Our Three Step Process
March 1, 2024
What is Email Deliverability: Ensuring That Your Message Reaches The Inbox
Our Three Step Process
March 1, 2024
What is Email Deliverability: Ensuring That Your Message Reaches The Inbox
Email deliverability can make or break your outreach efforts. In this guide, we walk you through everything you need to know—from setting up your domain to improving sender reputation and avoiding the spam folder—so your emails actually land where they should: the inbox.
Did you spend hours preparing the perfect email just to get no response?
You wrote the perfect subject line, that would have piqued the interest of the most stubborn prospect. Your body was a rollercoaster of emotions with a call-to-action that would have got the meeting. Yet, none of this happened. Your email never reached your lead; hence they never got the chance to see it. The solution to this is proper email deliverability.
Email deliverability centers on an email's ability to be delivered directly to a recipient's inbox. It depends on factors such as the reliability of the sender, adherence to authentication methods, how recipients interact with the email, and the quality of the content within the email. With this post, we aim to help you send emails to many prospects and make sure they arrive to the recipient's inbox successfully.
What is Email Deliverability?
Let’s start by defining what email deliverability is. As mentioned, Email deliverability is the process that determines whether an email successfully reaches the recipient’s inbox as intended, bypassing filters that could redirect it to spam folders or block it entirely.
This process is heavily influenced by various technical aspects, including the sender's email infrastructure and the policies of the recipient's email service provider. It is a critical aspect of email communication, particularly in marketing and corporate correspondence. The journey of an email from sender to recipient involves various technical checkpoints and processes to ensure it is delivered as intended. These include adherence to certain protocols that establish the legitimacy of the email source and content. For instance, email servers use specific protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to verify that the email is not forged and is coming from a trusted sender. This authentication helps to prevent the email from being flagged as spam or phishing, thus enhancing its chances of reaching the inbox. We will dive into what each of these are in a later section.
In addition to authentication, the sender’s reputation plays a vital role in email deliverability. This reputation is built over time based on the volume of emails sent, the frequency of these emails, and how recipients interact with them. Email services keep track of behaviors such as how many of the sent emails are marked as spam or how often they are opened. A good sender reputation helps in maintaining a high deliverability rate.
Image showing the key component of email health But what are the benefits of good email deliverability and the drawbacks of bad email deliverability?
Importance of Email Deliverability
Understanding and managing email deliverability effectively is essential to ensure that email remains a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. The benefits you get from establishing a good email deliverability include:
Higher Engagement Rates: Good email deliverability ensures that your emails consistently reach the inbox of your subscribers, which significantly increases the chances of your emails being opened and interacted with. This leads to higher engagement rates, crucial for successful email marketing campaigns.
Improved Sender Reputation: Maintaining good deliverability helps to enhance your sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email services. A strong reputation increases the likelihood that your emails will continue to be favorably received and not diverted to spam folders.
Accurate Metrics: Good deliverability allows you to get more accurate data on your email campaigns. You can better track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, enabling more informed decisions and strategy adjustments.
On the other hand, if you have bad email deliverability you suffer from the following drawbacks:
Lower Open Rates: Emails that end up in the spam folder are less likely to be seen and opened. Lower open rates not only affect the immediate effectiveness of campaigns but can also signal to ISPs that your content isn't valued by recipients, potentially worsening your deliverability issues.
Lost Sales Opportunities: Each email that fails to reach an inbox represents a lost opportunity to make a sale or engage a customer. Over time, these missed opportunities can accumulate, resulting in notable financial losses.
Difficulty in Rebuilding Sender Reputation: Once your sender reputation suffers, it can be challenging and time-consuming to rebuild. This process often involves cleansing email lists, improving engagement strategies, and slowly regaining the trust of ISPs and recipients.
Now that we understand what email deliverability is and why you want to make sure that you have good email deliverability, we will dive into how to prepare your email & domain to ensure good email deliverability.
