4 Surprising Factors Affecting Your Email Health
1. Picking colors that hamper readability and accessibility
Choosing the right colors for your email design is more important than you think. A bad color contrast will lead to dismal aesthetic and poor readability. For example, anybody would find grey text on white background difficult to read.
In addition to that, the right colors also matter when it comes to making emails accessible to all. Today, emails are an indispensable part of everyone’s life, and around 2.2 billion people across the globe are reported to be suffering from some kind of visual impairment.
Many of them could be your subscribers, too; what if your choice of color contrasts makes your emails inaccessible to them?
Similarly, dark mode compatibility is a factor that every email marketer must keep in mind while picking the background and foreground colors.
💡 Here’s what I recommend
1. Don’t use lower color contrast for your background and foreground. The more contrasts, the better for accessibility and readability.
2. Ensure that your CTAs and clickable links are also defined by an underlined or bold typography to make them accessible.
3. Don’t go overboard with too many colors. Pick one brighter color for CTA and a contrasting color for the rest of the text.
2. Not choosing a dedicated PTR-Record of IP
Also known as reverse DNS lookup, the PTR record is an important security protocol that matches domain names with IP addresses. Now, ISPs like Hotmail and iCloud require that the PTR record be dedicated; otherwise, the mail gets bounced and impacts your overall deliverability and email health.
Yet, many marketers overlook this and keep using a shared PTR record resulting in bounces that could have been avoided.
💡 Here’s what I recommend
1. Always prefer a dedicated PTR, and remember that the PTR hostname must be a subdomain of the sender domain.
2. If it’s a shared PTR record, try to maintain separate infrastructure for iCloud and Hotmail so that the emails are sent with a dedicated PTR to these ISPs
3. High latency in sending transactional emails
Imagine signing up for a product and not getting the OTP mail on time! Wouldn’t it be off-putting for you as a user? Similarly, your customers do not expect such latency, especially for receiving time-sensitive information like password reset, order confirmation, etc. They may end up dissatisfied with the overall customer experience due to email delays!
Moreover, not matching your audience’s expectations in the case of user-triggered transactional emails can be a major blow to your domain reputation and email health.
💡 Here’s what I recommend
1. Try to maintain a separate pipeline or infrastructure for your transactional emails so that the promotional emails don’t affect them.
2. Shift to a high-performing ESP using an in-house email system.
3. Ensure your domain reputation and infrastructure are not blacklisted so that the recipient server doesn’t throttle the speed of the emails based on your reputation.
4. Using URL shorteners
Of late, URL shorteners like bit.ly have become common in marketing practice. Marketers often overlook that many of them are blacklisted by ISPs, putting your emails at risk of getting marked as spam.
💡 Here’s what I recommend
1. Stop using URL shorteners. Nowadays, most ESPs have their own tracking domains that automatically mask your links and make monitoring easy.
2. If you’re using links to redirect users to complete an action, you could switch to interactive emails that help users take action within an email.
