Email Domains & Deliverability

What are email domains? What is email deliverability? How do they affect messages or campaigns sent from ArtCloud?

What is email deliverability & why is it important?

Email deliverability, or inbox placement, refers to the ability of your email message to arrive in a contact’s inbox. While most emails will ideally arrive in the contact’s inbox, they may wind up in the contact’s spam or junk folders instead. Some emails might even get blocked from ever making it to the contact’s email account. When emails successfully arrive in a contact's inbox, this will mark your email as having high deliverability. Having a high deliverability rate is important for your reputation as an email sender. The more emails that get delivered, the higher your deliverability rate and the better your reputation will develop.

If your emails are not delivered, your deliverability rate will go down and your reputation as a sender can be affected negatively.

After you send your message or campaign, the message will undergo various filter checks for spam content in your contact's email client. Filters check the validity of your message undergoes in its journey from your ArtCloud account to the recipients’ mailboxes, and it could be marked as spam even before ever making it to their email server. 

The Importance of Your Own Domain

Sending email messages or campaigns from free third-party email service providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, etc...) could cause your email or campaign to be marked for spam. Since these domains are free, it's easy for spammers to generate multiple email addresses with these domains. When an individual receives these random emails (like spam4you@aol.com), and they mark this address as spam, this declaration of "spam" has a negative affect on the domain, @aol.com.

When a @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @aol.com domain is listed as the sending address for a campaign sent to a large number of recipients, it can appear suspicious. Emails from privately-owned domain email addresses (@yourbusinessname.com) are less likely to get flagged as spam since there is less harm (marking the domain as spam) done on the domain. This can ensure better email deliverability and assist in improving your reputation as a sender.

Ways to Improve Your Email Deliverability

Email engagement also plays a vital role in sender reputation. This includes things like whether or not your email is opened, whether contacts are clicking on links in it, or whether people are unsubscribing or moving your campaign messages to their spam folders, etc...

Here are a few suggestions you can do to improve email engagement and increase the likelihood of making it to your client’s main Inbox:

• Be consistent with the volume of campaigns you send and when you send them. Switching your audience from 100 to 10,000 in a day will be suspicious.
• Never purchase an email mailing list online. Many of the times these lists will have spam traps that Internet Service Providers look for.
• Create relevant and aesthetic content for your audience. Use a mixture of images and text, and make sure you send recipients things you know that they are interested in so they are less likely to want to move your campaigns to spam or unsubscribe.
• Avoid spammy subject lines that contain a ton of capitalization and symbols. For example, the subject “SaVe $$$ With this DEAL!! New ART!!!!” will likely be marked as spam.
• Segment your audience into specialized target audiences. In ArtCloud, you can do this by using tags and artist interests of Contacts when creating your Audiences.

Reasons to Switch to a Privately Owned Domain 

In addition to improving email deliverability, there are other benefits of using a privately owned or business domain like:

• Better website or company engagement
• Improved brand awareness 
• Increased likelihood that people remember your email address and contact you
• Easier integration of other employee and department emails 

Changing your Email in ArtCloud

To change the email address associated with your ArtCloud account, navigate to the Profile tab of your Account Settings. Click on your profile icon at the bottom left of your screen. Next, select Account Settings. 

The Profile tab will be the first page you see in your Account Settings. From there click the Email box and enter your privately owned or business email. In order for this change to take effect, you will need to enter your Password and Confirm Password in the next fields.

Once you've adjusted the email address associated with your ArtCloud account, your new email will be listed in the Campaign builder under From Email. When you send an email campaign, select your privately owned or business email in the From Email drop-down menu. The email campaign will come from the email you select.

Once you send the email, the contact will see your @yourbusinessname.com private domain.