How to Ensure Good Deliverability
Email Set Up
The first step when preparing to do outreach via email is to set up a domain and email accounts. It's important to establish a professional domain from which to send your emails. Using a well-recognized domain enhances trust and credibility with both recipients and email service providers. Ensure that the email addresses associated with your domain are consistent and use professional naming conventions. This alignment helps to establish your identity and assists in building a positive sender reputation. It is recommended to have 1 domain for every 5 emails if you intend to send out multiple thousand emails a month. We will discuss the perfect amount in a later section.
The next step is to set up your DNS records for authentication, which refers to implementing specific protocols that verify the legitimacy of the emails being sent from your domain. These measures are crucial for proving to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that the emails are not spoofed and do indeed originate from the stated source.
Here are the primary authentication methods used:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): allows the domain owner to specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain. This is done by adding a specific SPF record to the domain's DNS settings. The record lists all servers allowed to send emails from that domain. When an email is received, the recipient’s server checks this SPF record to verify that the email comes from a server approved by the domain’s administrators.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): adds a digital signature to the headers of an email. This signature is associated with the domain and ensures that the contents of the email have not been tampered with during transit. When an email is sent, it includes this signature, which is verified on the receiving end using a public cryptographic key published in the domain's DNS records.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): leverages SPF and DKIM to provide further protections. It allows the domain owner to specify how emails should be handled if they do not pass SPF or DKIM checks. The DMARC policy can instruct receiving servers to either quarantine, reject, or pass emails that fail these checks. It also includes provisions for reporting, sending feedback about emails (whether they passed or failed the DMARC policy checks) back to the sender, enabling them to see how many of their messages are failing and why.
Properly configuring these records helps to ensure that your emails are considered legitimate by receiving servers, which greatly enhances deliverability. If you buy your domain & emails through Mailforge, then the DNS records are already set up. Otherwise, you have to set them up yourself.
Email Warm-up
When using a new email address or domain, it’s essential to gradually "warm up" by slowly increasing the volume of emails sent. Starting with a low volume and gradually increasing allows ISPs to recognize and trust your sending patterns. This process helps to avoid your emails being marked as spam due to sudden high volume, which is often a red flag for spam-like behavior.
However, doing this yourself takes up a lot of time and isn’t optimal, instead what most brands do is use automated tools to warm up their inboxes. One of them is Instantly. You can sign-up quickly and warm up all your email accounts with one subscription.
The Maximum Number of Emails You Can Send Per Day
Especially for newer domains or email addresses, it is important to limit the number of emails sent per day. This limit should gradually increase as the email address or domain ages. Adhering to this limitation helps maintain your sender reputation by preventing ESPs from marking your emails as spam due to perceived aggressive sending behavior. While there aren't set in stone rules of how many emails you can send daily, research by Mailforge found the following results:
Additionally, you get bonus points by tailoring your email lists through segmentation to ensure that the content is relevant to the audience. This relevance can significantly improve engagement rates (like opens and clicks), which in turn positively impacts your sender reputation.
Segmentation involves dividing your email list based on criteria such as demographics, behavior, or engagement history, ensuring that each recipient receives content that is likely to be of interest to them.
Content of Emails
Personalizing the content of an email can significantly improve email deliverability by enhancing recipient engagement and interaction with the email, which in turn positively impacts the sender's reputation with ESPs. To personalize the content of an email effectively and thereby improve email deliverability, you can follow these strategic steps:
Personalize the Subject Line and Email Content: Address the recipient by name in the subject line to immediately catch their attention. Further, personalize the email body by referencing their specific interests, recent interactions, or any other personal details you have. This could be as simple as acknowledging a recent purchase or as detailed as offering recommendations based on their preferences.
Timing and Frequency: Customize the timing and frequency of your emails based on the recipient's timezone and previous interactions with your emails. Sending emails at a time when they are more likely to be read increases the chances of engagement.
Use A/B Testing: Continuously test different aspects of your email personalization to see what works best. Test different subject lines, email content, images, and CTAs with various segments of your audience to refine your approach based on what yields the highest engagement rates.
Avoid Links and Pictures: You shouldn’t use more than 1 picture and/or link, especially in the first email you send to a prospect. Links and pictures are 2 factors that trigger spam filters and can hinder your deliverability. Instead, try using as much plain HTML as possible.
