Deliverability - optimising inbox placement

By bringing together our advanced infrastructure, specialist technical knowledge and leading technology and tools, we hope that e-shot™ is your best partner for best deliverability and inbox placements of your campaigns and communication. 

If you would like more information on any of the aspects covered in this document, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the team who will be more than happy to help or explain things further. 

What is email deliverability? 

Email deliverability is the ability of an email message to reach the intended recipient’s inbox, so it is also often referred to as ‘inbox placement’. There are a number of factors that affect deliverability including both technical management and infrastructure along with the content and build of the individual emails. 

Who is responsible? 

There are many factors determining good deliverability. Some are simple to achieve by following well-trodden best practices, legal requirements as well as technical specifications. Ultimately the sender is responsible for the success of their campaigns but your choice of ESP (email service provider) will undoubtedly help to increase your chances. Below we identify many of the contributing factors and explain their significance. For clarity and simplicity we have divided these to 3 main areas. While we expect you, our client, to take responsibility for the first and third areas (Contact list quality and content and design), we take the responsibility for the technology and infrastructure but more importantly, we have created many tools and elements of our service to help you achieve the best possible deliverability across the board. Last but not least is our expert advice and consultancy available to you through your account manager. 

How e-shot™ helps ensure your message hits the mark 

As you read through this document, we will highlight the different elements of good deliverability but mostly, we offer a transparent insight for you, our client, to understand how you can benefit not just from our many years of successful delivery of billions of emails across the world but also from all the tools that are available to you to constantly improve your engagement with your audience. 

What are the main contributing factors? 

Contact list quality 

Making sure your subscribers list is in tip top condition is something that all responsible marketers take very seriously. Organically building a healthy list of engaged contacts is every marketer’s dream. 

Sending infrastructure and reputation 

Robust and secure network capable of managing volumes, load balancing, throttling, ensuring authentication, reverse DNS, correct MX records, feedback loops, bounce handling, bounce reporting, spam filter checks, and Managing reputation. 

Engaging content and design 

Concise, compelling, well designed and correctly rendered on mobile devices. Follow best practice advice. Personalise your message and don’t include known ‘spam’ terms.  

Why is e-shot best placed to help? 

With over 15 years of experience in successfully delivering billions of emails around the globe, we have developed our own unique deliverability strategy. It is designed, not only to maximise inbox placement, but also to make sure that, while doing so, we protect your company’s most valuable asset, your brand. 

We successfully achieve this by using our unique combination of technology and methodology, together with essential tools and expert advice. We also ensure that your regular business email communications is never affected by your email marketing activity  

The 3 main contributing factors in more detail: 

Contact list quality:

• Use our email validation service to ensure subscribers’ list hygiene; 

• Use our sign up forms to engage with your web users; 

• Single sign up form integrates directly from your website; 

• WordPress plugin; 

• Double opt-in sign up form to ensure authentication of your subscribers 

• Full audit of when, how and where subscribers join; 

• Preference centre; 

• Manage profile for subscribers 

• Manage suppression list; 

• Global suppression list – known bounced email addresses across our accounts are automatically suppressed from your list without affecting your reputation; 

• Using AI technology to monitor clients’ sending behaviours; 

• We vigorously follow and enforce best practice, security and GDPR. 

Sending infrastructure and reputation: 

• Our robust and secure servers’ infrastructure (based in the UK); 

• Systems designed for high volume, high speed sends with load balancing and full audits. If your sends stopped for any reason, you will always be able to identify which part of the list was already delivered, preventing multiple copies to the same recipients; z e-shot™’s mailservers throttle sends to ISPs based on their acceptable volumes; 

• Protecting your identity and authentication; 

• Protecting your reputation through VESC and VSG; z Managing and monitoring authentication; 

• Correct MX records;

• Feedback loops set up to ensure correct bounce, complaints and error handling; 

• Bounce reporting; 

• Spam filter checks; 

• Black list monitoring; 

• Specialist analysis and reporting tools with e-shot™ Forensics; 

• Expert deliverability team. 

Engaging content and design

We cannot emphasise enough how important this is!

• Drag and drop tool to help simply create engaging, mobile responsive content and design; 

• The creation tools create optimised, responsive emails; 

• e-shot™’s Inbox Review – a test tool for your email rendering in multiple email clients; 

• e-shot™ Forensics tool to analyse your content before you send helps prevent using spam terms, review language choices and encouraging best practice through technology; 

• Split testing tools; 

• Use personalisation; 

• Expert advice and consultancy  

Read our complete Deliverability guide.