One question that crosses all our clients’ minds at one time or another is, “Why don’t I get more opens and less bounces?” We’re happy to say that there are a lot of ways you can help optimize your email efforts to increase your deliverability. Many are right in ReachMail for you to take advantage of right away.

The Bounce Report
Run a report on a recent individual mailing. On the report page, you’ll notice that you can click on the “Bounces” number. This leads to a page breaking down all your bounces into categories describing the nature of each group.
This alone can be revealing about not only how email servers are handling your message, but whether many of your recipients have auto-responders turned on, or have changed their email address. And because each of these groups can be exported as a .csv, it’s easy to use for cleaning your lists.

The Spam Checker
After you’ve created a mailing in ReachMail, click on the Mailings tab. In the drop-down menu on the same line as your mailing name, you’ll see “Run Spam Checker Tool.”
Simply stated, the tool looks through your email and compares it against the red flags email servers evaluate when deciding whether to put an email in the inbox, or the junk folder.
What you get back a moment later is a tidy list of items you can fix right away to improve the deliverability of your email.

Make Your Own Domain
Sometimes, when ReachMail generates email, it creates a DNS mismatch. That is, not all the URL’s in your email code are exactly the same. Most email servers have tolerance for this (after all, they’re adding code to each email that causes the same inconsistency), but some don’t.
This is an occasion where a little bit of custom programming on your behalf from our ReachMail team can go a long way. They’ll make sure all your DNS entries line up to help assure better deliverability.      

Checking your Code
If you’re uploading HTML files to generate emails or email templates, you’ve got enough flexibility to either improve your deliverability dramatically, or ruin it completely. Here’s a couple deliverability tips for people slinging code: Get Rid of the Alt Tags
Unless your audience is likely to use screen readers, this is the best practice to skip right now in HTML for emails.
Email servers read this text just like any other code to determine if you’re spam or not. The next logical step is to suggest that your alt text be concise and free of spam-like keywords.
However, we’ve seen that any alt tags on images – even blank ones – trigger less deliverability.
This suggestion in no way condones being incompliant with federal ADA specs. But with the amount of time your audience has to read emails, it’s probably best to let those with screen readers get right to the point of your email, and not get bogged-down in descriptions of the images.
Watch Out for Commenting
Email servers look at comments, too. Once you’ve uploaded your code into ReachMail, it’s a new HTML document anyway. You might as well take out everything extraneous and make the code as tight and efficient as possible.
As a side note, remember to name all of your files appropriately. Email servers read all of your code for red flags.

Text as Images
Here’s another non-ADA complaint tip: If you have text in your email that must be there, but that you know is a red flag, like fine print, type it into Photoshop and add it to your email as an image. People can still read it and print it, but email servers won’t.
Get Consulted!
There’s obviously a lot more to email success than checking a few HTML tags and running through Spam Checker. For emails that truly drive revenue to your bottom line, your best buy is ReachMail consulting services.
We’ll run a battery of analyses on your emails, past and future, to map out solutions that will make the most of every message you send. Contact our VP of Client Relations, Tim Reeder to talk more about our consulting services anytime.

Reaching The Inbox
Dave Albert, the President of Emerge Digital (formerly Publishing Dynamics), has been kind enough to write down an even more in-depth analysis of what you can do to increase your deliverability. It’s called, “Reaching The Inbox.” And it’s free! Download Reaching_the_Inbox.pdf.

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