Give the Option to Opt-Out: In some countries you are forced by law to make it easy to opt out from your lead list. Nonetheless, you should always respect other people's time and thus make it easy for them to stop receiving emails from you. The benefits are a lower unsubscribe rate and better segmentation.
By implementing these strategies, you can create more relevant, engaging, and effective emails that resonate with your audience, thus improving email deliverability and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Measuring Your Email Deliverability Health
After you have set up your email accounts and domain settings you should always keep an eye on your email health. If you see a drop in your open rates or engagement rates this can indicate that your email wasn’t delivered successfully or that your content wasn’t engaging. Likewise, if your bounce rate and spam complaints increase, you should see if your content is too promotional or clean your email list, so you only send it to an engaging audience.
Furthermore, you should keep in mind these tools that help email marketers understand and improve how their emails are delivered to recipients’ inboxes. These tools focus specifically on whether an email lands in the main inbox, the spam folder, or doesn't get delivered at all. Here are some of the tools you should look at:
MXToolBox
MXToolbox is a widely recognized tool that plays a crucial role in managing and improving email deliverability. It provides a suite of essential functionalities that help in diagnosing and resolving issues related to email sending and receiving. Here are some key reasons why MXToolbox is valuable for enhancing email deliverability:
Comprehensive Email Server Testing
Blacklist Monitoring
Alerts and Reports
Diagnostic Tools
DNS Record and Configuration Checks
Google Postmasters
Google Postmaster Tools is a valuable resource for anyone who sends large volumes of email, particularly marketers and organizations that rely on reaching their users’ Gmail inboxes. It provides insights into how Gmail views your email traffic, including how your emails are being treated by Google's spam filters. Key features include:
Spam Feedback Loop
IP Reputation Monitoring
Domain Reputation
Authentication Results (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)
Delivery Error
By utilizing Google Postmaster Tools, senders can gain a deeper understanding of how their emails are handled by one of the largest email providers in the world, allowing them to optimize their email strategies accordingly. This tool is particularly useful for improving email practices and ensuring that communications reach their intended audiences effectively.
Mail-Tester
The last tool we will look at is Mail-tester, which is a straightforward and effective tool used primarily for evaluating the "spamminess" of your emails to improve deliverability before you send them to your actual list. Here’s how Mail-tester works:
Send Your Email: Mail-tester provides you with a unique temporary email address to which you send your email.
Check Your Score: After you send your email, you visit the Mail-tester website and check your score by clicking on the provided link.
Detailed Report: The tool then provides a detailed report of your email, scoring it on a scale from 0 to 10. A higher score indicates a lower likelihood of your email ending up in the spam folder.
Using Mail-tester is particularly beneficial for email marketers and businesses to preemptively identify and rectify potential deliverability issues. By ensuring that your emails are optimized for these factors, you can significantly increase the chances that they will reach your recipients’ inboxes rather than getting lost in spam folders.
We hope this article helped you set up your email deliverability. If you have any questions or need any assistance, feel free to contact us at:
Did you spend hours preparing the perfect email just to get no response?
You wrote the perfect subject line, that would have piqued the interest of the most stubborn prospect. Your body was a rollercoaster of emotions with a call-to-action that would have got the meeting. Yet, none of this happened. Your email never reached your lead; hence they never got the chance to see it. The solution to this is proper email deliverability.
Email deliverability centers on an email's ability to be delivered directly to a recipient's inbox. It depends on factors such as the reliability of the sender, adherence to authentication methods, how recipients interact with the email, and the quality of the content within the email. With this post, we aim to help you send emails to many prospects and make sure they arrive to the recipient's inbox successfully.
What is Email Deliverability?
Let’s start by defining what email deliverability is. As mentioned, Email deliverability is the process that determines whether an email successfully reaches the recipient’s inbox as intended, bypassing filters that could redirect it to spam folders or block it entirely.
This process is heavily influenced by various technical aspects, including the sender's email infrastructure and the policies of the recipient's email service provider. It is a critical aspect of email communication, particularly in marketing and corporate correspondence. The journey of an email from sender to recipient involves various technical checkpoints and processes to ensure it is delivered as intended. These include adherence to certain protocols that establish the legitimacy of the email source and content. For instance, email servers use specific protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to verify that the email is not forged and is coming from a trusted sender. This authentication helps to prevent the email from being flagged as spam or phishing, thus enhancing its chances of reaching the inbox. We will dive into what each of these are in a later section.
