Getting emails in front of your subscribers is the whole point of Email Marketing, but troubleshooting Deliverability issues can be a very complex process. Here we’ve collected 5 of the fastest things to check to make sure you are successful with sending from Drip, and to have better emails in general.
1. Do you meet the minimum sending requirements?
There are several sending requirements that all accounts must meet to start sending emails through Drip. These are modeled after what we’ve seen and very well-documented best practices for marketing, as well as legal requirements in some regions that are more strict than others. Whether you are a brand new business or a 10-year vet, make sure these are in place so you aren’t starting off behind the rest of the pack.
If you have questions or need more specifics, don’t hesitate to contact our Deliverability team via Support@drip.com
Please review your account to make sure you're meeting all of the following:
- Is your website wholly yours and hosted on its own domain? Unfortunately, we don't support gray-labeled sites such as xyz.wordpress.com and xyz.bandcamp.com. This includes social media accounts such as Facebook pages and groups, as well as Instagram.
- Is your website launched and do you have a way for people to sign up for your mailing list? You should also have a link to your privacy policy, information about your company/brand/product, and contact information (email address, mailing address, etc.).
- Does your "from" address match the domain linked to your account? We don't support free email addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo, redirected websites, or addresses that are different from your website (for example, xyz@yourdomain.co for a site that is yourdomain.com).
- How many brands and websites are you marketing?
2. Do you have other brands or websites you'd like to market via Drip?
Avoid the hassle of organizing, tagging, and segmenting all of your lists within one account by creating subaccounts.
Subaccounts are essentially separate Drip accounts that are accessible from one single login. These will allow you to manage your lists more precisely, collect individual opt-ins for each brand, send emails with matching information, and avoid mix-ups. Also, when it comes to billing, your bill will be issued once a month as a total sum of all the active people across your accounts instead of having to pay for each account separately.
3. DMARC and Authentication
DMARC is a great security tool that helps prevent spoofing from happening, but to send emails through Drip, you’ll need authentication to make sure your emails aren’t being sent to spam because of it. To authenticate your sending, you’ll want to set up a Custom Sending Domain. This is a free service that Drip provides, which allows you to build your sending reputation by moving you to a separate pool of IP addresses for authenticated sending. To learn more about setting up a Custom Sending Domain, follow this link here.
Not sure if you have DMARC? No worries, check the DMARC status of your domain, as well as your policy type, here. It’s best to double-check before you start sending, otherwise, your emails might get sent to spam for failing your policy’s check.
4. Opt-in Permission, Older Lists, and List Health
- In regards to Opt-in, make sure everyone on your list has given explicit and direct opt-in permission to receive emails from each domain you are mailing from. This is not only an issue that breaks our Terms of Service (which can result in account closure), but can have pretty big impacts on your email reputation long term.
If you have people on your list that didn't fill out an opt-in form for you, were purchased, were a part of a list given to you by another brand, or whose info you found online, we'd recommend reaching out to them via non-email methods first to guide them to your opt-in before adding them to your Drip account.
- Want to avoid potential harm against your deliverability and even an automatic block on your sending? Make sure to clean your list and be well maintained!
List health is critical! Receiving Hard Bounces and Spam Complaints could hamper your sending reputation and, possibly, result in your account being blocked. Given the rate that folks change jobs, people mistype emails, or how hard it is to read handwriting, these list cleaning tools such as Briteverify, Kickbox, Neverbounce, or Zerobounce will help you find and remove invalid, misspelled, or even spam-related email addresses from your list.
For quite a few reasons email addresses have been going bad at a much higher rate over the past three years, especially those connected to a job or business. Start sending emails regularly, as this can help spread out the unavoidable bounces and complaints, and will ensure that your brand is at the front of your subscribers' minds.
- Next up is Pruning! Once you’ve cleaned your list and started developing your sending history, pruning inactive and unengaged people will help maintain your list’s health and keep you in peoples’ inboxes.
Email Service Providers watch your email activity very closely and take notice if you are sending lots of emails to someone who isn’t opening them. If this pattern continues, ESPs will begin to move your emails into spam boxes instead since they aren’t being interacted with. To avoid this, we recommend Pruning people from your list that have become unengaged with your content after 90-120 days. This will help maintain a strong sending reputation and avoid issues with getting emails to those who are opening them!
5. Less is more and fewer emails are better!
When it comes to deliverability and getting emails out of spam, a common piece of advice is to “send fewer emails”. We here at Drip would prefer to recommend, “Send better emails to fewer people”.
We don’t cap your number of sends within Drip as every business has different needs and business models, but for most businesses, 8-12 emails per month is a healthy number of sends without overwhelming your audience. Obviously, this number can fluctuate based on product launches, events, onboarding, etc. but this is a good baseline to follow to avoid email fatigue. This also gives you quite a bit of data when you are looking at a period of 90 days to consider pruning a subscriber as they would have had close to 30 emails to show you some form of interest in your content.