If you find that your email marketing platform is not whitelisting your communications then it’s imperative to set a review process.  Reviews can largely be done by the digital marketer but having a few trusted recipients on your email marketing list from outside your company is a valuable resource so that they can report their own experience with your email deliverability.

Once you have a review process and core group of recipients there are three tiers of deliverability that you’ll want to cover.  Starting from the smallest to the largest (or easiest to hardest):

Individual

The individuals receiving your email can greatly help deliverability by adding you as a trusted sender.  Most email systems allow them to do that by simply adding your email address to their contact list.  Sending a periodic email or an automated email on sign-up asking recipients to save your email as a contact can help keep your communications out of their SPAM box.

Company or Organization

Any company or organization that has their own URL likely have administrative settings set up on the email service to block SPAM.  Server administrators for that organization can whitelist your email address on their servers to ensure its delivered to individual email addresses that they host.  The biggest challenge in getting an organization to whitelist your emails is identifying the most suitable person.  Sending a request to individuals within the organization even if it’s from a personal email to whitelist your emails is often the simplest way to find the server admin that can whitelist your email marketing address.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs)

This is the most technically complex and potentially most damaging category. ISPs monitor complaints and if your email address receives too many complaints (rightly or wrongly) ISPs might begin to block your email messages.  This can happen on ISP email platforms (gmail, outlook.com, yahoo, etc.) but it can also filter downstream to organization servers or individual settings that receive your IP address as a problem sender.

The best advice is to be proactive and only send marketing communications to those that opt-in.  It’s also beneficial to minimize bounced emails by removing bad addresses from your list. If you still find that your communications are being blocked then you’ll need to identify which ISPs are blocking your messages and contact that individual service. This list is a little dated but provides a thorough listing of ISPs.

It’s best to have a proactive monitoring process but sometimes deliverability problems pop up without warning.  Be sure to review any reports of deliverability problems which often come from loyal recipients inquiring on why they are no longer receiving emails.

Immediately take action on these problems as your reputation scores will get shared across servers.  That means if one ISP or server lists you as a problem sender then any small flag on other servers will block your emails. Ignoring small deliverability problems can easily snowball to more widespread deliverability problems as your IP or URL is blacklisted.

Whitelisting can be a complex issue to monitor and time consuming to resolve but email marketing that doesn’t reach it’s intended recipient is a waste of time, money, and energy.  If your email marketing service is not taking these steps on your behalf then it’s critical to monitor your deliverability to ensure that the communications you craft will actually be seen by your intended audience.

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Email marketing can only be as good as its deliverability.  Whitelisting is a process of verifying with ISP’s, organizations, and individuals that your emails are valid communications to keep them out of SPAM folders and easily visible for your recipients. However, some email marketing platforms handle whitelisting deliverability where others place that responsibility on the digital marketers running the email campaign. It’s important to evaluate where the whitelisting responsibility falls so that your email marketing delivery rates remain high.

The first obvious step in avoiding SPAM folders is to truly run a permission based email campaign with valuable content that honors unsubscribes and filters out bouncing or inactive email addresses.  It’s impossible to be whitelisted if your recipients don’t want or don’t value the communications that you are sending. If permission-based campaign criteria aren’t being met, then it’s only a matter of time until your deliverability suffers.

Assuming you are running a responsible campaign, the question of whether your email marketing platform handles whitelisting for you or not comes down to a technical question: Are emails being sent from their servers or from yours? Platforms that send from their own servers almost always have a team dedicated to monitoring and improving delivery rates.  In fact, they have to because if their deliverability is not high they don’t have a product to sell. Platforms that integrate or embed on your website are probably using your server to send email.  In that case, it’s likely that they are not doing any whitelisting activity to maintain your deliverability other than processes to ensure CAN-SPAM law compliance.

When selecting an email marketing platform, technical questions like which server is sending the email are often way down the list of criteria or not present on it at all.  Platforms tend to focus more on contact management or message templating features rather than the nuts and bolts.  However, this is a technical element that digital marketers need to address and understand. 

How would a digital marketer know how a platform handles email deliverability?  The simple answer is to ask before migrating to a platform.  Unfortunately, email marketing platforms that don’t offer whitelisting sometimes give unclear or misleading answers to the question.   So here is a couple flags to watch for that might suggest you will be responsible for doing your own email whitelisting:

• Registrar updates – Any requests from the platform to update your website’s registrar settings is a strong indication that your server will be processing the email sends.
• Email Installation – Any software or significant email client (like outlook) changes often signifies that the platform will link to your email client which will then process emails though your server.

So, if the platform you want to use requires setup like this it’s a strong indicator that you will need to be executing your own whitelisting activities.  Does that mean it’s best to avoid these platforms? Not necessarily.

Typically it’s more robust platforms that integrate with your site that will use your email server as well.  They aren’t setting it up this way to make digital marketers life more difficult but rather to consolidate their marketing automation that is integrating with databases, websites, and/or email services. While maintaining whitelisting activities will take time and effort, the automation tools that become available can more than offset the added effort.

Our next post will cover whitelisting activities that digital marketers can execute if their email marketing platform does not do it for them.  Whether the platform handles it or not, it’s important to have a clear understanding of where the responsibility lies to ensure that your deliverability rates remain high.

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