In addition to authentication, the sender’s reputation plays a vital role in email deliverability. This reputation is built over time based on the volume of emails sent, the frequency of these emails, and how recipients interact with them. Email services keep track of behaviors such as how many of the sent emails are marked as spam or how often they are opened. A good sender reputation helps in maintaining a high deliverability rate.
Image showing the key component of email health But what are the benefits of good email deliverability and the drawbacks of bad email deliverability?
Importance of Email Deliverability
Understanding and managing email deliverability effectively is essential to ensure that email remains a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. The benefits you get from establishing a good email deliverability include:
Higher Engagement Rates: Good email deliverability ensures that your emails consistently reach the inbox of your subscribers, which significantly increases the chances of your emails being opened and interacted with. This leads to higher engagement rates, crucial for successful email marketing campaigns.
Improved Sender Reputation: Maintaining good deliverability helps to enhance your sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email services. A strong reputation increases the likelihood that your emails will continue to be favorably received and not diverted to spam folders.
Accurate Metrics: Good deliverability allows you to get more accurate data on your email campaigns. You can better track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, enabling more informed decisions and strategy adjustments.
On the other hand, if you have bad email deliverability you suffer from the following drawbacks:
Lower Open Rates: Emails that end up in the spam folder are less likely to be seen and opened. Lower open rates not only affect the immediate effectiveness of campaigns but can also signal to ISPs that your content isn't valued by recipients, potentially worsening your deliverability issues.
Lost Sales Opportunities: Each email that fails to reach an inbox represents a lost opportunity to make a sale or engage a customer. Over time, these missed opportunities can accumulate, resulting in notable financial losses.
Difficulty in Rebuilding Sender Reputation: Once your sender reputation suffers, it can be challenging and time-consuming to rebuild. This process often involves cleansing email lists, improving engagement strategies, and slowly regaining the trust of ISPs and recipients.
Now that we understand what email deliverability is and why you want to make sure that you have good email deliverability, we will dive into how to prepare your email & domain to ensure good email deliverability.
How to Ensure Good Deliverability
Email Set Up
The first step when preparing to do outreach via email is to set up a domain and email accounts. It's important to establish a professional domain from which to send your emails. Using a well-recognized domain enhances trust and credibility with both recipients and email service providers. Ensure that the email addresses associated with your domain are consistent and use professional naming conventions. This alignment helps to establish your identity and assists in building a positive sender reputation. It is recommended to have 1 domain for every 5 emails if you intend to send out multiple thousand emails a month. We will discuss the perfect amount in a later section.
The next step is to set up your DNS records for authentication, which refers to implementing specific protocols that verify the legitimacy of the emails being sent from your domain. These measures are crucial for proving to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that the emails are not spoofed and do indeed originate from the stated source.
Here are the primary authentication methods used:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): allows the domain owner to specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain. This is done by adding a specific SPF record to the domain's DNS settings. The record lists all servers allowed to send emails from that domain. When an email is received, the recipient’s server checks this SPF record to verify that the email comes from a server approved by the domain’s administrators.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): adds a digital signature to the headers of an email. This signature is associated with the domain and ensures that the contents of the email have not been tampered with during transit. When an email is sent, it includes this signature, which is verified on the receiving end using a public cryptographic key published in the domain's DNS records.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): leverages SPF and DKIM to provide further protections. It allows the domain owner to specify how emails should be handled if they do not pass SPF or DKIM checks. The DMARC policy can instruct receiving servers to either quarantine, reject, or pass emails that fail these checks. It also includes provisions for reporting, sending feedback about emails (whether they passed or failed the DMARC policy checks) back to the sender, enabling them to see how many of their messages are failing and why.
Properly configuring these records helps to ensure that your emails are considered legitimate by receiving servers, which greatly enhances deliverability. If you buy your domain & emails through Mailforge, then the DNS records are already set up. Otherwise, you have to set them up yourself.
