Think about it: a subscriber willingly hands over their email to get valuable information from you and they end up not getting it – it’s a lose-lose situation for everyone. 

Unfortunately, bounced emails are a common part of email marketing. It happens; people change their email addresses without notifying the mailing lists they’re on, and accounts stay untouched for years before they get disabled. 

But having a high email bounce rate can be detrimental to your overall email deliverability, which is why it’s important to not overlook it. Instead, if you work on improving it, you’ll increase opens and click throughs and ensure you have a healthy list of subscribers to regularly communicate with. 

Email Bounce Rate Definition – What Is It?  

If you’ve got questions like what is a hard bounce in email marketing? and how do I even calculate my bounce rate? you’re not alone. 

Your email bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that “bounce” back to you (a.k.a. they don’t get delivered). The lower the bounce rate the better, as this means that more emails than not are landing where they should. 

There’s a simple equation to work out your bounce rate as a percentage:

(# of bounces / # of delivered emails) x 100 = your email bounce rate

For example, if you send 2,000 emails and 10 bounce, you’d need to calculate 10 / 2000 x 100, giving you a bounce rate of 0.5%. 

There are two different kinds of email bounces:

• Soft email bounce:

A soft email bounce means temporary delivery problems, like when the recipient’s inbox is full or your email is too large.

• Hard email bounce

A hard email bounce describes a permanent delivery failure, like an email sent to an inactive or invalid email address, or an outdated domain. When an email hard bounces, it won’t ever reach the recipient.

The Reasons Emails Bounce

There are a number of reasons why emails bounce and it’s difficult to work out why an individual email didn’t reach its intended recipient. 

It might be because:

• The recipient no longer has access to the email account
• The email account has been inactive for a long period of time or has been deleted
• The email server is under maintenance
• The recipient’s email inbox is full 
• The recipient has put you on their “blocked” list 

Instead of getting stuck on why an email wasn’t delivered, it’s best to look at your bounce rate as a whole and work on improving that.

Why Your Email Bounce Rate is Important

Your email bounce rate can affect the overall delivery of all your emails. Consistently high bounce rate hurts your sender reputation.

The worse your reputation is, the more likely it is that your emails will get sent straight to the dreaded spam folder – even for recipients that actively open your emails and engage with you. 

When this happens, you’ll start to notice a decline in your engagement levels, including lower open rates, lower click through rates, and ultimately, lower conversion rate. 

As a result, you want to keep your email list as clean as possible, consisting only of email addresses that don’t bounce. This will ensure that the majority of your subscribers will see your emails in their inbox.

So what is an acceptable bounce rate? 

The average email bounce rate falls somewhere between 2-5% depending on the industry you’re in. Anything over the 5% benchmark should set alarm bells ringing and you should look into cleaning up your list or determining why your emails are bouncing. 

How to Reduce Your Email Bounce Rate 

If you’ve identified an above-average bounce rate or simply want to get yours down for optimal results, here are some ways you can reduce your email bounce rate.

1. Double Opt-Ins

Getting subscribers to double opt-in is a solid measure even on its own. It means you won’t be getting invalid or inactive emails addresses in your list.

A double opt-in works by sending email authentication to every new subscriber and only adds them to your list once they’ve clicked the confirm button.

This initial confirmation email has to reach them in order for them to confirm, which ensures that the address is correct and accepts emails. It’s best to use automation for double opt-ins to streamline contact list management. The best email service providers like Sendinblue encourage this practice because it increases the success rate of email campaigns and keeps mail servers healthy.

2. Clean Your List Regularly 

Over time, your email list will become populated with inactive accounts and problem recipients if you don’t clean it. Just like anything, a quick tidy up every now and again will keep your list healthy and active, with a low bounce rate. You’ll only be getting soft bounces when people’s inboxes are full.

Start by getting rid of inactive users and people who haven’t opened your emails in a while. You can also run a campaign to disengaged contacts, asking if they still want to receive your emails. Maybe they couldn’t be bothered to unsubscribe but you can do it for them if they don’t re-confirm.

Read: 5 Effective Email List Cleaning Tactics for Better Engagement

3. Make Sure Your Emails Aren’t Spammy

Stats show that more than 53% of global emails sent are spam. Your emails probably don’t fall into this percentage, but there are some key metrics that email providers use to identify spam and you might unconsciously be falling into them. 

To avoid the dreaded spam filter, don’t use images that are either too large or too small, or copy that will put the spam detector on red alert. Phrases to avoid like the plague include: 

• $$$
• Sale
• Clearance
• Act now!
• Big bucks
• Cash bonus
• Free offer
• Make money
• No catch

You get the gist. Think about what would signal spam to you in your own inbox and make sure you don’t use those terms and phrases in your email copy. Instead, check out these best practices for writing email subject lines.

4. Segment Your List

Segmenting your list means that subscribers only get information they want and need. As a result, they’re less likely to blacklist or mark you as spam. 

One of the most effective ways to segment is based on engagement: group together your most active subscribers and send them emails more frequently. They have shown that they welcome your emails with open arms and, the higher you can push your engagement rates, the better your email campaigns will perform overall. 

Then, you can try to re-engage inactive subscribers with winback emails, which can also decrease your bounce rate. 

Read our guide to segmentation in email marketing for more useful tips on segmenting your email list.

5. Regularly Show Up

We’ve all received an email from someone we don’t know (or rather, don’t remember), only to realize we signed up to their mailing list a long time ago and haven’t heard anything from them since. 

Instead of building an email list and then going dark, regularly show up in your subscribers’ inboxes. They’ll start to regularly open and engage with your emails. This will keep your subscriber list active, requiring little cleaning. 

6. Don’t Use Free Sender Domains 

It’s a business best practice to send your emails from an owned domain. That means not using an address from a free platform, like Gmail or Yahoo. 

Sending from your own domain (usually your website), like hello@yourbusiness.com, verifies you as a legitimate person or business and is less likely to hit the spam folder. 

7. A/B Test Emails

Some emails perform better than others. Test out key elements like your subject lines, email copy, and CTAs to determine which phrases and features your subscribers respond best to. 

A/B testing emails like this – where you send two different emails to two groups of subscribers and see which one performs best – allows you to measure and tweak what works and what doesn’t to encourage more subscriber engagement. 

8. Remove Hard Bounced Email Addresses From Your List

One thing you should definitely do in your regular list clean up is remove hard bounced email addresses from your list. There’s no point keeping them because they’re either incorrect or inactive, which means the emails you send will never reach them. 

Eliminating hard bounced emails as soon as they appear will keep your email bounce rate low and healthy. 

With Sendinblue, hard bounces are automatically blacklisted to avoid emails being sent to this contact again. This way you can maintain an active list and get the best results for your email marketing strategy.

Want to test-drive Sendinblue’s email marketing service? Our forever free plan lets you store unlimited contacts and send up to 300 emails/day.

9. Use a Signup Form With a Good Captcha System

A captcha system quickly identifies bots or spam accounts that sign up for your email list. Having one on your signup form will ensure that only real people who want to sign up to your list do so. 

Here’s how to create an email signup form for your website.

10. Make Your Opt-Ins Relevant

Usually, people subscribe to your email list by opting in to receive an incentive like an ebook, checklist, demo, or special offer that takes them one step closer to purchase. 

To make sure you get high-quality subscribers that will engage with your emails later, create opt-ins that are hyper-focused on your target audience. The more aligned the content is, the more likely they are to give you an active email address in the first place and continue to open your emails. 

See how the pros do it in these 20 newsletter signup examples to take inspiration from.

11. Ask Subscribers for Any Changes

Email addresses change. It’s very unlikely that you have the same email address now than you did at eighteen.

To make sure your list is full of active email accounts, ask your subscribers to let you know if anything changes, like when they get a new job and therefore a new email address, or if they update their details in any way.

With Sendinblue you can simply send your contacts an Update Profile Form.

This will help keep your list clean, healthy, and active, while encouraging your subscribers to participate and engage with you. 

It’s About Time You Looked at Your Email Bounce Rate

While often overlooked, your email bounce rate can dramatically affect email delivery. If it’s too high, it can be detrimental to your entire email marketing campaign and you’ll struggle to get the results you want.

Keep it low, and you’ll ensure your list is healthy and engaged. Follow the tips laid out above to reduce your bounce rate and ultimately encourage more email opens, more click throughs, and more sales.

The post 11 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Email Bounce Rate appeared first on Sendinblue.

What is email sender reputation?

Sender reputation refers to the reputation of your email sending IP address that signals to email inbox providers whether or not you’re a spammer. It’s based on factors such as the content quality, quality of contacts, and engagement levels of previous emails sent from your IP address.

Mailbox providers like Gmail use your IP reputation — also known as email sender reputation, IP score, or sender score — to determine whether or not your email should be delivered to the inbox. If you want to make sure your emails don’t get sent to your contacts’ spam folders, the first step is avoiding common mistakes that damage the reputation of your sending IP address.

Experienced email marketers know that it’s not just about getting the job done. It’s about getting the job done right the first time. You don’t want to invest time crafting a beautiful, well-designed email campaign, hit send, and then have it land in the spam folder of your subscribers. This won’t generate revenue and will cause you to do double the work.

If you’re struggling with these issues, it means you probably need to work on improving your email deliverability, or the ability of your emails to reach the inbox. One of the main factors in determining email deliverability is the sender reputation of the IP address you use to send emails.

