A low open rate for your emails may be due to the fact that they were delivered to the spam folder of the recipient email address. Whether an email is identified as potentially spam is based on many factors including the strictness of the recipient's spam filter. Here are a few techniques and tips that will help improve the deliverability of your emails into the inbox.
Email Authentication Techniques:
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and is a method of telling email gateways which domains or IP addresses are allowed to send email on your behalf, to prevent email spoofing. The email gateway receiving an email checks to see whether the sending server (by domain or IP address) is listed as a valid sender for the sending domain. When you are using Enudge, the sending server is enudge.com.au and the sending domain is your email address (name@companyname.com). By adding a SPF record to your domain, you eliminate the risk of getting flagged for spoofing, which will significantly improve email deliverability. A SPF record can be easily implemented by your website manager or domain registrar. Here is an article explaining how.
DKIM is a fairly recent authentication technique that helps inbound mail servers verify if an email message is being sent by an authorised sender and that the message was not forged or altered. By implementing this technique you will ensure that the outgoing Enudge mail server is treated as an authorised sender and the email message is verified as authentic and unaltered.
DMARC works alongside DKIM. In order to pass DMARC, your message must be signed with a DKIM certificate. Part of your DMARC configuration is to specify the email address to which reports on DKIM authentication issues will be sent. Having DKIM and DMARC will significantly improve your email delivery.
Read this article, to find out more about DKIM and DMARC and how to implement these techniques.
Content-related tips:
Flashy colours, fonts and exclamation marks, particularly in the subject line, should be used sparingly.
Avoid using words that are widely used in spam emails. These tend to change overtime, so it is important to research and keep up to date.
Having a 'clean' HTML code for your emails will certainly help. For example, having a lot of empty table rows or table elements can trigger some spam filters. An easy way to achieve this is to use one of our pre-existing Enudge templates, which can be customised to meet your brand requirements.
Avoid link masking e.g. using a website address as a link, rather than hyperlinking regular words. This is explained in this Enudge article.
Having too many images in your email can trigger SPAM filters. The best practice is to have a balance between text and images.