Although the main goal of email marketing is to make sure your text messages with your promotions and offers reach your targeted audience on time, there’s a lot going behind. At a glance, email delivery is a simple process but there’s a host of mandatory components such as domain name systems, servers, email protocols, and other tools responsible for email delivery. All these tools compose an email infrastructure.
If your job is related to marketing, you need to understand how all these elements of the email infrastructure work together. Successful marketers need to be aware of all the details and understand how the email infrastructure works. Let’s take a closer look at this theme!
What’s an Email Infrastructure?
It’s a system that was developed to guarantee the delivery of all transactional emails. Generally, it consists of mail agents, IP addresses, email management tools, etc. Let’s review each aspect in greater detail.
IP addresses
These are simple strings of numbers that the DNS (domain system name) attaches to domains. Thanks to IP addresses, we all can see letters instead of numbers when we visit different websites.
Currently, there are two types of IP addresses:
- A dedicated IP address (it’s assigned to the domain of your website);
- A shared IP address (where a few domains are used simultaneously).
It goes without saying that in email marketing, IP addresses are of utmost importance for a sender’s reputation. If you don’t control your IP reputation, you risk damaging the email deliverability rates of your marketing campaigns. Experts recommend using a dedicated IP address for important marketing campaigns.
IMAP and POP3 Protocols
When your email that includes your marketing offer is at the email server, it undergoes another stage – it must be retrieved from there using IMAP4 VS POP3 protocols.
IMAP (or Internet Message Access Protocol) is a well-known communication standard that pursues one goal – it allows access to the email, which is stored on the server.
POP3 (or Post Office Protocol) is another standard, famous for its low dependency on the internet connection. POP3 is a more sophisticated protocol as it is a simpler solution to access mailboxes. The main goal of POP3 is to download emails from the server to the client, so a user can easily read them even offline.
SMTP Server
It’s an app, used by a chosen email client to exchange emails between various users. The thing is that every hosting provider has its own SMTP address. The key objective of an SMTP server is to process email data and send it to the recipient’s inbox. In the process, it checks if the account of a sender is active and the address of a recipient is valid. When the email reputation is low, it will blacklist the email.
Feedback loop
It’s one of the main processes empowered by email infrastructure. If your marketing team uses a feedback loop, it will be easier to find out how a recipient interacts with your emails. A feedback loop allows marketing experts to delete subscribers that aren’t engaged with your products or services.
Email Reputation Management Tools
To find out more about a targeted audience, marketing teams can use various analytics tools. Their main goal is to monitor the conversions, control KPIs, check open rates of your emails, and automate campaign management if necessary.
In the area of marketing, experts are using email reputation management tools to pursue such goals as keeping track of mail delivery, segmenting the email lists, monitoring engagement, and domain reputation.
Dealing with an email user base might be a simple task only when you have no more than a few hundred users on your list. But what if your audience grows? In this case, it is more challenging to keep a solid reputation on the market. And this is where reviewing the existing email architecture might be the right solution. Remember that successful email campaigns must be based on a secure infrastructure. Plus, email marketers need to follow the latest industry practices to monitor their campaigns.