How email providers assess sender reputation

Email providers use algorithms to monitor the behavior and assess the risk potential of every IP address delivering messages to their network. These programs take certain factors and metrics into account to evaluate sender reputation. These include:

• Quality of contacts to whom that IP address is sending messages
• Level of engagement recipients show for emails from that IP address (open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate, etc.)
• Sending volume trends
• Quality of content contained in the emails being sent by that IP address

Those are just a few examples among many other signals that email inbox providers look at when determining sender reputation and filtering for spam. Needless to say, you want to make sure the IP address you use to send emails has a good sender reputation.

One way to ensure a good sender reputation is to use a dedicated email marketing service like Sendinblue. We have a rigorous anti-spam policy in place and monitor sender reputation automatically to limit any potential deliverability issues. 

Try Sendinblue for free >>

2 Easy Ways to Check Your Email Sending IP Reputation

If you’re having deliverability issues, one of the first things you should investigate is your sender reputation. It’s also possible that you unknowingly sent emails in a way that is viewed as spammy by some email inbox providers. Or worse, maybe your IP has been put on an email blacklist.

Whatever the case, start by benchmarking where you are now. There are not many publicly available scores, but the tools below are a good starting point to measure your IP sender reputation.

1. Sender Score from Return Path

Return Path has come up with an email sender reputation metric called “sender score.” Your sender score is expressed as a number between 0 and 100, the higher the better.

Much like a credit score, the sender score of your IP address can be easy to damage and tough to improve. 

To put this in perspective, Return Path put together a 2019 Sender Score benchmark report, showing deliverability rates. Small changes in your score make big differences in your email deliverability. A score that drops from 83 down to 70 can see delivery rate decreasing by approximately 20%. This will lead to a huge loss of revenue.

To get a free assessment of your current Sender Score, just go over to SenderScore.org and plug in your IP address.

Just keep in mind that it’s just one company’s metric and not an industry standard. A lower sender score will have an impact on deliverability, but it’s not the sole indicator. Email services like Sendinblue have dedicated teams to maintain sender reputation and ensure deliverability for its clients. Thus, if you follow the best practices outlined later in this article, and use such a service, your email will land in the inbox every time.

2. Talos IP and Domain Reputation Center from Cisco

Talos Intelligence Group is part of Cisco and provides network security solutions for businesses. Similar to the previous two examples, Talos lets you look up your sender reputation by IP address for free on their website.

The results show you the IP reputation score for both web traffic and email of the IP address that you entered. Scores can be “Good,” “Neutral,” or “Poor.” There is also more detailed information about sending volume history and related sender IPs.

6 Common Mistakes Hurting Your Sender Reputation

Once you’ve checked your sender reputation using one or more of the methods mentioned above, you should know where your reputation stands with the email inbox providers.

If your IP sender reputation is lower than you would’ve hoped and you’re not sure why, it could be that you’re unintentionally sending the wrong signals to email providers by making common mistakes.

To help you avoid this moving forward, here are 6 common ways senders are damaging their sender reputation without even realizing it.

1. Collecting misspelled email addresses

It is so easy to collect invalid email addresses. On average 80% of invalid contact data is simply because of human error. Especially when people are using mobile devices.

People who respond to emails via mobile devices often have a funny “excuse my typo” phrase in their signature line. One of my favorites on this list is “Sent from a mobile device. Erroneous words are a feature, not a typo”. Let’s not forget about the viral autocorrect screenshots.

Source: runt-of-the-web

Sure, these things are funny, but when it comes to spending money to collect new leads and getting invalid results — there is nothing funny about that.

So how does this impact your sender reputation?

Hard bounces make up one of the largest portions of your sender reputation. If the email address you collected isn’t legit, email delivery is impossible. Most email service providers including Sendinblue will not tolerate a high hard bounce rate because you are damaging their IP reputation.

Read more: 11 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Email Bounce Rate

As a best practice, you should always set up a double opt-in authentication for new subscribers. Anyone who signs up receives an email asking them to click a link to confirm their subscription. This validation prevents misspelled addresses from being added to your email list.

You can also use a solution for real-time email verification to check the email address before you accept it into your marketing funnel. This way if the user has made an accidental typo they will see an error message. The user will now have a chance to correct their mistake before moving forward.

2. Using purchased email lists

Businesses often turn to data suppliers when they need new leads and new customers.

It sounds like an ‘easy choice’ because you will be able to quickly grow your list. However, the bad news is that you’re not growing your list organically. Working with data brokers will not help you improve your engagement rates and you shouldn’t buy email lists.

To have good email deliverability, and improve your sender reputation you need to have the users engage with your emails. This means they need to open and click the messages you send.

If you send to contacts you’ve acquired through a list broker, you will not have built up any trust with these users yet. What makes you think they’re going to engage? Open rates will most likely be abysmal and unsubscribe rates sky-high. Chances are they won’t, leaving you with a higher chance of being marked as spam.

Spam complaints are a big part of reducing your sender reputation. Each complaint you get is like sending a message directly to the internet service providers (ISPs) that their users do not trust your company. 

If you get too many spam complaints with a specific ISP, they can choose to just push all of your emails directly to the spam folder. Imagine if all your Yahoo recipients never see your message from an email blast because Yahoo has decided to put you in the spam folder.

Further reading: Deliverability 101: How do email spam filters work?

3. Not cleaning your email list

Why are you keeping old data on your email list? It’s only costing you more money to keep uninterested contacts there.

As an email marketer, it is your responsibility to regularly remove unengaged users from your list. Users who are not opening or clicking on your content can lead to bigger problems that will damage your sender reputation.

For example, if a user has abandoned their email account, they aren’t opening your emails. This will later create a hard bounce. They also might not be active with your email content because they already moved you into the spam folder without your knowledge.

Cleaning your list is something you should be doing on a quarterly basis (if not more frequently). If you don’t feel ready to take the leap and delete a good portion of your contacts, learn how you can segment your list to achieve similar benefits.

Even if you do segment your list, it’s highly likely you still have contacts you haven’t emailed in several months. If this is the case, you should at least do a quarterly database clean-up to identify dormant email addresses that might generate a hard bounce.

4. Sending poor quality content

Never compromise quality for quantity. If you slap together a poorly created email campaign, users are much more likely to complain and unsubscribe. We already covered how spam complaints damage your sender reputation, and poor content gives them a reason to complain.

Things to keep in mind when creating your email content:

• Don’t use a bait and switch subject line. Here’s how to write email subject lines.
• Do pay attention to the email preview text as well.
• Don’t oversell to your users. Check out these 5 best practices for email CTAs.
• Optimize your email templates for mobile. See where you can find free responsive email templates.
• Don’t use spam words in your content. Find out more about email copy here.
• Test all of your links.
• Format your content for readability (see email design best practices).

5. Sending emails inconsistently

This is often overlooked by email marketers, but your email frequency matters when it comes to calculating your sender reputation. 

You need some balance when creating your email campaign calendar. Email too often and you risk annoying your users and generating spam complaints. Email too little and you miss out on sales opportunities.

The bottom line is that if you don’t have a consistent schedule, and email random days and times of the week instead, your users may lose interest. Marketing Sherpa published a blog post around a study done by Return Path which claimed read rates declined as send frequency increased.

As a rule of thumb, it is best to stay focused. You want to set clear expectation with new subscribers up front. This way you can indicate how many times per week they should expect to hear from you. Here’s a study on the best time to send emails by industry.

Another thing you want to keep in mind when considering your volume frequency is how your subscriber list is growing. A quickly growing list or adding users in bulk to your ESP doesn’t look good. It give the appearance that you’re purchasing data and not following best practices.

6. Keeping spam traps on your email list

Spam traps threaten the good reputation of your email campaign. One rotten apple can bring down the whole tree.

The problem with traps is they can directly lead to getting blacklisted. Therefore, many marketers tend to jump ship from email platform to email platform because the black listings prevent their whole campaign from being delivered.

There are two main types of traps. Pristine traps are email addresses created by ESPs or blacklist organizers who post their email addresses across the web. Most of them get into your list because they were “scraped” or “harvested”. You might not directly be scraping data from the web, but you never know if one of your data suppliers has used these techniques.

The other type of trap is the recycled spam trap. These are email addresses that were once real but have been abandoned by the user. The ESP deactivates the account which should cause hard bounces for you so you remove the user from your list.

After the email address is inactive, the ESP reactivates the account many months later. If that account is still receiving emails from you, you will be blacklisted for not following best practices.

Boost Your Sender Reputation

In sum, here’s what you need to do to improve that sender reputation:

• Clean your list by regularly removing unengaged contacts
• Use double opt-in confirmation and/or an email verification tool to prevent misspelled addresses from winding up on your list
• Never buy contacts – always use lists that are 100% opt-in
• Stick to your promised frequency so subscribers know how many emails to expect – this reduces complaints
• Avoid spam trigger words and poor content – these will get flagged by spam filters

The post Email Sender Reputation Guide: How to Check Your Sender Score & Avoid Bad Sending Behavior appeared first on Sendinblue.

And with COVID-19 still a factor in our daily lives, consumers are using their emails more than ever. This trend explains why over 60% of consumers still prefer email communication to connect with their favorite brands.

But these emails can only lead to conversion if they reach the target consumers. If the email fails to deliver or ends up in the spam folder often, your return on investment will decrease significantly.

