Fix Your Email Deliverability
Deliverability of email is one of the most important aspects of email marketing. If your emails aren’t being received by your recipients, then your efforts are worthless. However, with the right knowledge, you can reduce the risk of a low deliverability score and increase your chances of getting valid responses from your target audience. If you aren’t aware of the many factors that affect deliverability, let alone their positive and negative implications, you will be in shock when you first learn about them. Different email services have their own set of guidelines on how to improve deliverability. Some services have a strict policy of rejecting emails from their users if the emails fail to meet their deliverability specifications. Therefore, knowing how to check and fix your email deliverability is essential for any email marketer.
What affects your WordPress email deliverability?
One of the reasons affecting deliverability is your own email strategy. If you want to improve your email deliverability, you need to understand the process and how to correct it. Having a word combination that resembles spear-phishing will be flagged as suspicious. Your domain’s DNS records have a big influence on email delivery. Also, if you build a basic WordPress site without paying attention to the WordPress mail settings, problems are expected. The most common explanations are: Domain’s settings aren’t set up properly for email authentication and verification or incorrect email configuration and optimization.
How to check your email deliverability?
Check email health here: https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth
Email network generator tools: https://mxtoolbox.com/NetworkTools.aspx?tab=Email
How to verify email authentication?
Mail has always been the main instrument used in cybercrime. Hackers imitate and hijack other people’s domain names. That is, they create emails from your domain. To address this, mail providers are deploying more sophisticated methods and technologies to manage mail flow. Email authentication is the most basic protection. Consider email authentication as a hard-to-spoof digital signature for your domain, protecting your brand, identity, content, and reputation. To implement email authentication, you must configure your domain’s DNS records to include extra information in the email headers. You may then verify that it originated from an approved mail server or IP address linked with your domain. While this verification is optional, it increases the chances of your letter reaching your recipient which are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
How to fix your email deliverability?
Contact your email service provider. If you have already tried out various send times and decided that your deliverability is low because of your email’s content, contact your email service provider and let them know about the issue.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and describes a mechanism to check an email message delivered from an authorized mail server to identify forgery and spam. SPF standards allow domain owners to identify which mail servers they can transmit from.
Use SPF Record Generator: https://mxtoolbox.com/SPFRecordGenerator.aspx
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
DKIM is a method of email authentication that allows an entity to claim authorship for a communication. DKIM employs “public key cryptography” to authenticate an email message was delivered from an authorized mail server, preventing forgery and spam delivery.
DKIM Generator: https://easydmarc.com/tools/dkim-record-generator
DKIM Check Validity: https://mxtoolbox.com/dkim.aspx
Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)
For improved domain protection from fraudulent email, DMARC employs SPF and DKIM to provide linkage to the author (“From:”) domain name, written standards for recipient handling of authentication failures, and reporting from receivers to senders.
Use DMARC Record Generator: https://mxtoolbox.com/DMARCRecordGenerator.aspx
WordPress Email Optimization
If you’ve done all the testing, but still does not fix the problem then it’s probably a plugin issue. Each WordPress plugin is unique, and if you use numerous plugins, they must all operate well together, but this is not always the case. Plugin updates may cause conflicts with other plugins. So knowing your plugins and how to configure them is crucial. Some troubles with email plugins are due to configuration errors. Clients may identify emails as suspicious or spoofing if not set properly (e.g. Contact form plugins frequently rewrite the From: field’s address or change other information that may be suspicious.)
Conclusion
Low deliverability is one of the most frustrating aspects of email marketing. However, if you follow the steps mentioned in this article, you can increase your email’s deliverability. There are many ways to fix this and some are easier than others. Once you learn how to check and fix your email deliverability, you will be able to send emails to a larger audience and increase the number of valid responses to your emails.
