Email Best Practices

Last Updated: April 4th, 2022.

Please make sure to look at the updated date of this article. Email deliverability changes CONSTANTLY and in recent years it has exponentially gotten tighter for successful email delivery. This is a good thing, over 50% of email that flows through the web is spam so restricting/blocking and otherwise not seeing that email is a good thing!

Suggestion 1: Use your professional email!

Use your professional domain email. If you have basic email (IMAP or POP) then you will have just a simple email address to send and receive email from.

Using your professional email allows you to have a business presence in a users mailbox, and promotes YOUR brand, not “Gmail’s” or “Outlook.com’s” brand and reducing your change of having your email filtered as spam

You’re in control of the privacy of your email content and where you store it when you are hosting your email. Your web hosting provider will have varying rules & regulations that you can choose and control VS just sticking with the privacy settings in Gmail.

We recommend IMAP between the two, POP has been around since the 80s and there are a plethora of Cons to using the service. IMAP allows you to sync emails between multiple devices, your biggest contender with IMAP is server storage space. If you start running out of space or need more features like syncing contacts, calendar and files then your next step is to contact us and learn more about Office 365.

Suggestion 2: Use transactional email for your ECommerce

The one built into your website hosting is probably just fine but again, you want to make sure you are measuring key metrics to ensure your domain deliverability or “Email Sender Reputation” is at an all time high.

Transactional email services will be a fully external service with a separate connector called an SMTP Connector or an API Connector. The service providers service will be place where your email will flow out of, there are many service providers that can do this, we have a list of ones we have used in the past and recommend like PostMark and SMTP2GO and ones we don’t. Reach out to us if you have any questions.

Most providers will give you 30 day history and a TON of detail with the service, most Transactional services have ‘free’ tiers and you should be careful with them, as the free tiers will be lumped in with “everyone else”. Work with your web host or Managed Service Provider to help you get the best transactional service delivery for your Ecommerce Website.

A good Transactional Email Service will help you monitor the following things.

  1. Bounce Rate
  2. Spam Rate
  3. % Opens
  4. % Clicks

If the provider does not have a Full SSL SMTP or API connection, DO NOT USE THEM.

Suggestion 3: Use a separate email domain for marketing

Your email reputation runs off of your domain and its authenticated status in the web, IP based reputation is still valid but your domain holds a lot of weight now with rule changes and “Email Sender Reputation”

If you have a marketing list (some kind of Opt-in form on your website for marketing content) always have that run through a separate domain name. This is usually the opposite of your current domain (if your email is domain.ca, your marketing email may be domain.com). All our personalized communications for our organization runs through @wilkinsit.ca and all our system notifications, reports and other data runs through our @wilkinsit.com and our marketing domain is @wilkinsit.solutions. This segregation allows for a properly managed domain reputation. It’s a bit of work but the last thing you need is your invoices to your customers getting sent to junk because your domain reputation is down!

What if you don’t have another domain? You can choose to use the same domain but for about $30CAD/yr you can have another domain (or even cheaper if you are on a tight budget). If your marketing list is active customers and not ‘strangers’ its ok to temporarily use the same domain, but we don’t recommend it for a long period of time.

There are many marketing email services out there, like MailChimp, ConstantContact, HubSpot and countless others. You will want to choose a solution that fits your needs and it is COMPLETELY OK if those needs change, as a small business, you’re going to move along to other solutions as you evolve and grow.

Choose one and send all your marketing email, monthly newsletters and the like through that solution, it will help maintain your domain based reputation.

More information about Email Marketing

Solicitation of any kind must follow the rules!

It does not matter if it is your existing client list, or a list of already approved email recipients. You must follow email regulations for solicitations. Rules will vary by country but in Canada the general rules are

  1. You must have a unsubscribe option
  2. You must have your address information
  3. You must identify to the user that they have opted-in to these type of communications

Most marketing systems manage this for you effortlessly, never use your email to send solicitations to multiple people!

When in doubt, ask for permission

Have you not used your marketing list for a long time? Changing topics or doing something different with your list? It never hurts to re-ask for permission or send your list a pre-emptive email explaining some changes you are making.

This little bit of extra communication gives your list an opportunity to leave if they want or change the lists they are signed up for.

Ask yourself, would you be expecting this email?

Not sure if its a marketing email or not? Any solicitation in many email platforms is considered a marketing email. Additionally ask yourself this question.

Would I be expecting this email to come in? Do I typically receive these kinds of emails in this method?

This can be a hard question to answer, but if you think about receiving the email you are about to send, is it a surprise or a different type of content you normally send? Like a request for a review or a sale flyer from your personal email. If it is, then it might be classified as a marketing email, and you should follow our third suggestion above.

Determine how many people will get this email.

Is it ten or one hundred? five or five thousand? If you are sending a personal email that has similar content to a few dozen people, you can get away with using your main email (while we would suggest you still use a marketing system)

While the number of people you send is arbitrary, if you’re sending this to over a hundred people and many “free domain” systems like Hotmail/ Gmail/ outlook.com, then you should use a marketing system, so you follow the rules and do not wreck your email reputation!

Why did Wilkins IT stop allowing 3rd party email forwards?

This next section goes through some reasons why we no longer allow forwarding on our email servers

Read the blog post
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