive as possible to ensure we minimize any impact. The really great thing is that you don’t really need opens and clicks for this! There are a lot of things to look at, but one of the easiest is to check if your domain is on a blocklist.

Blocklists

Inbox service providers use blocklists to help their spam filters make better decisions and to reinforce them with even more information. You can check if your sending domain or IPs are on a blocklist with tools such as HetrixTools, or with paid tools, such as Validity or EmailConsul, which check against a more extensive list. 

Blocklists can be domain-based or IP-based and will affect you differently depending on how important they are deemed by ISPs. If your domain is on the Spamhaus – DBL blocklist for example, all emails sent to Microsoft will be blocked and you will receive a bounce telling you the email has not been delivered. Gmail, on the other hand, might act differently on a recipient-by-recipient basis. Some might get the email, while others will not. 

It is important to read up on what behavior to expect from ISPs when you’re on a particular blocklist, and to understand what needs to be changed in order to be removed from one and to minimize the long-term impact on your email strategy.

Seed tests

Another way to monitor things is through seed testing. You can do this yourself, for free, by setting up dozens of inboxes and seeing where your emails land, or by paying a seed testing tool to help you see your current inboxing rate. Simply put, these tools give you a list of email addresses you send your email to, and they let you know where the emails were received (Inbox, Spam, or not received) and quite a lot of other valuable data. A seed test doesn’t only provide you with inboxing results for various ISPs, but they also help you diagnose why they didn’t accept your email.

In most cases, it is important to analyze your sending list and see what providers you are sending your emails to. Not everyone sends to inboxes like Yandex or Mail.ru, so sending a seed test to them might not really give you a true image of your inboxing rate. On the flip side, though, if you know how different ISPs make decisions about the fate of your emails, knowing that GMX (a popular email option in Europe) is blocking you might indicate that the inboxes think you’re acting like a spammer. This allows you to change your behavior so that other ISPs who might also frown upon this but don’t penalize you as quickly don’t start blocking you as well.

Bounces

Another thing to monitor is your bounces, and I am not talking about the percentage rate. If you send 10 emails and you get a 10% bounce rate, the email police will not immediately penalize you. Bounces affect you in a very logical manner. Do you have bad list hygiene but keep sending to that same email address that doesn’t exist? The ISP knows this and will start thinking you don’t care about your list hygiene habits or your recipients. There are so many types of bounces out there, and depending on the ISPs, different bounces will affect you differently.

If users in your list have a full mailbox, for example, segment them out and try sending quite sometime later or never again. There is no point to keep sending emails to inboxes that can not accept your email anymore. Some bounces are quite clear in telling you they don’t want to be friends anymore with you without any positive changes. They are blocking your emails completely either because of your reputation, because you are generating high spam complaints, or even being on a block list.

That’s just how it is

Deliverability is extremely interesting, and my favorite part is when two very different issues stem from the same “deliverability rule.” It is exciting to be able to prove that sending too many emails and not enough can both impact your deliverability. One is because you are just plain annoying based on recipient and engagement feedback, and the other is because your volume is inconsistent, and the inboxes can’t quite build a reputation or opinion on your sending habits. My favorite activity to do with my new clients is to ask them this question:

If everyone in email and IT just disappeared one day, and you were the chosen one that had to create some basic rules to enforce in a spam filter, which rules would you implement first?

And then I remind them to follow those rules! You would be amazed at the number of people who argue about a bad sending habit, but then create a rule against it themselves. This exercise also helps marketers and email specialists change bad sending habits created or enforced by other people in a company who might be making decisions but not dealing with email issues themselves.

Open and click rates alone aren’t enough to understand whether or not your emails are being delivered to the inbox. If you’ve authenticated your domain and regularly clean your list, you’re probably in good shape — but you can always use monitoring tools such as seed testing, Google Postmaster, or check email blacklists to make sure you’re staying in the inbox and out of trouble.

Have a question that you’d like Yanna-Torry to answer in a future edition of Ask a Deliverability Expert? Submit it here.

Thanks to our sponsors
The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our summer sponsors: ∙ Selzy, an easy-to-use email marketing platform ∙ Who Sponsors Stuff, a tool to help you find relevant sponsors for your newsletter