Email Whitelisting: Make The Most Of This Opportunity

Understanding email whitelisting is important for both email marketers and email recipients. For email marketers, whitelisting can increase their engagement rate and enhance their sender’s reputation with their ISP. Pre-designed HubSpot marketing email templates ensure that novice email marketers know where to insert the instructions for email whitelisting. And, for email recipients, it ensures that they receive all the best email updates from their favorite brands. Here is everything you need to know about email whitelisting. 

What is Email Whitelisting?

An email whitelist is an approved list of email senders. The list signals the email clients to allow the mails from these websites to reach the subscriber’s inbox without any hurdle. In other words, email clients offer special privileges to the trusted domains and senders. As long as your emails are not blacklisted by the ISP, your subscribers will always receive them in their inboxes without any re-routing. 

However, the subscribers have to follow instructions to create a whitelist in their accounts. This might cause friction and prevent more people from whitelisting the emails in the first place. 

How to whitelist an email sender?

More often than not, email clients do not have a feature to directly add the emails and the domains to a ‘whitelist’. But, some different features and options act as a whitelist. Therefore, your potential customer simply might not be aware of the procedure. You can change this by including an instruction manual for adding emails to a whitelist.

Google 

Gmail has a peculiar method of segregating emails into primary, promotions, and social tabs. For the brands, it is essential to deliver their emails in the primary inbox as it increases the chances of the reader opening the email. The steps to whitelist your emails in the primary tabs are simple. 

• Click and drag the brand email from the promotions tab and drop it in the primary inbox.
• It will open a dialog box that asks whether you want Gmail to do the same action for all the future emails from this sender. 
• Click on Yes. 

The Gmail app on mobile devices does not offer this easy drag and drop feature. However, by clicking on show images and then on ‘always show images from the sender’, you can ensure that you continue receiving emails from this brand. 

Apple email

On Apple devices, you can directly whitelist the senders by adding them to your contacts. The steps are also pretty simple-

• Click on the ‘from’ or ‘Reply-to’ field.
• Click on Add to Contacts or Add to VIPs

The Add to VIPs not only ensures the delivery of emails in your subscriber’s inbox but also sends these emails to a VIP mailbox. 

Outlook 

After opening an email in Outlook.com, you will notice an alert at the bottom of the email. The alert notifies the reader that some parts of the mail are blocked due to safety concerns. Below it, you will find a hyperlink that asks whether you trust this sender or not. Simply click on this link, and the sender’s email will be automatically added to the whitelist. 

For Outlook 20XX versions, the process is slightly different. Here, the alert will show ‘click here to download the pictures.’ Once you click on it, it will open a drop-down menu. Just click on add senders to the safe sender’s list. 

What are the benefits of whitelisting email senders?

• The whitelist will ensure that all your emails are delivered right to your subscriber’s inbox without fail. 
• Asking your subscribers to whitelist your email domains also improves the overall deliverability of your emails. Your reputation with the ISP will also improve as they notice that more people are preferring to see your emails in their inboxes. 
• Lastly, email whitelisting will increase your other engagement metrics. And, higher engagement rate with the emails means that you have a higher chance of converting your subscribers into customers. 

Why should your subscribers whitelist email senders?

Email marketers and brands often think they are imposing themselves on their subscribers when they ask them to whitelist their emails and domains. However, this could be far from the truth. There is no harm in making a polite request to the subscribers to add the email to their address book. Always include a hyperlink that redirects to an instructional page that will help them create a whitelist and add your brand to that list. 

Welcome email campaigns are one of the best ways to request your subscribers to add your brand to their whitelist. It is crucial that you send this request and instruction during the following few hours after someone subscribes to your email list. You can even use custom HubSpot marketing email templates to include an interactive email whitelisting guide for your readers. This increases the chances of the subscriber making the effort to mark your email as safe. Throughout their subscription, you can request them to mark your brand as safe in the footnotes of your newsletters and appreciation email campaigns. 

Conclusion

Asking your email recipients to add your emails to their whitelist ensures that you are doing the most you can for your email campaigns. Email whitelisting will also significantly improve the metrics for your future email campaigns. As an email recipient, who wants to support their brand, you should whitelist the sender’s emails to increase their deliverability rate and reputation with the ISP.

Author: Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing customs email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

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