Email Warm-up
When using a new email address or domain, it’s essential to gradually "warm up" by slowly increasing the volume of emails sent. Starting with a low volume and gradually increasing allows ISPs to recognize and trust your sending patterns. This process helps to avoid your emails being marked as spam due to sudden high volume, which is often a red flag for spam-like behavior.
However, doing this yourself takes up a lot of time and isn’t optimal, instead what most brands do is use automated tools to warm up their inboxes. One of them is Instantly. You can sign-up quickly and warm up all your email accounts with one subscription.
The Maximum Number of Emails You Can Send Per Day
Especially for newer domains or email addresses, it is important to limit the number of emails sent per day. This limit should gradually increase as the email address or domain ages. Adhering to this limitation helps maintain your sender reputation by preventing ESPs from marking your emails as spam due to perceived aggressive sending behavior. While there aren't set in stone rules of how many emails you can send daily, research by Mailforge found the following results:
Additionally, you get bonus points by tailoring your email lists through segmentation to ensure that the content is relevant to the audience. This relevance can significantly improve engagement rates (like opens and clicks), which in turn positively impacts your sender reputation.
Segmentation involves dividing your email list based on criteria such as demographics, behavior, or engagement history, ensuring that each recipient receives content that is likely to be of interest to them.
Content of Emails
Personalizing the content of an email can significantly improve email deliverability by enhancing recipient engagement and interaction with the email, which in turn positively impacts the sender's reputation with ESPs. To personalize the content of an email effectively and thereby improve email deliverability, you can follow these strategic steps:
Personalize the Subject Line and Email Content: Address the recipient by name in the subject line to immediately catch their attention. Further, personalize the email body by referencing their specific interests, recent interactions, or any other personal details you have. This could be as simple as acknowledging a recent purchase or as detailed as offering recommendations based on their preferences.
Timing and Frequency: Customize the timing and frequency of your emails based on the recipient's timezone and previous interactions with your emails. Sending emails at a time when they are more likely to be read increases the chances of engagement.
Use A/B Testing: Continuously test different aspects of your email personalization to see what works best. Test different subject lines, email content, images, and CTAs with various segments of your audience to refine your approach based on what yields the highest engagement rates.
Avoid Links and Pictures: You shouldn’t use more than 1 picture and/or link, especially in the first email you send to a prospect. Links and pictures are 2 factors that trigger spam filters and can hinder your deliverability. Instead, try using as much plain HTML as possible.
Give the Option to Opt-Out: In some countries you are forced by law to make it easy to opt out from your lead list. Nonetheless, you should always respect other people's time and thus make it easy for them to stop receiving emails from you. The benefits are a lower unsubscribe rate and better segmentation.
By implementing these strategies, you can create more relevant, engaging, and effective emails that resonate with your audience, thus improving email deliverability and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Measuring Your Email Deliverability Health
After you have set up your email accounts and domain settings you should always keep an eye on your email health. If you see a drop in your open rates or engagement rates this can indicate that your email wasn’t delivered successfully or that your content wasn’t engaging. Likewise, if your bounce rate and spam complaints increase, you should see if your content is too promotional or clean your email list, so you only send it to an engaging audience.
Furthermore, you should keep in mind these tools that help email marketers understand and improve how their emails are delivered to recipients’ inboxes. These tools focus specifically on whether an email lands in the main inbox, the spam folder, or doesn't get delivered at all. Here are some of the tools you should look at:
MXToolBox
MXToolbox is a widely recognized tool that plays a crucial role in managing and improving email deliverability. It provides a suite of essential functionalities that help in diagnosing and resolving issues related to email sending and receiving. Here are some key reasons why MXToolbox is valuable for enhancing email deliverability:
Comprehensive Email Server Testing
Blacklist Monitoring
Alerts and Reports
Diagnostic Tools
DNS Record and Configuration Checks
Google Postmasters
Google Postmaster Tools is a valuable resource for anyone who sends large volumes of email, particularly marketers and organizations that rely on reaching their users’ Gmail inboxes. It provides insights into how Gmail views your email traffic, including how your emails are being treated by Google's spam filters. Key features include:
Spam Feedback Loop
IP Reputation Monitoring
Domain Reputation
Authentication Results (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)
Delivery Error
By utilizing Google Postmaster Tools, senders can gain a deeper understanding of how their emails are handled by one of the largest email providers in the world, allowing them to optimize their email strategies accordingly. This tool is particularly useful for improving email practices and ensuring that communications reach their intended audiences effectively.
