Email Deliverability 101

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!