And this is where email deliverability comes in: you need a fool-proof authentication strategy to ensure your emails reach your consumers every time. Read on to discover what email authentication is and how your business can benefit from it.

But first, a quick reminder about email deliverability and why it’s so important.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is a metric that determines the probability of your email arriving at the subscriber’s inbox smoothly. This metric is valuable to marketers because only emails that make it to the inbox can be opened.

Like other email marketing metrics, some measurable factors affect email deliverability, including:

• Reputation: If your domain is trustworthy — that is, it has a high domain score — your email will fall into fewer blocklists and spam folders.
• Email content: ISPs consider spam-ish content, non-conventional headers, and suspicious links in emails when determining the quality of your email content.
• Authentication: The presence (or absence) of protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC determine if your domain and email content are authentic. We’ll discuss these protocols in detail later.

Why care about email deliverability?

Marketers often argue that email deliverability doesn’t really matter: once you send your email, who cares what the recipient does with it, right?

Absolutely wrong! This thought process is problematic and can stagnate your company’s growth.

Let’s explore why prioritizing email deliverability is essential.

1. Email deliverability positions your brand as a trustworthy entity by bolstering your reputation with email service providers (ESPs).
2. Email accounts for 40% of customer acquisition ahead of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
3. You can improve customer experience and loyalty by improving email deliverability.
4. Companies with high email deliverability enjoyed 4400% returns on investment over the past year.

If you don’t know how to authenticate your email, let’s take you through the process starting from the definition.

What is Email Authentication?

Email authentication refers to the process of verifying your domain and email addresses before you can send email content through an ESP. When an email passes this verification process, it becomes authenticated.

In the past, businesses could buy email lists and send generic email content to random people — which led to massive spam cases. 

To curb spam content in emails, anti-spam agencies and top companies — like the Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) and Yahoo — pooled resources to develop email authentication protocols. 

As a result, they developed several authentication methods to protect users and businesses from harmful content. 

Email Authentication Methods Explained

The standard SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server only receives and sends emails without any authentication. So, these SMTP servers need extra authentication standards to boost the security of mail transfers.

In the early days, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) served as the Rangers to the Wild West of the internet by introducing email protocols to prevent spam. 

Through their research and persistent efforts, we have come to enjoy the following email authentication methods:

SPF

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a record that tells the receiving server that the sender’s IP address and domain are authenticated. 

Source: Rejoiner

The SPF record that the server receives contains DNS TXT records linked to a specific domain (or range of addresses belonging to the same network).  

SPF came into existence in the early 2000s, making it the first widely recognized email authentication protocol.

Today, email senders without valid SPF records often go through a stringent secondary verification to determine their authenticity. And most of them end up in the spam folder.

Although SPF authentication can suffice sometimes, it doesn’t offer full protection from spoofing and other malicious email activity. You still need to update the records when you change ISPs.

DKIM

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) uses OpenDKIM to generate encrypted tokens required for validating the sending address on the recipient’s server. 

DKIM relies on two encryption keys — one public and one private — to determine if the original content has not changed during transmission. 

Source: Rejoiner 

The private key is accessible only to the domain’s owner and serves as a unique signature to verify the authenticity of outgoing messages.

Although DKIM provides a more secure protocol than SPF, they both work better together to protect the email sender and receiver. Consider them the ‘two-factor verification’ equivalent for email authentication.

DMARC

As the name suggests, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an authentication process that verifies the message source and generates reports about its conformance to rules. 

Source: B2C

DMARC functions in conjunction with SPF or DKIM to process requests sent to the receiving server. These requests inform the server of the action to take if the source domain is not authenticated. The DNS record for DMARC actions can be expressed as the following p-actions:

• p=none — The receiving server does nothing.
• p=reject — the receiving server rejects any mail that fails the authentication (SPF or DKIM).
• p=quarantine — the receiving server flags the unverified email for suspicious content and sends it to the spam folder.
• v — the receiving server checks DMARC.

Source: B2C

You can also configure DMARC to send feedback records containing information about authentication status to your preferred email address. The data from these constant updates helps you monitor your domain and prevent spoofing.

How Does Email Authentication Work?

The working principle of any authentication method varies, but in general, authentication follows a standard process. 

1. The authentication protocol verifies the domain and the sending address.
2. The domain owner adds the encryption keys and records to the DNS records.
3. The receiving server authenticates incoming messages based on the unique private key.
4. The receiving server decides to send, reject, or quarantine the message.

See this article for information about verifying a domain on Sendinblue.

Why You Should Always Start with Authentication 

From the issues discussed above, authentication sounds like a complicated process. So, why should your business spend time and resources to authenticate your domain and email address?

Prevents phishing

Your company’s emails go through SMTP Servers before they arrive at the recipient’s inbox. However, these servers are prone to attacks from malicious actors. One option is to set up a fake SMTP server to review and test your email campaigns before running them.

Source: B2C

Unfortunately, a phisher can mimic your domain or email address using advanced mail servers to bypass standard checks. 

But without the private key from the DMARC protocol, they cannot access the recipient server, which means the message will not be delivered.

Eventually, you can access the report to blocklist these malicious emails and protect your IP address.

Deters scammers

Scammers can pose as your company to defraud your customers or spread false information. 

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), there were nearly 800,000 online fraud cases, leading to financial losses of over $4.2 billion. And these were only the reported cases!

But how can you protect consumers from these scams?

Only email service providers that send authenticated emails to users. You should also make your PTR record available to the mail provider to verify your brand’s identity (as is the case for Sendinblue users on dedicated IPs).

By doing so, the receiving email server will flag incoming emails that don’t match your PTR record (and encryption keys) and keep them out of your consumers’ inboxes.

Boosts your brand reputation

Email authentication verifies your brand’s domain name and email address, thereby promoting them as reputable entities. With authentication protocols like DMARC in place, your consumers won’t receive phishing emails from ‘you’. As a result, they will view your brand as legit. 

Since every company relies on reputation to boost sales, you need to authenticate your email to validate your online presence.

Sets apart your brand

Figures from Oberlo show that 90% of marketers use email. These figures signify that the competition for consumers’ inboxes is fierce — and you don’t want to end up in the spam folder. 

Source: Oberlo

Therefore, email authentication can distinguish your brand from the ‘crowd’ and boost your reputation further.

Improves email deliverability

And it all comes down to this: deliverability. 

If you want your email to get to recipients without any hitch, you need email authentication protocols. Besides, ISPs and inbox providers gather reports about your email engagement and delivery — which they factor in when determining your brand reputation and domain score.

How to improve email deliverability

Now that you have discovered why you need to improve your brand’s email deliverability let’s explore ways to do it.

1. Optimize for mobile

According to Brafton, over 75% of consumers will not read your email if it is not mobile-friendly. Besides, over 40% of internet users browse the web using their smartphones. 

Source: EmailMonday

So, optimizing your emails’ mobile experience makes the content more deliverable and attracts the right attention from customers.

2. Clean your email list

Users often subscribe to your newsletter, which expresses permission to send them emails. Although these permissions are valid, inactive emails can harm your email deliverability. ESPs use spam traps to detect spammers. And if you don’t declutter your email list, you can fall into these traps.

3. Fine-tune the content

In the past, spammers used images to skate past text-based authentication protocols and spam filters. Coincidentally (and unfortunately), consumers digest visual information better than text.

And this presents a dilemma: should images accompany the text in email content?

If you want your email to reach more people, use images to ONLY supplement your email text. This way, spam filters (and consumers) will accept your email message.

4. Provide unsubscribe options

Sometimes, people get tired of receiving your newsletter. This is normal: you should give your consumers an option to unsubscribe without any hassle. 

If you don’t include the “Unsubscribe” option in the email body, your consumers might end up blocking your email address. As a result, your email deliverability score will plummet.

5. Use double opt-in

Users often sign up for newsletters without confirming their emails. So, you need a second layer of verification to filter out these opt-in emails. This approach helps you segment and filter the mailing list.

6. Avoid short URLs

Using URL shorteners is a major red flag in email marketing: it signifies that you are trying to hide something. Not only that, scammers are notorious for using shortened URLs to mask their actual domain.

So, use hyperlinked texts to include links to your email content. And if you must share the entire link, leave the original URL.

7. Personalize the text

Every email you send should contain personalized messages and clear CTA messages. Use a familiar conversational tone that resonates with the readers in the email content. By maintaining a consistent writing style, you also improve your email deliverability.

8. Authenticate your email

Sending confirmation emails from an unverified account harms your email deliverability. So, ensure to authenticate your email according to GDPR standards and other local internet protocols. 

Email Deliverability Starts with Authentication

With a better understanding of email deliverability and authentication, you should have all the information you need to configure successful email campaigns. 

Use authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to boost your email deliverability. Verify your domain names and DNS records to position your brand as reputable to mail service providers. 

Also, don’t forget the human factor. Use genuine subject lines and CTA messages in your email to increase engagement. Filter your email list to get rid of spam traps. And most importantly, update your authentication standards and study the feedback reports.

Till next time!

Andriy Zapisotskyi is a Growth Marketing Lead at Mailtrap, a product that helps people inspect and debug emails before sending them to real users. He has over 5 years of experience in the field of marketing & product.

The post Understanding Email Authentication Protocols: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC appeared first on Sendinblue.

Email deliverability. Even the term itself sounds quite technical. And it certainly has its complex aspects. But don’t worry. You can implement email deliverability best practices without any technical knowledge. 