Mail-Tester
The last tool we will look at is Mail-tester, which is a straightforward and effective tool used primarily for evaluating the "spamminess" of your emails to improve deliverability before you send them to your actual list. Here’s how Mail-tester works:
Send Your Email: Mail-tester provides you with a unique temporary email address to which you send your email.
Check Your Score: After you send your email, you visit the Mail-tester website and check your score by clicking on the provided link.
Detailed Report: The tool then provides a detailed report of your email, scoring it on a scale from 0 to 10. A higher score indicates a lower likelihood of your email ending up in the spam folder.
Using Mail-tester is particularly beneficial for email marketers and businesses to preemptively identify and rectify potential deliverability issues. By ensuring that your emails are optimized for these factors, you can significantly increase the chances that they will reach your recipients’ inboxes rather than getting lost in spam folders.
We hope this article helped you set up your email deliverability. If you have any questions or need any assistance, feel free to contact us at:
Email deliverability can make or break your outreach efforts. In this guide, we walk you through everything you need to know—from setting up your domain to improving sender reputation and avoiding the spam folder—so your emails actually land where they should: the inbox.
Did you spend hours preparing the perfect email just to get no response?
You wrote the perfect subject line, that would have piqued the interest of the most stubborn prospect. Your body was a rollercoaster of emotions with a call-to-action that would have got the meeting. Yet, none of this happened. Your email never reached your lead; hence they never got the chance to see it. The solution to this is proper email deliverability.
Email deliverability centers on an email's ability to be delivered directly to a recipient's inbox. It depends on factors such as the reliability of the sender, adherence to authentication methods, how recipients interact with the email, and the quality of the content within the email. With this post, we aim to help you send emails to many prospects and make sure they arrive to the recipient's inbox successfully.
What is Email Deliverability?
Let’s start by defining what email deliverability is. As mentioned, Email deliverability is the process that determines whether an email successfully reaches the recipient’s inbox as intended, bypassing filters that could redirect it to spam folders or block it entirely.
This process is heavily influenced by various technical aspects, including the sender's email infrastructure and the policies of the recipient's email service provider. It is a critical aspect of email communication, particularly in marketing and corporate correspondence. The journey of an email from sender to recipient involves various technical checkpoints and processes to ensure it is delivered as intended. These include adherence to certain protocols that establish the legitimacy of the email source and content. For instance, email servers use specific protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to verify that the email is not forged and is coming from a trusted sender. This authentication helps to prevent the email from being flagged as spam or phishing, thus enhancing its chances of reaching the inbox. We will dive into what each of these are in a later section.
In addition to authentication, the sender’s reputation plays a vital role in email deliverability. This reputation is built over time based on the volume of emails sent, the frequency of these emails, and how recipients interact with them. Email services keep track of behaviors such as how many of the sent emails are marked as spam or how often they are opened. A good sender reputation helps in maintaining a high deliverability rate.
Image showing the key component of email health But what are the benefits of good email deliverability and the drawbacks of bad email deliverability?
Importance of Email Deliverability
Understanding and managing email deliverability effectively is essential to ensure that email remains a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. The benefits you get from establishing a good email deliverability include:
Higher Engagement Rates: Good email deliverability ensures that your emails consistently reach the inbox of your subscribers, which significantly increases the chances of your emails being opened and interacted with. This leads to higher engagement rates, crucial for successful email marketing campaigns.
Improved Sender Reputation: Maintaining good deliverability helps to enhance your sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email services. A strong reputation increases the likelihood that your emails will continue to be favorably received and not diverted to spam folders.
Accurate Metrics: Good deliverability allows you to get more accurate data on your email campaigns. You can better track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, enabling more informed decisions and strategy adjustments.
On the other hand, if you have bad email deliverability you suffer from the following drawbacks:
Lower Open Rates: Emails that end up in the spam folder are less likely to be seen and opened. Lower open rates not only affect the immediate effectiveness of campaigns but can also signal to ISPs that your content isn't valued by recipients, potentially worsening your deliverability issues.
