There are many reasons an email can end up in a Spam or Junk folder. While no system can promise 100% inbox delivery, there are things that our experts can help you with that dramatically improve email deliverability. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why emails fail to arrive and what can and cannot be done to correct it.
DMARC Compliance
First, if you aren’t monitoring email delivery, then you don’t know what your DMARC compliance rates are right now. If you are say around 75%, that’s 25% of your email that fails to make it to the server, much less the inbox. MxToolbox can help there.
Second, our DMARC compliance rates (and many of our Managed Services customers) are around 99.8%, some of the highest in the industry. With the volume of email we send in a week, that’s still several thousand emails that fail compliance.
There are many causes of DMARC compliance issues. Some you can control through better configuration (our specialty), some you cannot control. For example, if you have a large amount of forwarded email, SPF and DKIM will often break, making that email non-compliant. The newly released ARC standard is starting to help reduce that breakage, however.
Blacklisting
Email sender blacklisting is still an issue. If your email sending tools are blacklisted, then some of your email will be blacklisted. It happens and reduces delivery rates. Again, if you aren’t monitoring it, you don’t know about it. We know that some of our sending IPs were blacklisted in recent emails, which may send some email to spam or junk. If you are monitoring blacklisting for all your senders, then you can identify problems with these senders and address them either by working with your sender to improve their blacklist status or finding a sender with a better reputation. Our Adaptive Blacklisting give our customers insight into the blacklist reputation of all your senders.
The Appearance of Spam
Finally, some emails appear spammy to standardized spam rules that inbox providers apply. This is something MxToolbox tests for before every email broadcast. You can test emails too, with Spam Analyzer.
However, custom spam rules and customer behavior are something that no emailer can get around without feedback from users. For example, Gmail applies custom spam rules based upon some image attachments and Outlook.com appears to automatically junk email from senders that you routinely delete without opening. Fortunately, many inbox providers are leveraging feedback loops to provide insight to legitimate senders about their users’ behavior.
Conclusion
No email delivery tool can promise 100% inbox placement. Email Delivery is a complicated balance leveraging existing and emerging technologies to help you business communicate your message. Our Experts spend their days working with these technologies to help our customers improve their email delivery.
If you have learned something from this, then maybe you can trust us to help you.
