How to improve the deliverability of your email pitches

Want to make sure your pitches reach those journos? Here are a few things you can do to improve the deliverability of your emails (and keep out of spam!)

The most beautifully crafted pitch email in the world isn’t worth a thing if your message doesn’t reach its recipient.

That’s how we approach email deliverability. There are steps that you can take, too, the most important of which is to build a good reputation by following certain email best practices (i.e. don’t spam your contacts!)

• Follow the rules of the game. Do not send emails to addresses unless you have permission to. ISPs will often set up spam-catcher addresses, which look like ordinary email addresses, in order to lure spammers. Once you send an email to that address, your IP will be blacklisted.
• Keep your email list clean. Regularly filter out and remove bounced email addresses from your email list. Sending to a lot of invalid addresses is marked as suspicious behavior by ISPs.
• Keep your unsubscribed addresses in Prezly. We don’t count people who have unsubscribed as part of your total contacts. Keeping them in our system ensures that you won’t email them again by accident, and if you reïmport them by accident, they’ll stay unsubscribed. If you have other lists (such as in Excel or another tool), be sure to remove your unsubscribed contacts from those lists, as well.
• Use a clear subject line. Vague or overly promotional subject lines increase your risk of ending up in in the spam folder. Make sure your subject lines are clear, direct and preferably brief. If you’re a brand or working for a brand, be sure to use your brand name in the email’s subject line, too.
• Keep your sender name consistent. Send emails from the same sender as much as possible. Inconsistent sender names are a red flag for ISPs.
• Let us know if you have delivery problems. If you’ve followed all the steps above and are still having trouble with email deliverability, give us a call. We’ll do everything we can to help make sure your emails get delivered.

Taking these steps will improve your overall deliverability rate and dramatically increase your chances of ending up in your media contacts’ inboxes, rather than their spam folders.

If you send emails via Prezly, rest assured that we take many steps to ensure that your emails get delivered to your media contacts’ inboxes, not their junk folders:

• We use SendGrid: a professional and proven email delivery system.
• We have a dedicated IP address to ensure optimal delivery of every email.
• We continually monitor blacklist services.
• We get notified every time we receive a spam report (it doesn’t happen very often!), so we can take appropriate action immediately.
• Our email layout is professional, clean and can’t be customized, reducing the potential for spammers to take advantage of our templates.
• Only paying customers get access to the email functionality. This is the absolute best way to keep spammers out.
• We have a clear unsubscribe link, so anyone can opt-out at any time and for any reason. This keeps us compliant with spam and email privacy laws and helps minimize spam complaints.
• You can only use our email tool for sending out press releases. This prevents anyone from trying to abuse our system – not that any of our wonderful customers would do such a thing! 🙂

What steps do you take to improve your email deliverability? Anything we left out?

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