Lost Sales Opportunities: Each email that fails to reach an inbox represents a lost opportunity to make a sale or engage a customer. Over time, these missed opportunities can accumulate, resulting in notable financial losses.
Difficulty in Rebuilding Sender Reputation: Once your sender reputation suffers, it can be challenging and time-consuming to rebuild. This process often involves cleansing email lists, improving engagement strategies, and slowly regaining the trust of ISPs and recipients.
Now that we understand what email deliverability is and why you want to make sure that you have good email deliverability, we will dive into how to prepare your email & domain to ensure good email deliverability.
How to Ensure Good Deliverability
Email Set Up
The first step when preparing to do outreach via email is to set up a domain and email accounts. It's important to establish a professional domain from which to send your emails. Using a well-recognized domain enhances trust and credibility with both recipients and email service providers. Ensure that the email addresses associated with your domain are consistent and use professional naming conventions. This alignment helps to establish your identity and assists in building a positive sender reputation. It is recommended to have 1 domain for every 5 emails if you intend to send out multiple thousand emails a month. We will discuss the perfect amount in a later section.
The next step is to set up your DNS records for authentication, which refers to implementing specific protocols that verify the legitimacy of the emails being sent from your domain. These measures are crucial for proving to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that the emails are not spoofed and do indeed originate from the stated source.
Here are the primary authentication methods used:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF): allows the domain owner to specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of their domain. This is done by adding a specific SPF record to the domain's DNS settings. The record lists all servers allowed to send emails from that domain. When an email is received, the recipient’s server checks this SPF record to verify that the email comes from a server approved by the domain’s administrators.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): adds a digital signature to the headers of an email. This signature is associated with the domain and ensures that the contents of the email have not been tampered with during transit. When an email is sent, it includes this signature, which is verified on the receiving end using a public cryptographic key published in the domain's DNS records.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): leverages SPF and DKIM to provide further protections. It allows the domain owner to specify how emails should be handled if they do not pass SPF or DKIM checks. The DMARC policy can instruct receiving servers to either quarantine, reject, or pass emails that fail these checks. It also includes provisions for reporting, sending feedback about emails (whether they passed or failed the DMARC policy checks) back to the sender, enabling them to see how many of their messages are failing and why.
Properly configuring these records helps to ensure that your emails are considered legitimate by receiving servers, which greatly enhances deliverability. If you buy your domain & emails through Mailforge, then the DNS records are already set up. Otherwise, you have to set them up yourself.
Email Warm-up
When using a new email address or domain, it’s essential to gradually "warm up" by slowly increasing the volume of emails sent. Starting with a low volume and gradually increasing allows ISPs to recognize and trust your sending patterns. This process helps to avoid your emails being marked as spam due to sudden high volume, which is often a red flag for spam-like behavior.
However, doing this yourself takes up a lot of time and isn’t optimal, instead what most brands do is use automated tools to warm up their inboxes. One of them is Instantly. You can sign-up quickly and warm up all your email accounts with one subscription.
The Maximum Number of Emails You Can Send Per Day
Especially for newer domains or email addresses, it is important to limit the number of emails sent per day. This limit should gradually increase as the email address or domain ages. Adhering to this limitation helps maintain your sender reputation by preventing ESPs from marking your emails as spam due to perceived aggressive sending behavior. While there aren't set in stone rules of how many emails you can send daily, research by Mailforge found the following results:
Additionally, you get bonus points by tailoring your email lists through segmentation to ensure that the content is relevant to the audience. This relevance can significantly improve engagement rates (like opens and clicks), which in turn positively impacts your sender reputation.
Segmentation involves dividing your email list based on criteria such as demographics, behavior, or engagement history, ensuring that each recipient receives content that is likely to be of interest to them.
