When sending emails, the million-dollar question is how you land in the inbox. What’s your deliverability score and, if needed, how can you improve it? For transactional emails in particular, it’s important to distinguish two important factors that have a huge impact on deliverability.

Transactional Emails deserve some attention

Transactional emails are an important component of your customer experience. Whether it’s an order confirmation or a password reset email, your customer must get it as quickly as possible. It’s a big part of your business so you cannot have them landing in spam.

On the other hand, we’ve noticed that anti-spam filters have examined the engagement rate to define your sender reputation. The better your contacts interact with your emails, the better your reputation score gets. This score will determine if your marketing email is classified as spam or not. Your transactional email enjoys a significant advantage in terms of deliverability on this.

Think about an email for password reset or shipping confirmation, the interaction rates – opens, clicks, CTR – should be higher than traditional marketing campaigns. 

Your advantages for deliverability come from these interactions. You should welcome transactional emails in your infrastructure, and feel free to create more templates based on app-triggered behaviors. These emails have really high engagement, and they will contribute to bringing your overall infrastructure deliverability upward.

Main causes for transactional email landing in SPAM

The causes of spam placements may vary from one company to another. One of the reasons may be a misalignment between your email messages and your customers’ expectations. It can be the case when, for example, your content or the frequency of your transactional emails are not relevant to your subscribers.

Transactional email may also be affected by mass marketing email if you use the same IP address or domain to send both marketing and transactional campaigns. If you get spam complaints or a low engagement on your regular marketing campaign, you may also face problems with your transactional email.

A dedicated IP address for your transactional messages could, in some cases, bypass this problem. Another fix could be to separate your traffic through different subdomains, and make sure that all the outlets are protected from spam contagion across the apex domain.

Finally, your email can be marked as spam by the email service if it looks like it. Let me explain it: if your email is not branded, contains only text, for email providers, it looks like spam. Moreover, if your clients don’t recognize you quickly they will report your message as spam. Things like adding your physical address are a one-off modification that could make a big difference.

If we had to sum up 2021 in one word for email deliverability, it would be transparency. So, never try to hide – it will not work and cost you a lot of money. Instead, become compliant and ensure that it’s easy to see it.

How do you get a good deliverability rate on your transactional emails?

To increase your deliverability, choose a highly reputable and specialized platform that doesn’t deal with spam or promotional emails.

Once you have decided and correctly configured your email platform (with email authentication, DKIM, SPF,… ), you have to assign one of your IP addresses to transactional email. It will allow you to control your IP reputation in both sections. You will not be affected by a drop in your domain reputation or an increase in the spam complaint rate.

Now, it’s time to talk about the content of your transactional email. To increase the deliverability rate, you should follow those few pieces of advice :

  • Be sure your transactional email can be read easily on mobile devices;
  • Make sure the branding matches your marketing emails so people recognize your emails;
  • Personalize your transactional email to increase engagement;
  • Your subject line should also be relevant and describe the content of your email;
  • Include plain text versions of all your transactional messages;
  • Include value-added content to get better engagement;
  • Allow subscribers to reply to your transactional email (don’t use noreply@-addresses!).

Increase deliverability of your transactional emails

To increase the delivery of your transactional email, you should start with the tips we saw in this article. With a great email infrastructure and these tips, you’re close to becoming an expert in deliverability.