Published: 30 November, 2024

Avoid the Dreaded Blacklist with Email Deliverability Etiquette

Reputation can be everything.

Maintaining a good look builds esteem in the fund world, while a poor show can direct investors elsewhere. Sending emails may feel like a simple bread and butter exercise, but with email being held in such high regard by investors, the consistency and deliverability of an email can be make or break.

If your company emails start to bounce frequently or make it into the inboxes of non-subscribers, this starts a slippery slope. No quality control or monitoring can decline email performance and mark them out as Spam, or even land your addresses onto dread blacklists. That’s a land of very tricky return; the last place a fund marketer wants to be.

There have been many changing rules regarding deliverability best practice, particularly as data privacy compliance has become so stringent in the light of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU. Going back to basics in understanding email technicalities and methods can help sort out email sending going forward, meaning you’re a way away from ending up on prohibited lists.

The Makeup of Emails

Let’s break down email to their essentials: what marks them as your legitimate addresses, and how they get to where they should.

Email Service Providers (ESP): a technology company that allows platforms to send commercial or transactional email campaigns.
Internet Service Providers (ISP): these services allow users to connect to the internet and its capabilities. This access can be provided through cable, wireless or fibre optics and popular ISPs such as Verizon or Virgin Media. Inbox Providers grant mailboxes to users as part of their services, with paid or free webmail accounts or email apps including Gmail or Yahoo.
Internet Protocol (IP): a unique tag for devices connected to an internet – essentially a home address attributed to computers around the world that outlines you and your server.
Domains: names that identify network locations of servers or devices. Users can browse domain text to locate a company online, for instance.
Sub domains: ways to mark out other marketing streams from the same company, e.g., email.[companyname].com identifies the sender as being the email arm for a fund’s outreach.

An ISP can track engagement between end users and the email sender’s IP address to determine the IP Reputation. This score takes into account the volume of sent emails, the consistency of sending patterns, bounce rates, complaint frequency, additions to Spam traps (which aim to catch malicious senders), and included content.

Where emails are not always sent from the same IP address of the provider (very common for businesses nowadays), reputation scores are racked up in regards to the sending domain – the ‘umbrella owner’ comprising multiple employees using different devices.

Delivery vs Deliverability

A fund marketer may think it’s all well and good to set up email automations, click send, and assume they’re opened and read by the recipient. This is, unfortunately, not the way of the email world. All emails have the potential to be blocked, and there’s a clear distinction between delivery and deliverability.

Delivery comes down to the intended user actually accepting the message. This will not happen if the IP address is blocked, or if the domain or email address is non-existent. It can often be seen as a metric to indicate bounce rate.

Even if an email makes it to the recipient, this does not count as successful delivery. Instead deliverability refers to the percentage of emails ending up in the inbox – not into the Junk folder, and not the Spam. For the message to nestle in a place where it’s more likely to be read, it must pass authentication procedures.

Unfortunately, even if messages get accepted into the user’s inbox, if they remain unopened they could be deemed less useful and the sender’s follow-ups may be marked as Spam.

Common Emailing Mistakes

Ignoring levels of care can stop emails completing their intended journey. It’s imperative to avoid sending emails to those that are not subscribed to you. Do not automatically tick opt-in boxes for preference centres – if subscribers are willingly giving you permission to contact them, they will be less likely to mark emails as Spam, and more likely to open your links. A win-win!

Providing simple access to unsubscribe options, and an email address to report email abuse, is also recommended. It can also be tempting to send a large number of bulk emails over time, but mail servers at the other end may set filters to not deliver them internally.

Some firms may send automatic ‘noreply’ addresses which are not only untrustworthy non-human responses, but unlikely to hit inboxes. Sending test emails from a domain is another non-no, while impersonating another domain (also known as ‘spoofing’) is common spamming behaviour.

Over-formatted templates may trigger content filters and heavy handed punctuation can also signal ambiguous looking sentences that Spam filters hate – e.g. multiple hyphens in a subject line. Mixing in HTTP content or links (not secured in the same way as encrypted HTTPS content) may be indicative of fraudulent emailers who would not spend money on a verifiable digital certificate. HTTPS content is preferable, especially when hosted on the same domain as the sender address.

What To Do for Deliverability

Maintaining deliverability involves doing a consistent spring clean with a useful best practices checklist, which should comprise the following:

Authentication

To stop scammers spoofing your domain, a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) method can be configured by your domain provider. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email standard that allows recipient servers to thumbs-up senders through digital signatures. DKIM shows a sender taking responsibility for their emails.

Check your domain status, any domain linked to your address, on a Google Safe Browsing site status page.
If you send HTML messages, they must comply with the Internet Format Standard (RFC 5322) and not hide content.

Appearance

Do not purchase email addresses from other companies, or send emails to unsubscribed persons.
Use one email address in Headers that display ‘Message From: *sender*’, and include a valid Message-ID header field in every message.
Subjects, links, and content must be relevant, accessible and easy to understand.
Images overpowering text will make for an imbalanced email.
Not differentiating content for every email (even just salutations) means servers may identify them as suspicious.
Embedded images can work well for click-through rates but also trigger Spam alerts if they’re used by phishers to verify if an email gets read, so platforms that safely deliver embedded images are necessary.
An overload of CCd or BCC contacts can also be seen as suspect by Spam filters.

Monitoring and Management

Send emails consistently, slowly to start, and build up volumes over time. Be wary of the number of emails you send out if running multiple campaigns at once.
Monitor your sending rates and email opens, replies, and unsubscribes to tweak deliverability and performance.
Check the activity of a shared IP address, and emails sent from affiliate marketers.
Remove any users that send unwanted Spam from your domain.
Send bulk emails from your exchange server or a platform that allows this, as major mail servers may not allow bulk-sent communications.
Keep an eye on your bounce rate, as high numbers can harm your reputation as governed by an ISP.
Understanding error messages can highlight why emails are bounced or rejected, e.g. if the server’s IP address is on an allowed or suspended list, or if there are authentication errors against standards.
Check any Spam reports. ESPs can check for users that have marked old campaigns as such, and look at multiple spam filters that score emails in different ways. Discover them in more detail here.

Testing, Testing, and More Testing!

Data laws are making compliance with financial marketing emails trickier, and it takes a level of investigation to check where practices can be improved. Assessing email deliverability should be a consistent audit – it’s not a one-time sweep!

Platforms including ProFundCom can also assist in keeping email sending fully in line with regulations. While some strict Spam filters will unsubscribe your contacts if content is deemed as Spam, contacting district user-side domains to check your listing is unsustainable. ProFundCom offers a solution for this to ensure better deliverability before sending: