This article walks through Splash's email deliverability process and provides best practices for improving open and click rates.

On this page

Understanding email deliverability
What Splash does to ensure email deliverability
How to troubleshoot deliverability issues

Understanding email deliverability

Email deliverability means the ability to deliver emails. While a simple concept, every corporate email environment is guarded by firewalls, security settings, and filters, often preventing even well-intended messages from reputable senders reaching their destination.

Consumer email systems (i.e., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, employing spam traps and algorithms that process many variables (IP address, domain rating, etc) in making delivery judgments.

Despite email becoming a more guarded medium, Splash maintains status as an industry leader in deliverability, even delivering well to most businesses and personal inboxes.

What Splash does to ensure email deliverability

The Splash platform uses a rigorous, multi-faceted protocol to ensure optimal email deliverability to businesses and personal inboxes.

It’s important to note that 100% email deliverability should never be the expectation.

1. Domain Tiering
   The reputation of the domain an email is sent from is a key factor in deliverability. Therefore, Splash's enterprise clients are given a prioritized email domain to send from (one with a high reputation). They can even move up to better ones based on the merits of their email activity, which considers factors such as open, click, and delivery rates.
   
   Domain Tiering ensures that Splash users sending to lists of poor quality will not affect the reputation of the domains powering the emails of top-rated senders.
   
   
2. Bounce exclusion and remediation
   Splash doesn't allow the resending of emails to any recipient for whom previous messages bounced (read more here). The risk of repeat bouncing is eliminated by skipping over bounced emails in subsequent send attempts, helping Splash maintain a top-sending reputation.
   
   Splash also allows its users to correct bounced or invalid emails: an essential strategy for maintaining clean lists and accurate email analytics.
   
   
3. Content Analysis & Optimization
   An email's content affects its deliverability when sending to businesses and the general public. Every email template Splash offers is tested by industry leading deliverability software 250ok. Splash will not make available a new email design that does not pass 250ok testing for major consumer email systems. 

How to troubleshoot deliverability issues

Before promoting any event, you should go into the process with the mindset that total deliverability is likely not achievable, unless you're sending to a small list of personal email addresses.

The first recommendation is to understand the extent of the issue, which you can do using Splash email analytics to assess the success of your message.

Finding domains with low open and click rates

Splash offers person-by-person analytics that can be filtered by domain. For example, if after you send an email, a particular domain (i.e., @apple.com) has a high occurrence of only "Delivered" messages without any Opens or Clicks, this indicates the high likelihood that the message was caught in a firewall or filter.

Example: Your list has ten people with @apple.com email domains, and a few hours after you send, each of the recipients has a status of Delivered. This lack of engagement across a considerable sample size indicates your message was probably not received.

Whereas if two people from @apple.com com opened or clicked your message but the other 8 had a status of Delivered, this indicates the message was likely received just fine but ignored by a large subset of recipients.

After you know which domains are problematic, you can take appropriate action.

• Domain “Whitelisting”
  Depending on your relationship with your guest list, you can work with their company’s IT Department to have Splash’s email domain put on a “white list,” meaning validated to bypass company firewalls. 
  
  This is a highly effective measure, especially if you plan to send to a business in the future, but it may take time to coordinate.
  
  Best Practice: For the reason just mentioned, we strongly recommend sending a Save the Date a few weeks before the invitation — this will allow you to understand how your list is delivering well ahead of when you are ready to start collecting responses.
  
  

• Send a follow-up from an alternative personal email address
  The best event marketers use personal follow-ups — regardless of deliverability — because they effectively boost conversions. This of course is also a particularly potent weapon when a deliverability problem strikes because a personal domain will almost always outperform one used to batch send emails.
  
  

Implement Content Best Practices 

We trust that most of your emails don't include overt spammy language, but you should also be mindful of more subtle best practices that can make a difference.

Some of the basics:

1. Avoid purchased lists
These are notorious for their poor quality, high bounce-back rates, and even blacklisting. Any short-term benefit can be quickly outweighed by a suspect list’s negative impact on future email marketing.

2. Avoid using all CAPS, especially in subject lines.

3. Use dynamic salutations
Hey [first_name] — so that the message content demonstrates you're acquainted with the recipient.

4. Avoid unmistakable spam terms like Click Here, Buy Now, and Free.

5. Being more strategic in the use of image content.
This is not to suggest that a few images will land you in spam, but overdoing the visuals is also a known spam variable for certain email service providers.

Let us know if you'd like Splash to test your email content for performance to common consumer email clients.

Additional Splash help

For deliverability optimization recommendations, email domains and IPs only used by Splash, domain analysis, or cross-application display testing, submit a case to our team.