We’ve broken this guide into two parts:

• Part 1 will bring you up to speed on what is email deliverability and how it works
• Part 2 lists 8 non-technical ways to increase your chances of inbox placement

Looking for more advanced insights into email deliverability? Download our free eBook.

Otherwise, let’s get down to basics.

Email Deliverability: What you need to know

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability successfully deliver emails to your contact’s inbox without being filtered out as spam by the email provider.

The Sendinblue Academy has an entire video explaining the concept of email deliverability. Check it out ?

What’s the difference between email deliverability and email delivery?

They might sound similar but these terms actually refer to two different things. 

Email delivery refers to whether or not an email is received by the server of a recipient’s email provider.

Email deliverability refers to where the email lands once it’s been received by the server (i.e. in the inbox or junk mail).

Why is email deliverability so important?

Because it’s a crucial factor for email marketing success. Poor deliverability equals even poorer results. You could even inflict long-term damage to your brand and email sender reputation.

What’s more, if your subscribers aren’t getting your emails, you can say goodbye to any return on investment from your email marketing software.

But my emails always land in the inbox, does deliverability still concern me? 

Yes! It’s still good to know how email deliverability works and best practices. This avoids any mistakes that could damage your deliverability down the line. Prevention is better than cure, and all that.  

What affects email deliverability?

Email deliverability is affected by a number of factors, including:

• Sender reputation:  How have your previous emails performed? Has your domain or IP behaved dubiously in the past?
• Email content: Does your email campaign look like spam? Are there spam trigger words in your email subject line or content?
• Technical aspects: Are your emails properly signed with the right domain and IP? Has the content been altered in any way?

How to test email deliverability

The easiest and most straightforward way to test email deliverability is to simply send campaigns and monitor the results.   

More advanced email marketers may consider using a seed list to test deliverability.

What’s a seed list?

A seed list is a list of test email addresses at different email providers (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.). The goal of such a list is to measure inbox placement and rendering for different email clients. 

Email on Acid offers a neat spam testing feature that lets you generate a unique seed list for each campaign.

How to fix email deliverability issues

We hate to break it to you but there’s no quick fix for email deliverability issues. You’ll need to repair your sender reputation to get back in the email providers’ good books. This takes time.

First stop: right your wrongs and dispel any bad practices. Example: if you were previously sending campaigns to unengaged or inactive contacts, this needs to stop. Only send to engaged, opt-in lists.

As your engagement improves, so too will your sender reputation.

Now , if you want to know exactly how to improve email deliverability and avoid the spam folder, here’s a list of concrete actions that you can take today.

8 Easy Email Deliverability Best Practices

These best practices apply to everyone sending marketing emails. No technical knowledge needed.

1. Remove non-existent email addresses   

Cleaning your email list is one of the most important things you can do as an email marketer.

While keeping old or unengaged contacts may seem like a good idea (or at least a good self-esteem booster), it can hurt your email engagement rates and your overall deliverability.

There are two types of non-existent email addresses:

1. Email addresses incorrectly entered by the subscriber
2. Inactive email addresses no longer being used

To avoid misspelled addresses, set up a double opt-in process. Before being added to the list, the subscriber will be sent an email with a link to confirm the email address. Double opt-in is highly recommended.

Inactive email addresses will produce a hard bounce. Hard bounces damage email deliverability. These need to go. 

Sendinblue makes the job easy, though. We automatically blacklist any addresses that produce a hard bounce. This means they won’t be able to receive any more emails from your account. 

You can see all of your hard bounces by filtering them in the contacts page in your account.

Another good reason to remove inactive emails is the threat of spam traps.

2. Remove unengaged subscribers

Got subscribers who haven’t opened emails in six months? Or even a year? Get rid.

Unengaged contacts hurt deliverability. They lower your campaign engagement rates, which ties back to your sender reputation with email providers.

There are a number of reasons a subscriber might become unengaged:

• Your emails don’t reach their inbox (they’re filtered into spam)
• The person is no longer interested in your business
• They receive too many emails and yours are lost in the mix

So, what can you do? Start by sending a reactivation email asking if they still want to hear from you. If they’re no longer interested or don’t respond, remove them.

How to easily remove unengaged contacts in Sendinblue

Sendinblue users can easily improve engagement rates by simply excluding unengaged contacts when sending an email. These are identified by a pre-defined segment. You’ll find the option in the campaign editor when selecting your contact list.

The pre-defined unengaged segment is perfect for beginners but you can always customize it according to your preferences. 

To edit the segment, click Contacts on the dashboard, then Settings. Hit Configure in the box ‘unengaged contacts’.

From there, you can define your own conditions for the segment.

This is a super easy way to protect your sender reputation and deliverability. Don’t have a Sendinblue account yet? Test-drive our free plan in just a couple of clicks.

3. Only send to opt-in contacts 

This one’s a no-brainer.

For many people, the inbox is a curated space. Unsolicited emails are seen as an invasion of privacy, and don’t go down well. 

Send a marketing email to someone who hasn’t opted in and it’ll probably get marked as spam.

Not only that, but you risk breaking data protection laws like the GDPR.

The bottom line: Only send to contacts that are 100% opt-in and never buy email lists.

4. Stick to your sign-up promise

Another easy one. Only send the kind of content your subscribers have opted in to receive.

Be clear on your email signup form about the type of emails you’ll be sending and the frequency. 

Use clear language on your opt-in forms so you don’t upset your contacts with unwanted emails. 

5. Avoid spam words in email content

When the email provider receives an email, it checks the subject line and content for spam words and phrases.

Did you know there are specific types of content that trigger the spam filter? When writing email copy, avoid the following:

• Writing in all caps
• Using too much punctuation (i.e. overuse of exclamation points)
• Using red font
• Overuse of spam words (free, cheap, bargain, $$$, bonus, urgent, don’t wait!, etc.)
• HTML errors

Take special care with subject lines

Your email subject line also affects deliverability.

When crafting subject lines, be sure to:

• Avoid click-bait and false promises. Sure, it might get someone to open the email, but it’ll also lead to frustration and loss of trust. This drives people to unsubscribe and report you as spam. All in all, a great way to kill your sender reputation.
• Make the subject line interesting, intriguing, and relevant. As mentioned above, you shouldn’t oversell your content. But, you should still make your subject line enticing. Check out our list of best email subject lines for inspiration.

5. Make sure the sender is easily recognized as you

When your email shows up in your customer’s inbox, you want to make sure they know it’s from you. You wouldn’t ring someone’s doorbell with a mask on, right? (unless it’s Halloween of course ? )

Jokes aside, you want your marketing emails to look professional.

Use your business website domain in the sender email address. This avoids any sketchy vibes and your contacts will take you more seriously.

When setting the sender name (the name that appears as the sender in the inbox), choose a name that includes your business name in it as well.

For example, I send our newsletter as “Jeff @ Sendinblue.” That way, recipients know that it’s coming from Sendinblue, but with the personal touch that comes with adding my name. You can also go with the classic “[Company] Team,” though this isn’t as personable.

If you use your normal first and last name, recipients won’t know it’s from you and they might just delete it straight away.

7. Send consistently

Consistency is another important factor for improving reader engagement with your email campaigns. Find the right timing and frequency helps by:

• Placing your email in readers’ inboxes at the time when they’re most active
• Creating expectations for your readers so they know when to look out for your new campaigns
• Finding the right time of day or day of the week to send emails may take some testing — every audience is different. But it will pay off in the end.

Both of those increase the likelihood that contacts will open and click on your emails. And remember, anything that improves engagement, improves deliverability as well.

Sendinblue’s Send Time Optimization feature eliminates any guesswork by choosing the right time based on previous engagement data. It’s available on our Premium plan. 

8. Make it easy to unsubscribe

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: you do NOT want to keep contacts in your list if they aren’t interested in your content. This will only hurt your engagement. 

Make it easy for them to unsubscribe if they’ve lost interest. Otherwise, they might get frustrated and just send you to spam. 

And by making it easy, we mean having a clearly visible unsubscribe link in your email footer.

Don’t hide the link. Also, one simple click is all it should take. Don’t ask people to sign in or jump through hoops. That’s just annoying.

All the better if your email is configured to include a list-unsubscribe header. This’ll show the unsubscribe link at the top of your email as well. It’s automatically set up on all Sendinblue campaigns.

Email using a list-unsubscribe header

You mightn’t think it, but the unsubscribe link is your friend. It’ll help you maintain an engaged email list which leads to better email deliverability.

Improve your email deliverability today

By now you should have a clearer picture of what affects email deliverability and how to make sure your emails reach the inbox.

Remember the key takeaways:

• Remove unengaged or inactive contacts
• Maximize meaningful engagement with your emails
• Only send messages to contacts who want to receive them

For more content like this, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter.

The post 8 of the Easiest Ways to Improve Email Deliverability [+ Free eBook] appeared first on Sendinblue.

If you’re an email marketer, you’ll know how important email deliverability is to the success of your campaigns. 

So, why is it important to know about email spam filters?

Understanding spam and how email spam filters work will give you a better chance at inbox placement. Because, let’s be honest, if your emails don’t make it to your contacts’ inbox, then you might as well not send any emails at all.

This knowledge will also come in handy when choosing an Email Service Provider (or ESP – that’s us by the way!). While there are some best practices a marketer should use to get past spam filters, a lot of the deliverability heavy lifting is done by the ESP. So naturally, you’d want to choose a good one.

