Email Marketing Whitelisting Activities
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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