Your emails aren’t hitting the inbox. They’re being flagged as spam, leading your potential customers to miss out on important offers.
This thing hurts because you lose opportunities for conversions, trust issues, and lower ROI.
As a marketer or business owner, Whether you’re sending cold emails to get more leads or sending marketing newsletters to get engaged with your potential clients, you’ve more likely encountered deliverability issues. Trust me, it’s Unavoidable.
What should we do in that scenario?
This complete email deliverability guide is all set with step-by-step instructions and strategies to help your emails stay out of spam. It will break down all the deliverability issues and show how to solve them.
Ready to get started? Let’s keep it simple with the basics.
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability literally means “The number of emails that reach recipients’ inboxes without being categorized as spam.”
It can be taken as the ability to reach your subscriber’s inboxes while sending email messages.
Email deliverability confirms that your campaigns are reaching your recipients, giving you a strong chance to create a proficient email marketing strategy and build stronger ROI.
Factors Affecting Email Deliverability:
Certain factors altogether affect the deliverability rate; some of the majors are illustrated below:
What is the email sender score?
The email sending score or sender reputation is a numerical score ranging between 1 and 100, indicating your behavior or practices as an email sender.
It’s more likely equivalent to your professional reputation as your sender score lets the Internet service providers know if your company is able to be trusted.
Regarding deliverability, the key question is: do you have a strong sender reputation? If checked, it increases the likelihood that your emails will land in the inbox, while a poor sender score can result in your emails being filtered out.
However, you can increase your sender score by keeping your mailing list hygienic. You can do this by verifying or checking your email list regularly.
Email Deliverability Best Practices to Reach into Mailbox:
After having a general concept of what impacts email deliverability, it’s time to discuss some of the best practices to increase the deliverability rate.
3 Key Guidelines to Improve the Inbox Delivery:
Rule 1– Use double opt-in confirmation on all emails:
The double opt-in method requires the user or subscriber to confirm the registration via a follow-up email. Every ESP has multiple convenient options for users to set up a double opt-in method.
We can understand this by a simple example:
When a visitor to your website subscribes to a newsletter or fills out a form, he will receive an automated email. When he opens the email, he will see a link confirming that he wishes to receive further emails from the website.
Rule 2- Separate different types of emails:
If your company sends transactional emails (receipts, abundant cart reminders, etc.) and newsletters, then in that scenario, use a dedicated IP address and domain for each type of email.
For a specific corporate transactional email, use a domain like “XYZ.com.” For other emails, use a different domain that is similar to your primary domain, like “XYZ news.com.”
Rule 3- Use ReCaptcha on your registration form:
The reCAPTCHA role of Google is to prevent or safe the automated bots from registering on your site or subscribing to your newsletters.
Sending emails to bot registration or real people whose bots have registered can damage your email marketing strategy.
For Instance, if you email 100 bot registrations to an ISP and none of them are opened or clicked, it will inform the ISP that your emails are totally irrelevant to the recipients.
This practice will consequently damage or decrease your deliverability, making you land in the spam folder.
What is Email Authentication:
Email Authentication is a technique used to identify if a sender is authorized or verified to send emails under the authority of an email domain.
There are one or more methods or techniques used to authenticate your email.
Considering the spam and spoofing tactics today, companies must protect themselves with authentication.
Without authenticating your email, imposters or spammers could negatively impact your deliverability.
The major email authentication methods are described below:
1. SPF authentication:
The sender policy framework (SPF) is the email authentication protocol that verifies if the IP is authorized to send emails in the name of the email domain.
SPF authenticates the domain in the “envelope” or return-path email address, which is used during message transmission (from one mail server to another). This address is mainly responsible for “bouncing” or returning undeliverable emails to the sender.
2. DKIM authentication method:
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an encrypted key in your emails that mail servers use to verify the sender’s legitimacy.
It is an email authentication technique that identifies forged sender addresses in emails.
3. DMARC authentication:
(Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance) abbreviated as “DMARC,” is a powerful email authentication method that helps prevent phishing attacks (a social engineering tactic where a hacker uses fraudulent communication to trick a victim to give away sensitive information) by imposters and reduces spam.
A DMARC record enforces a policy instructing the ISP to handle incoming emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
The usage of Email Warmup Tools:
Warming up an email IP address is vital for building a strong sender reputation.
The email IP warmup means “ The process of gradually sending emails from new or inactive IP to maintain a good sender reputation.”
Gradually sending emails from a new IP helps your company establish credibility. Once you’ve established a good reputation, you can enjoy the rewards of your email marketing campaigns.
However, avoid sending large volumes of emails at once. If your sending platform allows it, set hourly or daily limits for each IP and email domain. Sending too many emails very often can lead to a higher bounce rate.
Here are some go-to strategies for email warm-up:
- To begin warming up your existing IP, focus on sending emails only to subscribers who have engaged with your emails in the last 30 days.
- For the initial phase, you should aim to reach a maximum of 3,000 subscribers. For the first three days, you should exclusively target this group before expanding your reach.
- After this, gradually increase the volume by adding 1,500 subscribers who have recently opened your emails, bringing the total to 4,500 subscribers.
- For the following two days, continue sending to the 4,500.
- Increase your volume by 50% of the current list size every two to three days.
- Once ten days have passed, you can accelerate growth by doubling the volume.
Spam trigger words can Endanger Email deliverability:
One of the quickest ways to have your emails marked as spam is unintentionally activating a spam filter. What is the reason for this? The content of your email.
It doesn’t matter how good your email content is or how strong the sender’s reputation you own; your headline or body content can upset a spam filter.
Usually, these are words you might find in your average phishing scam email, such as:
- Eliminate debt
- Credit card
- Act fast
- Click this link
- Earn cash now
Check your feedback loops (FBL):
Feedback loops (FBL), or complaint feedback loops, are services that notify email senders when their emails are flagged as spam or filtered.
When a recipient or subscriber marks your email as spam, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) sends you an alert.
This system helps you remove disengaged subscribers from your list while ensuring recipients can maintain a clutter-free inbox by blocking unwanted emails.
Email Blacklist Monitoring:
Getting your email domain blacklisted can severely impact your email marketing strategy. A single blacklisting can hinder your ability to deliver emails to numerous ISPs.
Blacklist monitoring tools help you detect unusual activity and alert you to potential blacklisting risks for your domain.
What does an email blacklist mean?
An email blacklist is basically a list of email domains and IP addresses flagged as untrustworthy senders. ISPs rely on blacklist service providers to identify and block emails from these sources in order to protect their users.
Types of email blacklist?
There are 3 major types of email blacklists, illustrated below:
Email whitelist: A guaranteed way to achieve email deliverability:
An email whitelist does the opposite of a Blacklist as it completely whitelists the email addresses, IPs, or domains approved for sending emails.
Whitelisting your IPs gives you many good benefits:
- Increased placement of inbox ratio for improved email deliverability
- Increased sending volumes
- Less restrictive spam filters
Always Whitelist your IPs after 90 days of sending:
It is advisable to wait 90 days, as some whitelisting services require a review of your sending history before granting access.
Work on improving your email list; regularly check your email addresses:
The quality of your email list is one of the most serious aspects, regarding your email deliverability.
Your email deliverability will itself start to improve if your email list contains high-quality, authentic potential subscribers.
It will also lower the risk of bouncing emails due to invalid email addresses or spam.
Email verification can quickly improve the quality of your email list. Even if you’ve carefully built your list, always make it a priority to refresh your email list every few months, as your email decay kills your marketing strategy upto 25.74% annually.
Keep checking your sender score:
Domains utilize the email sender score to check if you can send emails from specific IP addresses.
Maintaining your sender score at 90 is mandatory. If it is not, it will indicate that your email list quality is pathetic.
Upload your email list for verification, review the results of your recent campaigns, and monitor them closely.
Check if your email server is set up correctly for sending emails:
Your email server configuration plays a sole role in your email deliverability. That’s why it is important to check your email server settings before sending email campaigns.
Double-check your email content:
Be sure to include the recipient’s name in the subject line and the HTML header (e.g., “Dear Matilda”).
Industry best practices for high email deliverability:
You’re on the right track to becoming an email deliverability expert! To email like the top marketers, follow these best techniques to Secure the highest possible deliverability.
Remove inactive subscribers:
Eliminate subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked your emails in the past 180 days. Since many ISP algorithms rely on user engagement, having too many non-openers or non-clickers can negatively impact your deliverability.
You can segment these inactive subscribers and attempt to re-engage them after six months to check if they start interacting with your emails.
Avoid too many connections per IP:
ISPs limit the number of connections per IP address. Always check the Guidelines for each ISP to understand their Rate-Limiting rules and ensure you don’t exceed these limits.
Retry sending emails when encountering temporary error codes:
The most common anti-spam method used by ISPs is “greylisting.”
This method will show up a temporary error called SMTP 451.
When this happens, the Internet service providers will count on your mail server to be configured to retry email delivery after some time.
This is a normal process, as configuring your emails will surely improve the deliverability rate.
When you attempt to resend the email, ensure you use the same IP address. Rotating the IP will only trigger more greylisting, further delaying delivery.
Use a Reply-To header that’s valid:
You’ll receive emails from nonreply@, but a valid or functioning Reply to email address is much better than that.
Actively check on your Reply to addresses and answer all the customer queries.
Engagement matters at that time, as ISPs consider strong communication between you and your customer helpful for email deliverability.
Tips to cure spam complaints and bounce rates:
Maintain a privacy policy on your website:
Always check if your privacy policy is modified and updated and that it provides complete information related to security and compliance.
The ISPs always check your privacy statement to see if you’re legit before whitelisting your domain.
Be patient while sending:
Send your newsletters, promotions, and other important email marketing content on the same days each week and month.
Consistency helps demonstrate to ISPs that you run a legitimate business and helps keep your IPs warm. The more predictable your sending pattern, the less likely you appear as a spammer, improving your email deliverability.
Refrain from sending affiliate email marketing:
Most ISPs flag subject lines and content from affiliate emails. Since many marketers send the same affiliate promotions, ISPs use AI to recognize recurring subject lines and content patterns.
This can lead to your IPs being blacklisted or relegated to the spam folder. However, ISPs generally accept ads included in newsletters without complaints.
The Final Conclusion—Key Takeaways:
Deliverability matters a great deal for your email marketing campaigns to prosper. Understanding sender reputation, email authentication, and content quality are the rules that will surely improve the odds of actually landing in your audience’s inbox.
Following the best practices in disposing of a clean email list, double opt-ins, avoiding spam trigger words, and closely monitoring your sender score will help your emails be assignable out of the spam folder.
Furthermore, Email segmentation can be a good strategy for establishing a great reputation with ISPs and recipient engagement by showing consistency and patience.
Remember that deliverability is not a one-off task; it is a continuous process that includes proactive audits, content checks, and adjustments to industry trends.
If you do all of these things and remain committed to improving your email marketing strategies, you get to assure your emails will land at their fortuitous destination — the inbox — and generate meaningful outcomes for your business!
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