Trust Will Increase Your Open Rates: Eight Tips For Getting Your Email to The Inbox

Why are my emails going into people’s junk/spam folders?

There are several different reasons that your emails might be hitting your customer's spam folders rather than landing in their inbox. In the blog, we look at eight reasons why your email isn’t getting through.

1. Domain Settings

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. SPF is a set of standard practices that help to maximise email deliverability. By adding something called an SPF record to your domain name’s TXT entry, you reduce the chance of an email provider marking any emails sent from your domain as spam. At Airship, we add the DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) tool to all our outbound emails by default - this will test the domain name. We also ask our clients to set up SPF records for their domains - where they do this they will also adhere to SPF authentication.

2. Is your list clean? Other reasons why your emails might be going into spam

If your CRM or data list contains email addresses that are invalid, this will not only reduce email deliverability, it will also lessen your reputation in the eyes of your ISP since your emails will not be well received by the recipients of your sends.

This leads us to…

3. Activity segments

We automatically segment customers based on their engagement allowing us to broadcast separate content to push customers to maintain engagement or to re-engage.

4. Retention journey

A good retention journey will clean your email list automatically, Airship’s works by looking at the amount of emails sent to a customer over a period and how many emails have been opened. If the customer doesn’t score high enough we’ll send a final journey with a compelling subject line to push the customer to engage. If the customer doesn’t open the emails then they will be flagged to not send to in the future.

5. Hard bounce vs soft bounce

If your CRM contains email addresses that are invalid, the email you send will ‘hard bounce’. A hard bounce is indicative of a permanent reason why your email cannot be delivered, as in the case of an invalid email address, or a domain name that does not exist.

Soft bounces point to a temporary problem with deliverability: the recipient’s inbox might be full or the email server is down. It could also simply be that the email you are sending is too large.

Airship clean email lists automatically based on hard bounce and an algorithm for soft bounces. This shows the ESP that our clients are responsible senders and builds trust.

6. Transactional emails

Transactional emails such as a welcome journey, birthday, order confirmations, loyalty, and feedback journey will all get higher open rates than your campaign emails. This is important as it builds trust with the ESPs (email service providers) when looking at your IP address. Trust scores highly on the ESPs algorithms which will positively impact your overall open rates.

7. IP warming - what is it and why should you do it?

IP warming is a process of ‘warming’ up your IP address by gradually sending more and more emails. This helps to build a reputation with ISPs (internet service providers) so that they recognise your IP address as a legitimate source.

When your IP address is ‘cold’, ISPs will take notice of all of the emails you are sending and judge any unexpected activity (a high volume of emails being sent at once, for example) as suspicious. For this reason it is best to gradually increase the number of emails you send so that email providers have a chance to monitor your sending habits and the activity of the recipients.

Building a good reputation is key: if ISPs trust that you can sending legitimate emails, they are less likely to mark your emails as spam and your emails are less likely to end up in people’s spam/junk folders.

8. Increase email deliverability: split test subject lines

Split-testing is where you test two or more subject lines to see which ones have the best open rates. You can use the results from split-tests to inform future subject lines, or you can split test using only part of your CRM and then send the winning subject line out to the rest of your CRM. By doing this, you increase the percentage of people who open your emails which leads to an overall increase in deliverability.