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Email Deliverability 101

Jana Ferguson
2 minute read time

Email Deliverability is something that is a top concern, or should be, for all email marketers. You can create the most amazing campaign in the world, but without good deliverability, your readers won’t ever get to see it. There are a multitude of factors that contribute to reaching the inbox, but the good news is that most of them are within your control.

One of the leading factors in making sure your messages reach their intended recipients is your domain reputation. You can think of your domain reputation the same way you think of your credit score. The better your reputation, the more likely you are to reach the inbox of your intended recipients. The quality of your recipient list and your adherence to email best practices contribute to maintaining a good domain reputation. One good way to check the health of your domain is through senderscore.org.

Once you know your domain health, you will either want to maintain it or improve it. Here are some ways you can do just that:

  • Practice good list hygiene
    • Remove inactive subscribers (no activity in 6+ months
    • Remove role accounts (sales@, support@, etc.)
    • Use a validation tool, such as BriteVerify, to validate your lists
    • Remove unsubscribed recipients and those who have filed a complaint (you can get complaint reports through feedback loops and postmaster tools with email service providers (ESPs) like Yahoo! and Gmail)
  • Collect subscribers organically
    • Grow your list through recipients opting in - or even using double opt-in
    • Use CAPTCHA to prevent bot submissions
    • Never buy email lists
    • Utilize a Preference Center
  • Monitor
    • Pay attention to your bounce rate and unsubscribe rate - consistently having 3% or higher bounces on your email sends is likely doing harm to your domain reputation.
    • Pay attention to your engagement rates - the more people open and click, then more likely it is that your messages are going to be sent to the inbox vs. the junk or spam folder
  • Provide high-value content
    • Personalize content to help with engagement
    • Keep your images small & lightweight (30k file size or smaller)
    • Avoid URL shorteners
    • Craft strong subject lines that pertain to your content

Remember - driving good deliverability means your focus is quality over quantity. Sending to 20,000 recipients with high engagement is better than sending to 200,000 recipients with low engagement. There are lots of great resources available on the web and in our help articles. Happy mailing!

  • This is a fantastic article! One extra piece I will mention is if you find yourself in the need to improve your inbox placement even further then focusing on engagement rates is a large component for other services to recognize that your emails want to be received. A re-engagement campaign effort or 'warming' your email sends could be a healthy way to accomplish that goal. Here is a general idea of how those would look like:

    Re-Engagement Campaign(s) - Send a communication out to your customers to confirm which type of communication they would like to receive from your company. This could be a good opportunity to link them to your preference center to allow them to choose. For those customers that have never engaged (open or click) after several months (depends on your businesses sales cycle but typically 6+ months is a good guideline) then consider removing those records from your marketing efforts. The main reason is, holding on to records that never engage with your campaigns will contribute negatively to your email deliverability and thus inbox placement.

    Email Warming - In more extreme situations where your company feels they need to reset your email deliverability then an Email Warming plan could be a good option. It's also typically recommended to use a different sub-domain to act as a 'fresh' start but not always necessary and will depend on your situation. There is a lot of variations and guidelines when it comes to Email Warming and it's highly recommended to seek email consulting but there are some general practices you may use to get a better understanding. A general warming plan could look like this:

    • Send to 10% (no more than 5,000) of your highly engaged recipients (those that open and click). You can also use this opportunity to also use the re-engagement strategy and send a communication out for your customers to update their preferences.
    • Then after a few days, or perhaps even a week send your next email to the same recipients but slowly add in the rest of your engaged recipients, perhaps another 10%. Followed by the remainder of your marketable customers.
    • Repeat the process until you have sent to all of your marketable customers.
    • If you've found that you have customers that have never interacted with any of your emails then you could send one last email asking for those customers to engage / update their preferences otherwise you should consider removing them from your marketable database for the reasons mentioned above.

    The above will have a lot of variability and is used as a general guideline to get an understanding of what both a Re-Engagement Campaign and an Email Warming plan might look like.

    I hope this helps!