One of the most important things that you can do to ensure good email deliverability is to add email deliverability test accounts to your mailing list. Fortunately, adding deliverability test accounts is also one of the easiest things that you can do! You should do this by creating one or more test accounts with each of the major free webmail hosts, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. You can do this by using your “company name” as your standard email deliverability test account name.
So for example: YourCompany@gmail.com, YourCompany@aol.com, YourCompany@hotmail.com, and YourCompany@yahoo.com. Of course, if you are a customer of our deliverability services, it is also vital that you add our test accounts to your mailing lists. This helps us to ensure that your email is getting delivered to the inbox and, if it is not, allows us to address and troubleshoot any issues, to help ensure you the highest deliverability, i.e. delivery to the inbox instead of the junk folder.
Adding test accounts to your mailing list is important because one of the best ways to monitor whether your email is getting to the inbox is to, well, monitor whether your email is getting to the inbox! When you pay a company to monitor your deliverability, one of the things that they do is monitor whether your mailing list mail is getting to the inbox, or going to the junk folder. And how do they do that? By opening a bunch of free email accounts at places like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo, just like we’re telling you to do here, and having you add those “seed accounts” to your mailing lists (ditto). There is no reason that you can’t also do this for yourself!
If you find that your email is consistently ending up in the junk folder in these test accounts, then it’s likely that you have something to work on, but it also means that you have a good chance of figuring out what the issues are by analyzing that email as it is being received. Being able to analyze the email once it is received by the ISP or inbox provider, rather than before it is sent, is really important because it allows you to see not only how your email is being rendered, but also what sorts of information is being added to the “under the hood” headers by the inbox provider’s spam filtering system. That information is often the key that you need to fixing the problem.
If you find that the email you send is going to the junk folder everywhere, well, then you have some serious problems – and it’s best to know about them sooner rather than later! (And of course we can help you with deliverability issues whether at a single inbox provider or across all ISPs.)
Having those test accounts set up is also important because if you are having issues, then when you start adjusting things with your sending practices and your content to ameliorate the issues you’ll know whether those measures are working.
Bottom line: If you don’t already have test accounts set up, get them set up and onto your mailing lists now.
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