Help! My Email Broadcasts Aren’t Getting Delivered!

In this first part of our blogs on email delivery we look at the importance of the SPF record and how it impacts the reputation of your IP address with the ESPs.

There are a couple of easy ways to improve your email delivery rates so that your email messages have a better chance of being delivered into a customer’s inbox. One of them is an SPF record. SPF is a hot topic and is very important if you use email marketing as your primary way to communicate with customers. Creating SPF records helps mail servers validate email coming from you.

SPF is a base requirement in email delivery and acts as a digital signature between your email sending domain and the broadcast IP that your emails get delivered through.

So what is SPF?

A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a DNS record that identifies specific mail servers that are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. Adding an SPF record to your domain name's TXT entry, while not required, will help to improve email delivery rates by reducing the chance of the emails you send being seen as spam. It can also help prevent others from sending spam and using your domain name.

SPF records play a vital part in Gmail’s and Hotmail’s spam filtering algorithms. Not all email systems look at SPF but these do. Without properly created SPF records the chance of your messages getting marked as spam increases and your delivery rates may significantly drop.

The proof is in the pudding...

To prove that an SPF record really does make a difference in delivery and read rates we have conducted research in our own customer base. We compared those that do and do not have an SPF record set up. We looked at emails that have been sent to more than 50 contacts during a 9 month period. The results of our research are below.

By having an SPF record, email read rates increased by 6.27%, clearly a massive impact whatever your database size.

When it comes to email delivery rates, the presence of an SPF record led to a 1.17% increase in delivery rates. If you have a database of 100,000, this would mean an extra 1,170 people were delivered your latest email.

Summary

SPF is a necessity if you are serious about leveraging the most from your email campaigns. Remember reputation, reputation, reputation. The better yours is the better your ROI will be, and SPF plays a big part.

For more information on SPF or to get a free email evaluation for your business get in touch here.