06 Aug Increase Your Email Open Rates with One Simple Hack
Email marketing is one of the top avenues that businesses use to reach their clients, but it can be extremely frustrating when you see a low open rate after a low open rate. There is a simple hack that will help you increase your email open rates.
We recently had a client contact us because they were seeing low open rates for their email marketing. They wanting to see if we could find a way to increase their email open rates. We were able to determine that a large number of their Constant Contact (email marketing) emails delivered to recipients’ junk or spam folders and not to their inbox folders. A deeper dive into the setup revealed the client was sending out emails as their domain and not via Constant Contacts servers. While this is a legitimate use of the service, email servers were interpreting this as our client “spoofing” the sending of emails. Who they said they were was not matching what email servers were seeing.
The way to prevent email servers from mishandling email marketing emails and causing low open rates is by implementing a simple SPF record in your public-facing DNS. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and it allows a domain to publicly state who is allowed to send an email on its behalf. While most clients manage DNS internally for machine and server access, this particular DNS entry is handled by your domain name registrar; think GoDaddy or Network Solutions.
For this specific client, the SPF entry simply needed to be “Include:spf.constantcontact.com.” This record tells the world that Constant Contact is allowed to send an email on behalf of the client. Now that the email marketing vendor has been “registered”, email servers correctly interpret the email as coming from the client.
This means no more misdirection into junk or spam folders. Our client immediately saw a huge increase in their open rates for their email marketing campaigns. You may not use Constant Contact, but the principle is the same across all email marketing providers. If you want to have a higher deliverable rate as well as a higher open rate, you need to validate your email marketing vendor using the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record.
At Abacus Technologies, we have experience setting up these records for clients, and we would love to help you set up your SPF record, so you can increase your email open rates. Don’t let another email marketing blast go out without setting up your SPF record today.