Ready? Let’s begin with a quick lesson on spam.

What Is Spam? 

Before we can talk about spam filters, we have to understand spam itself. 

First came email. Then came spam. Then came spam filters. Then came email marketing service providers and inbox placement concerns.

Many people think that spam is equivalent to a scam. Scams can be many things, from the Nigerian Prince Scam to phishing emails posing as banks needing you to re-confirm your personal details, to advertisements for male enhancement pharmaceuticals. And email is just one of many forms – and perhaps the most common – that scams can take.

But while many scammers do send bucket loads of spam, spam and scams are two separate things.

Scam emails are malicious spam. But you don’t have to have nefarious intent to be a spammer.

What characteristics classify an email as spam?

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission defines spam as “unwanted commercial email” (UCE). And the Spamhaus Project, the biggest international nonprofit organization fighting spam, defines it as “unsolicited bulk email” (UBE). 

Although they differ slightly, what these definitions have in common is they stress that to be classified as spam, an email needs to meet two criteria:

1. It is unwanted or unsolicited. This means the recipient did not ask to get this email.
2. It is sent in bulk to many recipients (as opposed to just one or two). 

Many people will tell you that “spam is in the eye of the beholder” and “one person’s spam is another person’s ham.” That is absolutely correct.

A recipient defines what spam is, not the sender.

Occasionally recipients sign up for legitimate email marketing, and then they forget they signed up for it.

In that case, it’s, unfortunately, still a type of spam. It is unwanted. That’s why you always need to provide all recipients the option of unsubscribing from your list in every single email that you send. If a contact decides that your email is spam, they have a quick and easy way to stop receiving email from you.

As an email marketer, you don’t get to say if you’re sending spam or not, your contacts decide.

Why were email spam filters created? 

In the 1990s, the email industry was booming. The number of email users skyrocketed globally in the mid- to late-90s.

While everyone and their mothers were signing up for an email address, marketers began to go crazy over the potential of email marketing. But they weren’t all savvy enough to use consent-based marketing. 

Unsolicited emails flooded people’s inboxes, often causing them to overlook important messages and prevent all meaningful communication.

Naturally, people came up with ways to block these unwanted emails. And that is how anti-spam solutions were born.

With the advent of email filters came the idea of email deliverability, and the need for email service providers. Sending out messages in bulk usually signified to internet service providers (ISPs – like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) that you were a spammer. 

So email marketing services like Sendinblue were born: as a means to send legitimate permission-based email marketing campaigns.

Now that we’re all on the same page about what spam is and where the term came from, we’ll look at how ISPs keep out spam today.

The journey of an email: The spam filters it encounters

Despite its instantaneous nature, every single email you send has to complete a long journey from the sender to the recipient. 

It passes through multiple filters, which run authentication processes, as it travels through the internet from one server to the next.

In the case of email marketing, you are probably using an email service provider (ESP) like Sendinblue to send your email campaigns.

The email is passed to your ESP servers where the message transfer agent (MTA) does the work of sending the email out into the internet. From there it’s sent to servers owned by ISPs, also called inbox providers where it encounters anti-spam checks. 

Typically, when an email gets past spam filters, its journey goes a bit like this:

Step 1: Pressing send

You hit send and the message leaves the outbox.

Step 2: Leaving the MTA (Message Transfer Agent)

The message passes through the MTA’s outbound filters.

Before the message transfer agent (MTA) releases your email from your server or the ESP’s onto the internet, it must be checked by internal filters. If an ESP does not have internal filters set up to monitor and catch spam, then your ESP is not doing its job.

These internal checks ensure that no spammers are trying to make use of your ESP’s software and servers. Every ESP should run their own checks, and what constitutes those checks is usually proprietary and top secret.

Step 3: Traveling the internet

As tiny bits of data, the email passes from router to router on the internet where it gets mixed in with all the other billions of email messages sent around the globe every day.

Step 4: Getting through the gateway filter

The message is checked by your ISP’s gateway filter and either enters the server or is rejected.

This is the first email spam filter your message may encounter – an initial set of checks. If your email fails to pass the guards at this gate, it will not make it onto the ISP’s server.

This filter works on an SMTP basis, which stands for simple mail transfer protocol, and functions like a firewall for your email server.

It might decide to not let your message in for any number of reasons – e.g., a faulty/outdated recipient address or an overly large attachment. But other reputation reasons can come into play here, as well, such as a poor IP reputation or a blacklisting. (One way to quickly check your IP reputation for free is to figure out its sender score.)

The gateway filter also examines technical elements of the email’s header and any authentication it uses, such as DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. They prove to the ISP there is a good chance that your message is legitimate and it hasn’t been tampered with.

If your message does not pass the gateway filter, then it will be returned to you as a hard or soft bounce.

Another option that can occur in the gateway filter is graylisting. This is a spam protection mechanism wherein the message transfer agent (MTA) temporarily rejects all emails.

Step 5: Getting Sorted by Internal Spam Filters

The message passes through internal (hosted or on-premise) spam filters, which send it to the inbox, to the spam folder, (to a specific inbox tab) or reject it completely.

The email’s journey is not over yet. Everything covered up until here accounts for delivery rate.

But the last few steps of the journey before we get to inbox placement are still to come. There are more filters to pass. These internal filters can be either hosted or on-premise. These checks happen on the server or after the message is retrieved by a mail user agent (MUA).

Internal filters decide if a message lands in a spam folder or the regular inbox. A message can also be deleted or rejected at this point, too. This is also the place where a message can be sorted into various inbox tabs, such as Gmail has, promotional, social, etc. 

The complexity of internal spam filters

Note, too, that depending on how many layers of security make up a company’s anti-spam solution, it could also encounter more than one internal email filter here.

More specifically, this means that elements such as IP address reputation, blacklisting and sender reputation (this can include engagement metrics) play a role here, as well. Filters also scan content for suspicious links and wording.

There are many services offering hosted and on-premise spam filters, such as Spamhaus, SpamAssassin, Barracuda and Cloudmark, to name just a few. These filters have trade secrets for detecting spam, but they work with similar means as the gateway email filters, relying on the email’s header and content to give them information.

In B2B emailing, anti-spam solutions like those named above usually give companies control over how aggressively a spam filter behaves.

Most administrators choose a medium aggression level. Or they set the aggression to high and then have employees manually check the spam folder to save false positives.

Step 6: Passing Through the Black-Box Filter

Finally, you have the personal or black-box filters. These function at the inbox level and learn from a recipient’s previous choices. Here, the message either gets sorted into the inbox or into spam. 

They are almost always machine-learning filters, so they come to reflect their recipient’s preferences. They’re called black-box filters because no one outside your ISP can truly know what goes on inside them. Every recipient’s black-box filter will look different. It’s all up to the recipient.

If you haven’t opened a message from a newsletter for a while, your inbox might decide it’s spam, and start putting it there. If you “rescue” a sender from the spam filter, your spam filter will learn not to place it there again.

Step 7: Landing in the Inbox

The message has made it past the spam filters and arrived to its intended destination. Whether or not the recipient opens the message, however, is all up to you as a marketer!

There you have it – the typical journey of an email!

Every journey will, of course, be slightly different. Some smaller inbox providers might not even use a gateway filter. (Although that would be rare.)

How spam filters work: Techniques used

Spam filters look at a variety of factors to judge whether an email is spam. Most of these are technical (IP address source, authentication, domain address) and some of these are content-oriented (wording and URLs).

To get into the nitty-gritty of how spam filters work, here are some of the most common techniques:

Basic Spam Filter Techniques

• Header filtering (also known as reputation filtering): ensures the email header has not been tampered with and is from a secure source
• IP filtering: an important step of header filtering. This filters based on IP reputation. If an IP address is on a blacklist, this is where it is caught
• Sender filtering: uses internal engagement metrics to decide if the sender is reliable
• Content filtering: checks that the content of the email is not suspicious. 
• Word filtering: checks that the content of the email does not follow any current or familiar scamming vocabulary. Note: This is what most people think of when they think of spam filters, but wording actually plays only a small role in the larger scheme of filtering
• URL (domain) filtering: identifies links within the email message itself that are currently being used in widespread phishing campaigns, or that may be suspicious because they’ve been shortened

More Complex Spam Filter Techniques

• Rule-based filtering: works with user-created rules to score emails according to statistical matching and content. SpamAssassin, which is an open-source filter, works in this way. The user sets specific thresholds for spam scores that define what is spam, what could be spam, and what isn’t spam. Emails with lower spam scores will always land in the inbox, but the user can decide how low they have to be to land in the inbox. The user can also set a middle value, for example, anything scoring above 5, which will then be delivered to the spam folder. Finally, the user usually also determines a high score, for example, emails rating above 10, that then should be rejected or deleted
• Fingerprinting filtering: works with specific message identifiers that are compared to other messages with similar identifiers. The anti-spam provider CloudMark is known for developing this

The word filtering can be something of a misnomer because it is such a passive word. A spam filter does not work like a charcoal filter, put in place to passively strain out impurities. When it comes to email, filtering is an active process, involving many layers of checks and communication with other servers.

Deliverability: A top priority at Sendinblue

Now that you understand how spam filters work, you’ll feel more confident talking with potential ESPs about what they can do to ensure high deliverability for your email campaigns.

