The Basics

Let's start at the beginning - To truly understand how to manage a successful email marketing campaign, you have to understand the fundamentals of the game. Today we're going to go over the key pieces of information that every good marketer needs to know about email marketing.

Email Deliverability

Deliverability is the overall measure of the success at which you get your campaign from your hands into your subscribers' inboxes. Your deliverability rates will factor in everything that is involved in email traffic - from bounces and spam issues to internet service providers (ISPs) and email throttling (which we'll get to more in a later post.)

But also bear in mind that your deliverability is effected by you, the sender, as much as these external factors. And this is one of the key pieces that we want to help you solve with this article series.

Sender Score

And you thought caring about grades was over when you finished school.

A sender score is like your credit score. Your email activity is ranked by a number between 0 and 100, and that number is basically your sender reputation, showing how your mailbox providers view your IP address.

Don't take this lightly; Your mailbox providers will factor in everything from spam complaints to you mailing invalid emails and industry blacklists. The more you turn a blind eye to your validation and sender score, the worse off you're going to be.

Email Validation

Alright so what exactly is this "email validation" thing, anyway? Simply put, validating your of email lists is checking each address one by one to ensure that a mail record exists for the domain, and even whether or not the email address can be routed.

Let's break it down; with email cleaning services, you can keep your Salesforce database up-to-date with automated monthly email validations and authentications including SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. We can then remove invalid email addresses from your database, helping you avoid spam filters and being blacklisted, which will improve your overall email marketing results. This also removes the risk of jeopardizing your sender reputation and will supercharge your inbox placement by avoiding inbox filters and improving your deliverability.

An Email Validation Horror Story

Imagine this: You're honed in on your workflow, sending out marketing automation emails every day to as many email addresses and individuals as you can find. Those cold emails are digital gold - After all, hitting up a high volume of potential clients gives you the best chance of scoring some leads, right?

But all of a sudden you get a phone call, and on the other end of the line is your company CEO.

"Have you been getting my emails? I think they're getting sent to your spam folder."

And that's when you start to feel yourself sweat with anxiety. How could this happen? What's going on?

You've destroyed your email reputation because you weren't paying attention to email validation. Instead, you were sending your pitches to tons of dead emails and invalid email addresses. Those emails aren’t getting opened, they’re getting trapped in spam filters and when it’s all said and done, your email reputation is shredded to pieces and your CEO’s notes to you are getting punted straight into your spam box.

Think it can't happen to you?

It happened to SalesHive founder Brendan Burnett. And that's why he created an innovative domain warming service designed to save email domain and improve your email marketing.

As email automation tools become a more central part of sales organizations, email servers are getting smarter and more active, and the importance of making sure you're not sending emails to invalid email addresses is ever-increasing.

The simple fact is, email reputation is very easy to tank and very hard to build.

Once you damage it, you can't call Google and say you're sorry. You're just out of luck.

But why end up in the gutter when there's a service like SalesHive's email warming on the market that will ensure your email reputation stays pristine and your CEO never calls to tell you to check your spam box?