4 Surprising Factors Affecting Your Email Health

Hola email geeks,
 

How has April been treating you? We’ve been busy launching an email health report to help marketers analyze their email campaigns. In this edition of our newsletter too, we will throw some light on the least discussed factors that can impact your over email health.🤒
 

But before that, let’s figure out your watchlist.
 

Showtime 📺   

Trevor Sokraj, Founder of Divisional, will be joining us on our next Growth Chat on 20th April at 1:00 PM GMT. Join us for this fireside chat about how the growth function should work at an early-stage startup. 

4 surprising factors that are affecting your email health

via Mailmodo

# Picking colors that hamper readability and accessibility   

Choosing the right colors for your email design is more important than you think. A bad color contrast will not only lead to dismal aesthetic but poor readability too. For example, anybody would find grey text on white background difficult to read. 

In addition to that, the right colors also matter when it comes to making emails accessible to all. Today, emails are an indispensable part of everyone’s life and around 2.2 billion people across the globe are reported to be suffering from some kind of visual impairment.  

Many of them could be your subscribers too; what if your choice of color contrasts makes your emails inaccessible to them?
 

Similarly, dark mode compatibility is a factor that every email marketer must keep in mind while picking the background and foreground colors. 

Here’s what we recommend
1. Don’t go for lower color contrast for your background and foreground. The more the contrasts, the better for accessibility and readability.
2. Ensure that your CTAs and clickable links are also defined by an underline, or bold typography to make them accessible.
3. Don’t go overboard with too many colors. Pick one brighter color for CTA and a contrasting color for the rest of the text.

# Not choosing a dedicated PTR-Record of IP

Also known as reverse DNS lookup, PTR record is an important security protocol that matches domain names with IP addresses. Now, ISPs like Hotmail and iCloud require that the PTR record be dedicated; otherwise, the mail gets bounced and impacts your overall deliverability and email health.

Yet, many marketers overlook this and keep using a shared PTR record resulting in bounces that could have been avoided. 
 

Here’s what we recommend

1. Always prefer a dedicated PTR and remember that the PTR hostname must be a subdomain of the sender domain.

2. If it's a shared PTR record, try to maintain separate infrastructure for iCloud and Hotmail so that the emails are sent with a dedicated PTR to these ISPs   

# High latency in sending transactional emails

Imagine signing up for a product and not getting the OTP mail on time! Wouldn’t it be off-putting for you as a user? Similarly, your customers, too, do not expect such latency especially for receiving time-sensitive information like password reset, order confirmation, etc, and may end up getting dissatisfied with the overall customer experience due to delays in emails!

Moreover, not matching your audience's expectations in the case of user-triggered transactional emails can be a major blow to your domain reputation and email health. 
 

Here’s what we recommend
1. Try to maintain a separate pipeline or infrastructure for your transactional emails so that the promotional emails don’t affect them.
2. Shift to a  high-performing  ESP if you’re using an in-house email system.

3. Ensure your domain reputation and infrastructure are not blacklisted so that the recipient server doesn’t throttle the speed of the emails based on your reputation. 

#  Using URL shorteners
 

Of late, URL shorteners like bit.ly have become common in marketing practice. What marketers often overlook is the fact that many of them are blacklisted by ISPs and put your emails at risk of getting marked as spam. 

 Here’s what we recommend
1. Stop using URL shorteners. Nowadays, most ESPs have their own tracking domains that automatically mask your links and make monitoring easy.
2. If you’re using links to redirect users to complete an action, you could switch to interactive emails that help users take an action within an email. 
 

Our Favorite Excerpts from Twitter

What’s happening in the marketing verse

Do URL Shorteners affect Your Email deliverability?

This detailed article by easysendy discusses the reasons that make URL shorteners a bad idea for emails and what you can do instead to maintain good deliverability. 

^{How to Choose the Right Colors for Effective Email Marketing}

Read this blog by email on acid to understand color psychology and how it can drive better customer engagement, actions, and conversion when used carefully in an email. 

 6 Ways Marketers Are Using Interactive Emails To Win More Conversions

Interactive emails are a pandora's box of possibilities and this blog featured in Search Engine Journal covers each one of them with a real-world example and easy-to-implement solution.

When Content Impacts Deliverability

Your email copy has much more relevance than just engaging the subscriber; the words you choose also directly affect your inboxing and this article by Kickbox contains expert insights to help you understand the same. 

 Email Deliverability: What marketers need to know

Tune into this fireside chat with Lauren Meyer, the OG queen of deliverability, and hear her take a deep dive into what really matters when it comes to email deliverability. 

GIF of the month

Mailmodo Technologies Inc.

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