How Do You Test Email Deliverability

Today one of the most effective ways of marketing is certainly email marketing. It is now used widely by all the B2B marketers belonging not only to giant corps but also small businesses as well. This marketing channel is in trend right now because it sends the right message to the right users at the right time.

But executing it is not as easy as it sounds! To optimize, marketers have to perform the A/B testing method on the numerous elements of email marketing including email subject lines and the overall design of the email. 

Simply conducting the A/B test is not enough, marketers also have to test email address deliverability to ensure success.

What does it mean?

If your carefully composed email does not reach your recipients, all your hard work and creativity are ultimately going into vain. Email marketing is all about marketing your products and services by sending customized emails to your marketing persona aka customers.

But what if none of the emails you are creating reach your potential customers?

Yes, your emails might be going to your customer’s email address but instead of making their way to the inbox of the customer they are landing up in the junk.

Do any of us check the junk folder even once a month, let alone, regularly?

The answer as expected is a big NO. Therefore you need to conduct the following types of tests to ensure that your emails land up in the main inbox.

Seed list testing

A seed list is nothing but a set of email addresses in which you would send an email before actually sending the email to your potential client’s email addresses. That is why before delivering the actual email you need to have a seed list ready with you so that you can check the deliverability of your email across different email clients and the devices they use. This type of testing is done to determine whether ISP accepts your emails as many ISPs and networks consist of different layers of filtering. After performing this test by sending emails to your seed list you would need to determine whether the email landed in the inbox or the junk section.

Content filtering testing

As the name suggests, this type of testing is being performed to filter your emails abiding by certain content filters, like MessageLabs. This type of testing, like seed list testing, requires you to send the email to the seed list to check the efficiency of the content filtering and also to verify where the emails are landing in the mailbox.

Authentication testing

Authentication in the scenario of email marketing ensures that your email content is not forged. This type of testing is being conducted to check whether the emails you are writing are passing through the DKIM and SPF checks, which are email authentication technologies that help ISPS to safeguard against inbound spam. If you use these technologies then you are validating that you have complete rights to send emails by using the supplied domain along with IP address. If you add the SPF record to your domain then your job becomes easy as receiving servers like Google and even Yahoo can verify your emails for sender ID authentication.

You can think of these technologies like passport which would lead you to your recipient’s inbox.

IP and domain blacklist testing

If you are running email marketing for quite a long time then you would know that a ton of IP addresses gets registered in the spam database every day. You would have to perform this test to verify that your domain and IP address is, in fact, a component of the anti-spam database.

Get better statisticsFrom time to time you might notice that some email addresses become invalid and you receive bounces as the result. That’s not a good thing for your email marketing analytics as it influences the overall campaign rate. A great helper here will be a tool like the email verifier from Snov.io for reducing the number of emails that are not working anymore.