While email hygiene and email copy play a key role in the performance of your emails, another important component that impacts deliverability is the technical setup of your emails.
In our Email Deliverability series, we’re sharing practical tips and technical best practices for improving email deliverability to ensure your outreach campaigns are set up for success when you send out emails to prospective candidates and clients.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the importance of authenticating emails, running email deliverability tests and whitelisting your email address.
Email authentication
A technical way to prove that an email has not been forged, email authentication shows that your emails are actually coming from you. Email authentication is frequently used to prevent fraudulent emails from being sent, such as spam and phishing emails.
Authenticating your emails early is crucial as it ensures your email deliverability is in good standing to email providers like Gmail that aim to deliver only authorized emails to their consumers’ inboxes and avoid unverified emails.
Here are two methods of email authentication you’ll want to set up before sending out your emails:
1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) – SPF helps identify impersonators and stops them from sending emails from your domain. It finds spammers by comparing the sender’s IP address with the list of IP addresses permitted to send emails on behalf of your email domain.
2. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) – This method of authentication adds digital signatures to emails to assure recipients that they’re coming from the specified sender. By doing so, it prevents the possibility of spammers tampering with your emails while they’re being transmitted.
SPF and DKIM are the main authentication methods you’ll want to implement. Another one to consider is Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), which can help you reap the full benefits of having SPF and DKIM.
Running email deliverability tests
Running deliverability tests gives you a pulse check to evaluate your email reputation and how well specific email sequences are performing.
It’s best to run a test if you notice a decline in your email deliverability or want to optimize your open, click-through and reply rates. The results of an email deliverability test can give you insight into what changes you might need to make to your email sequences to improve your overall deliverability.
If you’re looking for a tool to run these helpful tests, Interseller’s deliverability tool can help you not only run tests but also generate reports on the results.
Personal whitelist requests
Asking your email recipients to whitelist your email address can help improve your email deliverability. That way, when you’re added to their mailing list, it lets their email provider know that you’re a trusted sender. This also helps get your emails to appear at the top of your recipients’ inboxes and stay out of the spam folder.
Don’t miss the last blog in our Email Deliverability series, where we walk you through some of the most common email mistakes and how to avoid them to ensure all your emails land in the inboxes you want them to.