Email check is the last stage of planning before sending. And planning works for everything in life, doesn’t it?

In the case of email marketing, there are many technical details that can lead to campaigns being blocked.

This is because anti-spam filters are extremely demanding when it comes to detecting a suspicious message.

And as each filter has its own criteria, professionals must keep an eye out for any detail that could lead to emails being sent to the spam folder.

Failures in deliverability affect open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI.

In other words, doing an email check when you are finalizing an email avoids damaging your communication investments aimed at leads and, together with checking lists, guarantees the credibility of your reputation as a sender.

Do you want your campaigns to generate good results? There’s no magic to it. You just need to have valid emails in your database and follow good practices, starting with compliance with the LGPD.

We’ll go into this in more detail below.

Compliance with laws

One of the most important requirements of the American Data Privacy Protection Act (ADPPA) is that all emails sent must be authorized by the recipient. This is what we call “Opt-in”.

In other words, an email sent without authorization is classified as spam. And sending spam is illegal. The consequences fall on both the person who clicks the “send” button and the company. It’s as simple as that.

And how do you get your recipients to say yes? By building an email list with real leads, i.e. people who are really interested in receiving your content.

This is done through a registration form, through which people access rich content and, in return, provide their contact details.

However, there are a lot of typos when people enter their emails into the forms: Gamil instead of Gmail, or a misspelled letter in the user’s name can turn a promising lead into an invalid email.

Knowing if all the contacts on your list are valid is information that needs to be part of your email check, as spam filters block lists with at least 3% invalid emails.

The SafetyMails real-time verification API protects your registration forms by automatically correcting emails with typos.

Email authentication check

Email providers (Gmail, Yahoo and even private ones) require authentication from senders so that they can prove that they are the real senders.

This prevents someone from sending messages on behalf of a domain that is not actually yours, which happens a lot in phishing and ransomware scams.

Therefore, if you are an email marketing professional, the security settings of your domains should be part of your email check.

Therefore, if you are an email marketing professional, the security settings of your domains should be part of your email check.

There are three types of authentication:There are three types of authentication:

• SPF: Sender Policy Framework, which shows all the servers in a domain. This way, when a message arrives from a certain authenticated server, the provider knows which domain it came from.
• DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail, which reveals a digital signature of the domain sending the messages. This way, the provider recognizes all emails containing the signature.

You can configure your domain only for SPF authentication, only for DKIM or both together.

It’s worth noting that the more authentications your domain has, the better its relationship with spam filters will be.

A domain that has no authentication is susceptible to being blocked.

• DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, which will tell providers what to do with messages that do not comply with the SPF and DKIM settings of the sending domains. Quarantine them? Reject them? Each domain configures DMARC in its own way.

Regardless of whether you prefer SPF or DKIM, or both together, the DMARC setting is not an option.

Email content check

Visual programming

On the layout side, the images of the entire piece must not exceed 500 kb. Lightweight emails are required by anti-spam filters.

Therefore, if there are a lot of images in your pieces, work with Jpeg, Gif or png compression.

Another very important detail: never make an email 100% image-based. In addition to the high risk of it failing to load on the user’s screen, the likelihood of it being blocked is high.

And remember to organize the elements within the piece: 60% images to 40% text. Or compositions close to this.

Quality of texts

It all starts with the subject line. Watch out for the urgency trigger. Don’t use words like “free”, “urgent” or “attention”. They encourage the user to open the email at any cost, and this is not good practice when sending email marketing.

Don’t use capital letters or numerical sequences.

Email volume check

Bulk emails should be sent gradually. If a company sends 500,000 emails at once, for example, the risk of being blocked will be high.

The ideal is to start with 10,000 and gradually warm up to the target. The same applies to those working with smaller lists.

In short, the size of your base doesn’t matter. Sending gradually is seen as good practice and avoids blockages.

Conclusion

The success of email marketing is also linked to good practices. That’s why it’s important for professionals to observe internal and external details that can lead to campaigns being blocked or interrupted.

This prevents investments from being damaged for reasons that might not have occurred if there had been good email check planning before sending.

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