How to Ensure your Emails Avoid the Spam Trap
Spam is the scourge of the internet. We all hate getting it and are pretty grateful to have high level junk mail filters that mostly ensure that penis enlargement offers and $100,000 inheritances from exotic princes are a thing of the past. Or at least confined to the junk mail folder.
But on the flipside of that, how do you ensure that your lovingly crafted, incredibly thoughtful and value-providing email newsletters are actually being delivered to YOUR audience? You know, the people that took the trouble to sign up to your mailing list in the first place, then confirmed that they really did want your emails via a second confirmation email? I mean… these guys really do want your emails, right? So how come so many of your precious emails are getting filed alongside unclaimed multi-million dollar inheritance notifications?
The reason is that lots of different email services like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft use an authentication process to scan incoming emails for spam or spoofed addresses and to check who is the person sending them. Emails that fail this authentication check are more likely to get filed into a spam or junk folder.
Therefore the most important thing you can do to help to ensure that your emails reach recipients inboxes safely is to set up something called an SPF (Sender Framework Policy) and DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail) authentication for your domain with your newsletter service provider.
How to Authenticate Your Domain
It’s not as complicated as it sounds and you usually manage the SPF and DKIM authentication process in the same place and at the same time.
You will need access to the DNS (domain name system) settings of your server. If you don’t normally do this yourself then ask the person that hosts and manages your website to help you. It requires a few lines of text being added to some fields in the DNS settings.
Each newsletter service provider offers its own set of instructions for how to do this. The instructions will be quite similar but the lines of text you need will be unique to your account, so make sure you look up specific instructions with your newsletter provider inside your account.
I have listed and linked to the most popular ones below:
Confession - Don’t Make My Mistake!
Now that I have shared all this wisdom and hopefully you are running off to your newsletter provider to ensure you are following their protocols for DKIM authentication… let me confess how I recently goofed up…
I recently changed my domain service to a really good service provider - one that offers me much better customer service than what I had before. They made the change over super easy - basically it involves moving your website and email servers from one company to another. It was seamless. All was perfect. This was a few months ago now. So far, no drama.
Then last week I started to investigate why my mailing list opening rates were disappointingly low. I mean, I write GREAT content right? I imagine everyone is just hanging around their inboxes every week waiting for me to show up. So why were my open rates really low?
Then I remembered. When I transferred my website to a new server, I did not re-authenticate the DKIM. Or perhaps I even forgot in the first place. I don’t remember. I know I do this for every client (where I have access to their domain DNS settings). But what a big fat mistake I made for me!
Anyhoo, I addressed that mistake and authenticated the domain immediately then sent my newsletter out and boom! My open rates rocketed! So I think we can be sure that was the reason.
Let that be a lesson - don’t make my mistake! Go and authenticate your domain right now!
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