Content of Emails
Personalizing the content of an email can significantly improve email deliverability by enhancing recipient engagement and interaction with the email, which in turn positively impacts the sender's reputation with ESPs. To personalize the content of an email effectively and thereby improve email deliverability, you can follow these strategic steps:
Personalize the Subject Line and Email Content: Address the recipient by name in the subject line to immediately catch their attention. Further, personalize the email body by referencing their specific interests, recent interactions, or any other personal details you have. This could be as simple as acknowledging a recent purchase or as detailed as offering recommendations based on their preferences.
Timing and Frequency: Customize the timing and frequency of your emails based on the recipient's timezone and previous interactions with your emails. Sending emails at a time when they are more likely to be read increases the chances of engagement.
Use A/B Testing: Continuously test different aspects of your email personalization to see what works best. Test different subject lines, email content, images, and CTAs with various segments of your audience to refine your approach based on what yields the highest engagement rates.
Avoid Links and Pictures: You shouldn’t use more than 1 picture and/or link, especially in the first email you send to a prospect. Links and pictures are 2 factors that trigger spam filters and can hinder your deliverability. Instead, try using as much plain HTML as possible.
Give the Option to Opt-Out: In some countries you are forced by law to make it easy to opt out from your lead list. Nonetheless, you should always respect other people's time and thus make it easy for them to stop receiving emails from you. The benefits are a lower unsubscribe rate and better segmentation.
By implementing these strategies, you can create more relevant, engaging, and effective emails that resonate with your audience, thus improving email deliverability and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Measuring Your Email Deliverability Health
After you have set up your email accounts and domain settings you should always keep an eye on your email health. If you see a drop in your open rates or engagement rates this can indicate that your email wasn’t delivered successfully or that your content wasn’t engaging. Likewise, if your bounce rate and spam complaints increase, you should see if your content is too promotional or clean your email list, so you only send it to an engaging audience.
Furthermore, you should keep in mind these tools that help email marketers understand and improve how their emails are delivered to recipients’ inboxes. These tools focus specifically on whether an email lands in the main inbox, the spam folder, or doesn't get delivered at all. Here are some of the tools you should look at:
MXToolBox
MXToolbox is a widely recognized tool that plays a crucial role in managing and improving email deliverability. It provides a suite of essential functionalities that help in diagnosing and resolving issues related to email sending and receiving. Here are some key reasons why MXToolbox is valuable for enhancing email deliverability:
Comprehensive Email Server Testing
Blacklist Monitoring
Alerts and Reports
Diagnostic Tools
DNS Record and Configuration Checks
Google Postmasters
Google Postmaster Tools is a valuable resource for anyone who sends large volumes of email, particularly marketers and organizations that rely on reaching their users’ Gmail inboxes. It provides insights into how Gmail views your email traffic, including how your emails are being treated by Google's spam filters. Key features include:
Spam Feedback Loop
IP Reputation Monitoring
Domain Reputation
Authentication Results (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)
Delivery Error
By utilizing Google Postmaster Tools, senders can gain a deeper understanding of how their emails are handled by one of the largest email providers in the world, allowing them to optimize their email strategies accordingly. This tool is particularly useful for improving email practices and ensuring that communications reach their intended audiences effectively.
Mail-Tester
The last tool we will look at is Mail-tester, which is a straightforward and effective tool used primarily for evaluating the "spamminess" of your emails to improve deliverability before you send them to your actual list. Here’s how Mail-tester works:
Send Your Email: Mail-tester provides you with a unique temporary email address to which you send your email.
Check Your Score: After you send your email, you visit the Mail-tester website and check your score by clicking on the provided link.
Detailed Report: The tool then provides a detailed report of your email, scoring it on a scale from 0 to 10. A higher score indicates a lower likelihood of your email ending up in the spam folder.
Using Mail-tester is particularly beneficial for email marketers and businesses to preemptively identify and rectify potential deliverability issues. By ensuring that your emails are optimized for these factors, you can significantly increase the chances that they will reach your recipients’ inboxes rather than getting lost in spam folders.
We hope this article helped you set up your email deliverability. If you have any questions or need any assistance, feel free to contact us at:
Other Blogs
Other Blogs
Check our other project Blogs with useful insight and information for your businesses
Other Blogs
Other Blogs
Check our other project Blogs with useful insight and information for your businesses
Other Blogs
Other Blogs
Check our other project Blogs with useful insight and information for your businesses