At Sendinblue, we take deliverability very seriously. We work hard to ensure the performance and reputation of our shared IPs. All emails are obliged to meet or exceed a set of baseline metrics to preserve our service quality for all Sendinblue customers.

Interested in Sendinblue? Open an account today and you can send up to 9000 emails a month for free. You’ll also be able to carry out deliverability tests on your campaigns before sending them.

For more content like this, sign up to our monthly newsletter and follow us on Twitter!

The post Deliverability 101: How do Email Spam Filters Work? appeared first on Sendinblue.

Are blacklists as bleak as they sound? How easy is it to get removed from one? This article will cover all you need to know about email blacklists.

My IP/domain has been blacklisted, how did this happen?

ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook use spam filters to decide whether an email is delivered, flagged as suspicious, or rejected entirely.

Getting your emails past spam filters is crucial in email marketing to prevent your work ending up in the junk folder or worse – on an email blacklist!

If you wind up on an email blacklist, this means your IP or domain has shown characteristics of engaging in spam-related activity.

The definition of spam varies according to different ISPs and blacklist vendors. While each blacklist has its own set of rules and policies to determine spam, here are some of the typical reasons for getting blacklisted:

• Recipient complaints
• Emails or IPs being used for fraudulent activities (malware, phishing, hacking, ransomware, etc.)
• IP supporting spam services like scrapers or bulletproof hosting
• Buying email lists 
• Getting caught in spam traps
• Using ISPs like Gmail or Outlook to send mass emails   
• Any other behavior considered suspicious (a high volume of hardbounces, too many emails sent within a certain period of time, technical standards not being met)

How does being on an email blacklist affect my business?

It’s likely that your email deliverability will take a hit. Deliverability here refers to the ability to land emails in a recipient’s inbox.

The impact to your email deliverability depends largely on the size and notoriety of the blacklist.

Let’s say your domain ends up on a small and relatively unknown blacklist. There’s a good chance the impact will be so minimal you won’t even notice it. This is the best case scenario.

On the other hand, if you’re on a blacklist used by a major email provider then you’re in trouble. In this case your emails are likely to be rejected before ever reaching the recipients. Naturally, this will be detrimental to your email marketing efforts. 

How to carry out an email blacklist check

You’ll know you’ve been blacklisted when your undelivered email generates an error message to inform you of the blacklisting.

If, however, you don’t receive any such message but notice a sudden drop in your delivery rates, it’s a good idea to do an email blacklist check.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to go to the websites of the most common blacklist vendors and check the blacklists directly. These sites usually have lookup tools with which you can enter the IP address or domain name and run a search. It’s that simple.

Here are some of the most common email blacklist providers:

• Spamhaus
• Microsoft
• Proofpoint
• Barracuda
• Cisco/Ironport
• Invaluement
• Spamcop
• SURBL

Another option is to use one of the many email blacklist checkers available online.

If you’re looking for a free email blacklist checker you can try out tools like MXToolbox or Ultratools.

What to do if your IP or domain name is on an email blacklist

There are three things you need to do when you find out you’re on an email blacklist:

1. Understand why this happened: Did you make changes to the email content? Were you emailing a new set of contacts? Was this part of a new email strategy?
2. Request blacklist removal
3. Take actions to prevent this from happening again

It’s essential that you review your email practices and make changes where necessary.

Remember, you’re on the blacklist because you were doing something wrong – it’s up to you to find it and fix it.

How to remove an IP address/domain from an email blacklist

Most of the blacklist vendors have information available on their websites about blacklist removal.

Delisting can be requested via a link or form. You just need to follow the necessary steps and put in place the recommended actions to improve your email marketing practices.

Ideally you want to establish new rules and practices for yourself so that you don’t appear on any more blacklists. Ever. ?

How to avoid ending up on a blacklist in the first place

Prevention is certainly better than cure when it comes to email blacklists.

It’s going to be much better for your email marketing performance and brand reputation if you abide by email deliverability best practices. This way you can minimize the blacklist risk entirely – while maximizing the impact of your email campaigns.

Here are some email marketing best practices to prevent you from being blacklisted:

Always obtain consent 

Only email contacts who have given their express permission for you to do so. For signups we strongly recommend implementing a double opt-in process to confirm the subscriber’s intent and ensure the address provided is valid.

Double opt-in is one sure way to protect yourself from spam traps (more on those below).

Keep your contact list up to date

Keep in mind that engagement has an impact on deliverability. If a contact hasn’t opened an email from you in six months, then it’s time to delete. Unengaged contacts are more likely to mark you as spam if you keep hounding them with emails (not cool).

Remove them along with any unsubscribes and inactive addresses as part of regular list cleaning.

Don’t send mass email from an ISP

Webmail providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) are designed for personal use so when a mass email is sent from one of them, it looks suspicious.

The best way to send and manage mass email campaigns is by using a dedicated email marketing service like Sendinblue.

Keep a close eye on campaign analytics

If you notice a sudden drop in your email open rates you can be sure that something’s up. Tracking campaign analytics closely will allow you to react quickly in the event of a deliverability issue or blacklisting.

To get real-time campaign updates outside of your ESP’s application you may want to consider setting up a webhook.

Check your sender reputation

Your sender reputation is one of the criteria used by ISPs to determine if you’re a bad sender. Your sender reputation depends on how your emails have performed in the past and whether your domain has been flagged for suspicious activity.

You should check up on it regularly using tools like Senderscore.

Avoid spam words in subject lines and email copy

Did you know that spam filters are triggered by certain words and phrases? Check out this list from Elegant Themes to know which ones to avoid.

And finally…never buy email lists!

Just think about it: Buying a list of dubiously sourced random email addresses of people who’ve probably never heard of you and definitely didn’t opt-in to receive your emails. When would that ever be a good idea?! We’ll shout it from the rooftops if we have to – don’t buy email lists! 

Not only is this more important than ever in light of the GDPR, you should also be aware that purchased contact lists are full of spam traps (also known as ‘spam honey-pots’).

A spam trap is an inactive email address that has been purposely left out in the open by ISPs and blacklist vendors. Because the address is inactive, the ISP or blacklist vendor knows that any email received is unsolicited – and this identifies the sender as spammer.

Conclusion

By now you should know a lot more about email blacklists and how they work.

Only send your marketing emails to contacts who actually want to hear from you and be sure the content is providing value in some way.

Signing up to a reputable email service provider is one of the best ways to manage emails and optimize your deliverability.

Why not take Sendinblue for a test-drive and see how it goes? Sign-up is quick and our free version lets you send 3000 emails per month (or 300 per day).

Open my free Sendinblue account >>

For more content like this and exclusive marketing tips, sign up to our monthly newsletter or follow us on Twitter!

The post Email Blacklists: How to Check, Get Removed, and Avoid appeared first on Sendinblue.

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Email may seem like a quaint relic from the early days of Ecommerce, but it’s still a vital part of how we communicate and conduct business. It’s the primary means of interoffice communications, and it works especially well as a part of your overall digital marketing campaign. 

But, your email subscriber list is only as good as its contents. Are you a business owner who indiscriminately collects email addresses that are irrelevant as far as marketing potential? Worse yet, do you buy email addresses in an attempt to build your contact list in a way that’s inorganic and unsustainable? 

Smart marketers know that it’s important to obtain valid email addresses to broaden their networks, reach consumers who will push their business forward, and increase their chances of converting leads. Email verification helps you do this. 

What is email verification, and how does it help you achieve those goals?

Email Verification Explained

Building a subscriber or contact list is essential for effective marketing and engagement. Whenever you subscribe to a website or open an online account, there’s a good chance that you’ll receive a message that contains a link asking you to verify your email address. In fact, many websites won’t complete your registration until you do. 

This is the type of verification you need if you conduct email marketing campaigns, depend on subscribers to support your blog, or you’re branding your company. But, list building isn’t the only advantage of verification. 

Email verification helps ensure that your contact list is accurate and error free, that the email addresses you have are active, and that they belong to the people you want to reach. It also keeps your emails from being flagged as spam, having your sender score reduced, or your IP address blocked and added to a blacklist. 

But, you don’t need to go to an outside verification service or use an app. All of this can be achieved by choosing a premium email marketing service with the built-in functionality to validate and manage all of your emails. 

The Benefits of Verifying Email Addresses

Spam filters can’t catch everything. There are approximately 154 million email scams launched every day. Of those, about 70 percent are phishing exploits. Email verification protects you from exploits and malicious attachments by checking out the authenticity of senders. Many domains and email addresses used by hackers or thieves are stolen from inactive accounts or were created recently. 

Sender scores are rated from 0 – 100 by analyzing your reliability and reputation, in part by hard bounce rates. A bad sender score can affect how your address is evaluated by spam filters and IP blockers. One of the main reasons for a sender score being reduced is the number of hard bounces your outgoing email receives. 

Hard bounces are caused by emails that are immediately returned as undeliverable because the recipient’s address doesn’t exist or the email account has been closed by the previous account holder. This can occur due to a typo or an intentional misdirection. 

According to research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, more than 80 percent of B2B marketers use email to keep their client base up to date and conduct outreach. Email verification helps refine your contact list so that you can segment leads according to where they are in the buying process. This provides you with actionable data that will weed out inactive subscribers and uninterested leads. The time saved can be spent closing rather than chasing cold leads. 

How Does Verification Work?

