Introduction

Recruitment leaders know how important it is to communicate effectively with clients and candidates. Consultants rely on email as one of the main channels to help them source roles and candidates, often end up using it in anger. But do you know if emails are actually reaching your recipients’ inboxes?

Welcome to the world of email deliverability.

Email deliverability is a measure of how successfully your emails are delivered to your intended recipients. Sender reputation, email content, list quality and email service provider all impact your deliverability. Sender reputation is upheld through your company domain (e.g. ours is “atlascloud.co.uk”), meaning all consultants contribute to it and are impacted by it.

If your company’s reputation is low, it could have a knock-on effect when sending large volumes of email – meaning some emails aren’t delivered, and consultants could be missing out on roles or candidates.

Thankfully, there is a solution for this. But first, we must dive into the details.

What can trigger email delivery issues?

Email delivery issues are problems that prevent your emails from reaching your recipients’ inboxes. Low engagement rates and spam traps are two common influences that impact the recruitment sector.

Engagement is a simple metric of emails sent in relation to the volume of people that interact with it. You might report on this internally, mailbox providers do this to monitor your domain’s reputation.

Spam traps are email addresses that are used by email service providers and anti-spam organizations to identify and catch spammers. They are not used by real people, and they do not sign up for any email lists or newsletters. If you send an email to a spam trap, it means that you have obtained the email address from an unreliable source, such as a purchased or scraped list, or that you have not cleaned your email list regularly. Sending emails to spam traps can severely damage your sender reputation and lead to email delivery issues.

How does reputation work?

One of the common misconceptions about email reputation is that if one email gets through, all emails from the same campaign will as well.

This is not the case. Far from it.

In reality, reputation is more fluid than it is binary. Your reputation can change during a campaign send, meaning some emails get through and others do not. For example, if your email tool starts sending, then one of your emails hits a mailbox spam trap, all other emails from that campaign will be rejected by that mailbox.

Similarly, if your reputation is already on a knife-edge, it could be the volume of emails that could cause a temporary trigger. Without a monitoring solution, you’d never know.

Deliverability monitoring

The starting point for any business issue is usually evidence. Without evidence, you can’t gauge the size of the issue which makes it difficult to judge.

Deliverability monitoring tools can be patched on to any existing email service provision (including Microsoft 365 Exchange Online) and help you get data on the proportion of delivered emails. It can help you:

• Verify and validate your email list: A deliverability monitoring tool can help you check your email list for invalid or outdated email addresses, and remove them before you send out your emails. This can reduce the risk of hard bounces, soft bounces, and spam traps, and improve your sender reputation and deliverability.
• Analyse and optimize your email content: A deliverability monitoring tool can help you test your email content for spamminess, readability, and relevance. It can also help you personalize your email content based on your recipients’ preferences and behaviour. This can increase your engagement rates, reduce your spam complaints, and improve your deliverability.
• Monitor and improve your sender reputation: A deliverability monitoring tool can help you monitor your sender reputation and deliverability metrics, such as open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, spam complaints, and blacklist status. It can also help you identify and resolve any issues that may affect your deliverability, such as spam traps, technical errors, or blacklisting.

Conclusion

Email deliverability is crucial for the success of your recruitment agency. If your emails are not reaching your clients and candidates, you are losing out on valuable opportunities and revenue.

Bulk emailing can be a useful strategy to save time and resources, but it can also lead to email delivery issues and spam traps if not done properly. A deliverability monitoring tool can help you monitor outgoing emails and diagnose any reputational problems. From there, you can work out if consultants are losing out – and act where appropriate.

Atlas Cloud is a recruitment industry specialist provider of managed IT and cyber security services. Book a free consultation if you’d like to explore delivery monitoring or any new IT solution.