Email Marketing Foundation

Good habits are the foundation to successful email marketing.

Overview

Email marketing is a powerful tool for reaching and engaging your target audience. While ListDefender helps you keep your list clean, it's essential to prioritize best practices to protect your sender reputation and ensure your messages are delivered and seen.

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Protect Your Reputation

Your web domain carries its own email sending reputation, separate from the IP address used by your email marketing platform to send emails on your behalf. Though it's just one thing Email Service Providers consider when determining whether to deliver, reject or junk an email you send, it's a critical one that you can influence directly.

So as a first step in protecting your domain's reputation, we recommend that you properly implement DKIM and SPF.

• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): This is key that verifies the authenticity of emails sent on behalf of your domain. Setting up DKIM requires that you work with your email marketing provider. They will provide a DNS record that you will need to add to your domain's DNS.
• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This is a security protocol that specifies who is allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain. It also provides instructions on how to handle emails from unauthorized senders.

By adding DKIM to your outgoing messages and implementing SPF, you can prevent others from spoofing email messages from your domain and ensure your emails are recognized as legitimate. Some email services, like Google and Yahoo, require any sender who sends 5,000 or more emails in a day to have these set up. ListDefender recommends all email marketers set them up, regardless of sending throughput.

These settings can get complicated, depending on your email sending needs. For example, you might have several services that need to send email from your domain. Or, you may wish to set up monitoring to ensure nobody has succeeded in spoofing your domain. We recommend that you contact your email marketing provider or a trusted expert for help with DKIM and SPF or for help with DMARC and reporting.

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Be a Responsible Sender

You've heard it before, but it's so important that it bears repeating:

Do not buy lists. Do not scrape email addresses.

These practices are poison to your sender reputation, and severely increase your risk of spam complaints and spam traps. Don't do it!

Engage

Engagement is a key factor in determining whether your emails are delivered to the inbox or junk folder. Email Service Providers like Google and Microsoft use engagement metrics to determine whether your emails are wanted by your recipients. If your emails are not opened, marked as spam, or deleted without being read, your sender reputation will suffer, and your emails will be less likely to be delivered to the inbox.

So, you should email people who engage with your email messages.

But this means you'll want to be more deliberate about how you write your emails. Your emails should encourage interaction, via clicks and replies. Write content that teases something you've written on your website or elsewhere and link to it. You can also include links to other relevant or related content. You could also encourage emailed replies. The goal is to get clicks or replies.