Message deliverability is the likelihood that an email arrives in a recipient's inbox. The key to successful delivery is to send email that is correctly authenticated and well-targeted to an engaged audience. Repeated successful delivery leads to the establishment of an excellent IP address and domain reputation. When you monitor your message deliverability, you improve the success rate of your email campaigns.
To achieve successful message delivery, you must focus on several key areas. The keys to creating and maintaining an excellent IP address and domain reputation are as follows:
- Authentication and encryption
- Reputation
- Address acquisition and list hygiene
- Complaint management
- Frequency and engagement
Key concepts
You should become familiar with these terms.
Blacklist
A list of IPs or domains that are determined to be sending spam. The data is usually curated by a third-party blacklist operator such as Spamhaus or Cloudmark and made available to ISPs and other recipient networks. The ISPs use the provided data to generate a blacklisting/blocklisting, which results in mail from the listed IPs or domains being blocked.
Feedback loop
A form of feedback by which an Internet Service Provider (ISP) forwards anonymized spam complaints from their users, back to the senders with the expectation that the complainants are unsubscribed immediately. Failure to remove complainants can injure IP/domain reputation. Feedback Loop complaints are sent by using a standardized, machine-readable format called ARF.
Spam foldering
The placement of email in a spam folder rather than the inbox. Also called bulking.
Spam trap
A spam trap is an email address that is valid, does not bounce, and silently accepts mail. They are used by the owners of the trap to isolate senders with bad sending practices. Hitting a single trap even once can result in a blacklisting, depending on the blacklist operator.
Terms used in this documentation
Recipient
An individual who receives emails. Recipients can be either prospects or contacts.
Prospect
An individual to whom you send email with the intent of converting them into a contact.
Contact
An individual who has agreed to receive your marketing email.
User
An individual who subscribes to an ISP or email service.
Receiver
A network that receives email, generally used to describe an ISP, but can be applied in this context to any network that receives marketing email.
Sender
A company that sends email marketing messages.
Contact list
As part of a marketing database, a list of the individuals who agreed to receive your email.
Deliverability features and resources
Acoustic Campaign provides features to help you manage your email lists and increase your rate of deliverability to recipients. Refer to the following topics and training material for more information.
- For information about double opt-in, see the article on double opt-in.
- For training on the double opt-in process, see the article on the double opt-in process.
- For information about send time optimization (STO), see the article on send time optimization (STO).
- For information about preference centers, see the article on Creating a web forms preference center.
- For training on preference centers, see the article on Preference centers and Editing preference centers.
- For information about snooze, see the article on Snoozing a web form.
- For training on the snooze feature, see the article on snooze.
- For information about the Campaign spam check tool, see SpamAssassin.