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

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

Understanding email deliverability

Email deliverability means exactly what it says: the ability to deliver emails. Seems simple enough, right? Not exactly. Every corporate email environment is guarded by its own cocktail of firewalls, security settings, and filters, often preventing even well-intended messages from reputable senders from reaching their destination.

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

Despite email becoming a more and more guarded medium, Splash maintains a 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, however, that 100% email deliverability should never be the expectation.

1. Domain Tiering
   The reputation of the domain an email is being sent from is a key factor in deliverability. Splash’s enterprise clients are given a prioritized email domain to send from (one with a high reputation) and 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). By skipping over bounced emails in subsequent send attempts, the risk of repeat bouncing is eliminated, 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
   The content of an email factors into the deliverability equation as it pertains to both sending to businesses and the general public. Every email template Splash offers is put through a testing suite powered by industry leading deliverability software 250ok. Splash will not make available a new email design design that does not pass 250ok testing for major consumer emails systems. 

How to troubleshoot deliverability issues

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

The first recommendation is to understand the extent of the issue; this can be accomplished by 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. If after you send an email, a certain domain (i.e. @apple.com) has a high occurrence of only “Delivered” messages without any Opens or Clicks, this indicates the high likelihood the message was caught in a firewall or filter.

Example: Your list has 10 people with @apple.com emails domains and a few hours after you send, each of the 10 recipients has a status of Delivered. This lack of engagement across a noteworthy sample size indicates your message was probably not received.

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

After you know which domains aren’t cooperating, 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 an extremely effective measure, especially if you plan to send to a business again in the future, but it may take a bit of 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 very best event marketers use personal follow-ups — regardless of deliverability — because they are so effective in boosting 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 cognizant of more subtle best practices that can make a difference.

Some of the basics:

1. Stay away from 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. Stay away from obvious spam terms, such as 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.

If you’d like Splash to test your email content for performance to leading consumer email clients, let us know.

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.