Different apps or services have their own way of doing things, but most go through a three-step process that looks like this:

1. Syntax check: This rules out the possibility of your email being returned unopened by looking for things like spaces or invalid characters.

2. Domain check: You won’t have to wonder if the email address at the host domain exists. The domain check will also tell you if the email address is registered and working.

3. Check for email ping: Ping checks are the most technological part of verification. This test sends a ping to the email address with an EHLO message to determine its active status.

The reasons for invalid email addresses are usually benign, including a person switching to a different job within their current company or moving to another company, switching to a new email provider, or opening different account with the same provider. You can also get a negative ping response if the domain is dead or temporarily down. 

Using an Email Service That Includes Domain Verification

If you engage in any sort of serious email marketing, there’s a good chance you already have an email marketing service to automate the process. Plenty of companies offer A/B testing and other client-focused marketing procedures. But, does your service include verification?

Leading email marketing services like SendInBlue do more than just manage campaign automation. There is a protocol for testing email deliverability and verification functions that include basic string validation to check syntax and a double opt-in process. Double opt-in confirms that recipients have a valid email address that’s active and that they want to receive communications from you. 

Using a double opt-in process goes a step beyond just having subscribers fill in a form. You’ll benefit from a cleaner contact list and better stats. It also ensures that you’re in compliance with government regulations like the US CAN-SPAM Act and the CASL anti-spam law in Canada. 

Besides that, you could opt to use other email verification services (such as Hunter’s Email Verifier), which can help you automate verification and make checks on multiple levels: format, domain information, the response from mail services, etc.

Lastly, there should be an automated process in place for weeding out bad or inactive contacts. This could include blacklisting for unsubscribers and hard bounces – something which Sendinblue does automatically. 

Why Can’t My Web Host Handle Email Duties?

Yes, you absolutely can skip the preceding services and use any of a handful of popular web hosts to mount an email marketing campaign. That’s your right as a human being, but we don’t recommend it. On the surface it seems like a great deal. They offer as many domain-associated emails as a person can use for free. Why pay monthly fees for these other services? 

Consider this. It’s like hiring a tree trimmer to cut your hair. Just because he has cutting tools doesn’t mean he’ll do a good job. A while back, web hosts got into the email game because they realized it was a great feature to offer to sell more hosting plans. The problem is they don’t play the email game as well as standalone email marketing and verification services.

If you’re just playing around, it’s okay to go with a web hosting company’s tacked on email services, but when you get serious and want your emails to actually be delivered at a high rate, well, you can figure out the rest. A word of caution, though, should you be incautious enough to dive down the rabbit hole of hosting providers. Avoid self-proclaimed “free” web hosts, as they often suffer from security vulnerabilities and frequent downtime.

Final Thoughts

Hanging on to dead or irrelevant email addresses clogs your contact list and does nothing to advance your causes or business interests. Using an email service with a comprehensive verification process built-in allows you to put your energy and money where they will do the most good. 

It’s one more tool that you can use to make your whole marketing and outreach plan leaner and more effective. You focus on building your business, and your email service will handle the rest.

The post Why Your Business Needs to Practice Email Verification appeared first on Sendinblue.

Despite what you may have heard, email marketing is not dead. In fact, 93 percent of B2B marketers still rely on email to distribute content, and 59 percent state that email marketing provides their biggest ROI.

What has changed is how email service filters evaluate and segment incoming messages.

Have you carefully refined and crafted your email marketing campaign only to land in spam folders again and again? It’s not your message, it’s your approach.

It’s not enough to craft a targeted message or send bulk mailings hoping to increase your reach. In fact, sending too many emails could get you blocked.

You need to keep up-to-date with email marketing trends and 2019 email marketing best practices to avoid being penalised by Google, email service providers, and your prospective customers.

Two of the biggest problems, which are among those that lead recipients to mistrust email marketers, are spam and phishing. Even if spam filtering is improving, they are still existing, and they are intentional.

But, you could be considered guilty of them by simple lack of awareness and knowledge.

What are Spam and Phishing?

Most people associate spam with high-volumes of junk mail or irrelevant posts.

However, email doesn’t have to clog someone’s inbox to be considered spam. It’s defined more generally as any unsolicited mail sent for the purposes of sales or marketing.

Actually, up to 85 percent of all emails received fit the definition of spam !

Problems with spam mail are the reason so many email services have added filtering software to sort junk.

It’s also the reason that white hat practices include opt-in forms and unsubscribe options for subscriptions and newsletters, and why there are new, stricter laws regarding data collection and retention.

Phishing, on the other hand, is a form of social engineering. It’s not limited to email, but it’s very common.

Through various means, phishing attacks are designed to manipulate, trick, or charm someone into revealing personal or sensitive information for the purposes of theft, fraud, or harassment.

The emails and URLs are often close to those of legitimate businesses, but the links included send recipients to a fake account or website, where the phisher can then get their passwords and other info.

They may even use a legitimate company’s logo as part of the email. In a report released by the Symantec corporation, it was revealed that 95 percent of all cyber attacks began with successful spear-phishing attempts.

Sendinblue, along with other top email marketing software services, strictly forbids users from engaging in spam or phishing of any kind. Not only is it against the terms of service, but it’s also illegal.

In short, spam is more annoying than malicious, but phishing is almost always done with criminal intent.

What are Spam Filters and How Do They Work?

Spam filters use software that scans and evaluates emails in an attempt to find characteristics that would label something as junk rather than legitimate correspondence.

It uses a list of criteria to determine an overall score; passing scores vary by email provider, so what’s okay to get your emails past one filter may not work on another.

The best route is to do everything you can to avoid landing in the spam folder to begin with. You can decrease the chance of that happening by understanding how spam filters work.

Spam filters evaluate:

Metadata: Does the address field contain only the recipient’s email address and not their name? Are you on their contact list? You can use the merge field to personalize email, make sure to tell recipients to add you to their contact list, and have your sending address authenticated.

Sender IP address: You may be using an IP address that had problems with spam or abuse in the past. You can avoid this by sending emails through a trusted service like MailChimp, which would go through the IP address on their servers.

Content and how it’s formatted: There are no set rules about what kind of content is considered suspicious to the client. Try to make sure that you emails are balanced and short, and avoid sending media, images, and attachments whenever possible. Include links to such content instead, and only to those who request them. You should also conduct A/B testing before each campaign to find problems before they affect your entire campaign.

Coding: Avoid sloppy or incomplete coding, too many tags, and coding pulled from word processing programs like MS Word.

What Are Phishing Filters and How Do They Work?

Phishing filters and anti-phishing toolbars are software that’s used to scan emails and websites for potentially malicious links and content.

Internet security vendors and internet browsers, such as Microsoft Internet 7.0, Opera, and Firefox, have built-in spam blockers and phishing filters.

These programs look for known phishing patterns, content, and IP addresses associated with past abuse, flagging those that meet the criteria or fit a certain pattern.

Blacklists are compiled by investigated websites or emails that are reported by recipients as phishing attempts, and by investigating suspicious websites.

Any mail originating from a suspect IP or email client is blocked by email client phishing filters before it lands in someone’s inbox.

You should also ask anyone who subscribes to your newsletter or fills out an opt-in form to verify their email before adding them to your mailing list.

Did You Land on the Blacklist? How to Get Yourself Removed

Even innocent people can be blacklisted.

But, your IP address is more likely to end up on a blacklist if you send email through a spam trap account or rack up a high number of complaints.

Spam traps are abandoned or registered but unused email accounts that are picked up and used by someone who is not the legitimate registrar.

The first thing you should do is find out if your IP address is on a blacklist by checking here or here, and other Domain Name System Blacklists (DNSBL) websites.

Once you’ve determined that your IP address is blocked or on a blacklist at a DNSBL website, follow the instruction provided by that website to remove it.

Each website has their own procedure, but being proactive and reaching out first will help your case.

You can avoid ending up on these lists by following white hat emailing practices and using an online reputation management service to monitor your brand.

Can a VPN Solve the Spam Problem? Not really…

Privacy is one of the biggest issues facing consumers and business owners.

New regulations regarding data collection and retention have made traditional practices like list building and customer outreach harder for marketers.

Normally, using a virtual private network (VPN) is the go-to for protecting privacy. But, having a VPN may actually increase the chances that your emails are flagged and sent into the spam folder.

The list of IP addresses used by VPNs is only so long, and large ESPs like Gmail, as well as content providers like Netflix and HBO, maintain and track a database of IPs used by popular VPNs.

A VPN might also raise a flag when sending email via the Send Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is assigned to email accounts by many providers. It’s a common issue with those who use email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and others.

There are a variety of reasons that your outgoing mail might be blocked by a VPN. One is the increase in mobile computing. Many hotels use VPNs to protect their own networks and those of their guests by using virtual services on guest WiFi networks.

VPN networks often use servers that are out of the area, and hotels block these by default. Another reason is that high-quality VPN service providers have a strict no-log policy. This forces them to block outgoing emails that could be considered spam.

You can get around these issues by using a reputable webmail service to handle your email campaigns. These aren’t blocked by most major VPN services. They also have their own built-in security and anti-spam features, which will bolster your security.

Reach Your Target Market by Avoiding Spam Filters

Smart business owners and marketers will continue to incorporate email marketing as a prominent plank in their overall marketing platform.

To stay out of filters and make sure that your email hits its mark, only use white hat tactics for constructing your emails and choose a reputable email marketing software.

Why not try Sendinblue ? It’s free up to 9 000 emails / months !

The post How to Get Your Email Campaign Past the Spam Filters appeared first on Sendinblue.

If you’ve been around email marketing field, then you’ve probably heard some discussion around the topic of email deliverability (a.k.a. The ability of your emails to end up in your contact’s inbox rather than the spam folder). And it’s tough to have a discussion about email deliverability without talking about sender IP addresses.

Many email marketing services allow you to choose between using a shared IP address and a dedicated IP address to send your emails. This decision is one of the big debates in email marketing when it comes to deliverability.

If you’re stuck deciding between the two, or you just want to know a bit more about the subject of dedicated IP addresses for email marketing, this article is for you!

Why does IP address matter for email marketing?

For those unfamiliar, an IP address (i.e. Internet Protocol address) is a numerical identifier assigned to a network-connected device (e.g. a laptop, cell phone, or server) that is used to facilitate the sending and receiving of information over the internet using the TCP/IP communication protocol. This also includes the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), which is the protocol used to send emails between different SMTP servers.

One of the main factors that email inbox providers like Gmail use to determine the quality of an incoming email is the sender reputation of the IP address from which the email originated. In other words, your IP reputation is key in making sure you have good email deliverability.

What’s the difference between a shared and dedicated IP?

As mentioned above, many email marketing software tools let you choose between a shared IP and a dedicated IP for sending your emails… But what does that mean exactly?

• Shared IP: You send emails from a server that is also sending emails for other users. The IP reputation is therefore determined based on an aggregate look at all of the sending activity from all users.
• Dedicated IP: You are the only sender on your IP, meaning the reputation is determined solely on your sending behavior.

Although it might seem like dedicated IP is always the best option, that’s not actually the case. For low-volume senders, it might not be worth the pain because dedicated IPs require a fair amount of work to set up. You also have to be very careful when you first start sending since your dedicated IP has no previous history or reputation with email inbox providers.

This warming up process for dedicated IPs is essential if you want to ensure that you stay in the good graces of email clients receiving your messages. Learn more about warming up a dedicated IP from our tutorial on the topic.

Meanwhile, email marketing service providers like Sendinblue usually work very hard to manage the reputation of their shared IP addresses. That means monitoring the performance of all users and making sure they meet minimum standards that prevent negative effects on the deliverability for others.

For many email senders, it might be better to forego the hassle of setting up a dedicated IP address and just stick with a shared IP.

When should you choose a dedicated IP address for email marketing?

Shared IPs for sending emails may be easier for many, but sometimes they just don’t cut it. If you have more advanced needs.

The main reasons that you would need to use a dedicated IP address for sending your emails include:

• You consistently send a high volume of emails
• You want to take full control of your sender reputation and deliverability
• You want to completely associate your emails with your domain rather than that of your email marketing service provider

The first on the list is the most common reason for using a dedicated IP address to send emails. That’s because email clients like Gmail and Yahoo are super aggressive about monitoring incoming messages, and you need to send a lot of emails consistently if you want to build up enough credit to become a trusted sender with them.

Luckily, if you’re a high-volume sender using Sendinblue you get the option to purchase a dedicated IP so you can start owning your own deliverability.

Ready to start sending? Sign up for Sendinblue today or check out our pricing page for more information!

The post What is a ‘Dedicated IP’ for Email Marketing? appeared first on Sendinblue.

That’s right, through email.

So long as your small or mid-sized business has an online presence, you are a prime target for cybercriminals. Even if your business does not have all of the resources as a major corporation, you still do have valuable customer and business data that cybercriminals can use for identity theft crimes.

If you’re still not convinced that your business is truly at risk, from 2016 to 2017, the total number of small businesses that were the victims of a cyberattack rose from 55% to 61%.

That’s an astonishing figure, just to think that currently three out of every five small businesses with an online presence, and that figure has only continued to grow.

Since email is often the place where hackers will attempt to locate and steal your data first, it’s important that you take the necessary steps to secure your email against attack.

Here are the top email security tips for SMBs:

1. Encrypt Your Emails

Guess how many email users there are in the world?

Over two and a half billion.

As a result, it’s easy to imagine how many emails are sent every day, and it’s also easy to see how vulnerable your email can be to hacking.

Every day, almost half a trillion spam messages are sent, and many of those messages contain viruses that are designed to infect either a network or a computer.

To help protect yourself against viruses and other email attacks, you will need to encrypt your emails.

Email encryption simply protects your emails from being read by anyone other than the intended recipients. This is accomplished by taking your email message and applying a coding scheme to scramble the message into an unreadable format while it’s being transmitted.

A public key, shared with everyone, is used to encrypt the messages. A private key is used to decrypt, and is only private to the sender and the designated recipients.

There are a number of strategies you can use to encrypt your emails as well, but one of the most common is the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) approach.

With this method, the message is compressed after it has been encrypted, allowing you to boost security and save disk space simultaneously. The PGP then creates a session key, which is sent with the encrypted text. The recipient then uses a private key to retrieve the session key and decrypt the code.

2. Utilize Multi-Factor Authentication

Setting strong passwords for your business email accounts and storing and changing those passwords often with the aid of a password managing tool, is without question one of the security measures that every online business should be taking.

Unfortunately, it’s not just enough to protect your email accounts against certain hackers. This is because once the password is cracked, the hacker will then have unrestricted access to your entire email account, and the data within it.

This is why setting up a multi-factor, or at least a two-factor, authentication to your email account is absolutely necessary. This way, even if a hacker is able to crack your password with brute force using specialized hacking software, they still won’t be able to gain access to your email account.

You’ve probably used two-factor authentication, abbreviated as 2FA, before. After typing in the correct password and username, you also have to plug in a PIN code or something similar that is generated on an app on your mobile device. This extra layer of email security is vital to the safety of your company data.

3. Secure Your Wi-Fi Network

There’s a very simple policy that you should follow in regards to Wi-Fi with your business: never allow any business email accounts to be opened by yourself or your employees at a public location (restaurants, libraries, airports, data center computers, coffee shops, etc.)

Furthermore, you should also make it a policy that your employees are not allowed to access their business email accounts from unsecured devices as well.

Why is this so important? Simple: public Wi-Fi hotspots are prime targets for hackers for keystroke logging, or where the recorded keys being struck on a keyboard are covertly recorded in addition to other hacking attempts as well.

In the event that you need to use a secured device at a public Wi-Fi hotspot, the safest course of action to take will be to use a trusted VPN system in order to connect to the internet.

Now of course, you might be wondering, ‘how can I secure my Wi-Fi network at home or in the office?’

Well, there are a number of different actions you can take here: you can change your admin username and password on a consistently regular basis (at least once a week), disable any and all guest networks, and activate encryption.

To be extra safe, you can also disable your router when not in use as well.

4. Train Your Employees

Last but not least, it will be absolutely necessary for you to train your employees on the basics of email security and other preventative measures to prevent hacking.

You also need to teach your employees about the most common hacking methods that are used as well.

For instance, they may receive an email from what appears to be a department at your business (such as the IT department) requesting a password change.

The employee then opens the link in the email and provides their username and password, only to later realize that they’ve just fallen victim to a phishing scam.

Another hacking method that employees should be aware of is a man in the middle attack when opening their business email account on an unsecured network while traveling or working remotely. It’s possible that this network has already been hacked, meaning that the hackers have access to login and account information if your employee connects to the network and submits sensitive information through a form (such as those on an email login page).

One final hacking method that you should warn employees about is the possibility of opening malware contained in an attachment from a contact outside of their contact list. This malware could corrupt your network or provide an access point for hackers to steal your information or hijack your network for other nefarious behavior. In fact, 1 out of every 131 emails contains malware in it.

It’s absolutely essential that you teach each of your employees about the different kinds of hacking techniques that can put your business and sensitive data at risk.

5. Configure your email authentication protocols

In addition to securing your own network, you also need to make sure that bad actors can’t hijack your business domain for the purposes of phishing or spam.

A common technique for hackers to steal other people’s personal information is to pose as a legitimate business in the inbox in order to get readers to unknowingly divulge sensitive data. As mentioned above, this technique is known as phishing, and you certainly don’t want hackers using your business name to send phishing emails to your customers or other people on the internet.

Luckily, there are technical measures that you can take to prevent bad actors from using your domain for sending phishing or spam emails. All you need to do is set up your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication protocols.

These protocols allow you to communicate to email inbox providers which sending IP addresses are authorized to send emails using your domain. So, if a hacker tries to pose as you in the inbox, email providers will know that it’s not you and send the message straight to spam. Luckily, most SMTP server providers allow you to configure these protocols very easily.

Conclusion

To conclude, taking the above kinds of steps to protect your business email accounts against hackers and cybercriminals must be a top priority for any business.

Failing to do so could potentially allow hackers to steal not only sensitive information about your business, but also personal information entrusted to you by your customers. This data can then potentially be used for identity theft purposes.

If word gets out that your customer data has been compromised, it will result in negative publicity for your business and potentially even lawsuits. But most importantly, it will erode or completely diminish your customers’ trust in your business, which is a requirement if you want to achieve sustainable growth.

Fortunately, even though business email accounts may be prime targets for hackers, you can significantly reduce the chances that your email accounts will be hacked or compromised by taking each of the above steps that we have just covered in this article.

The post 5 Critical Email Security Tips For SMBs appeared first on Sendinblue.