How can I improve my email deliverability?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum shares that a key to inbox placement is to actively engage with your subscribers. Ask them questions, encourage replies, and make them feel like part of a community. Inbox providers look favorably on senders who foster engagement.
Email marketer from Litmus shares that testing your emails before sending them is a key, but often overlooked, aspect of maintaining good deliverability. Testing across different email clients and devices will identify any rendering issues or broken links that could harm your sender reputation and cause recipients to mark your emails as spam.
Email marketer from Constant Contact shares that building trust with subscribers is crucial for improving deliverability. This includes being transparent about why you're sending them emails, honoring their preferences, and making it easy for them to unsubscribe if they no longer want to receive your messages.
Email marketer from HubSpot shares that an often-overlooked aspect of improving email deliverability is optimizing your email content for mobile devices. With a significant portion of emails being opened on mobile, ensuring your emails render correctly and provide a seamless experience on smaller screens is crucial.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that many email marketing platforms offer pre-send checks and tools for monitoring Google Postmaster, blocklists, and feedback loops. Although some vendors offer deliverability scores, focusing on best practices is most important.
Email marketer from Sendinblue explains that achieving higher email deliverability requires a multi-faceted approach. They advise focusing on list hygiene (removing inactive subscribers), warming up your IP address gradually when starting a new campaign, sending personalized content based on subscriber behavior, and actively managing your sender reputation by monitoring feedback loops and addressing complaints. Using a dedicated IP address can also provide more control over your sending reputation.
Email marketer from Neil Patel shares that avoiding spam filters involves several key steps. You should avoid using spam trigger words in your email subject lines and body, ensure your emails are mobile-friendly, maintain a consistent sending frequency, and always provide value to your subscribers. Actively encourage recipients to add you to their address book to signal that your emails are wanted.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce shares that using an email validation service is crucial to keeping your lists clean and improving deliverability. These tools identify and remove invalid, inactive, or risky email addresses that can harm your sender reputation and increase bounce rates.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares the key factors for good deliverability, including having an opt-in audience, relevant content, easy unsubscribe, no cross-subscription, accessibility considerations (no text in images), avoiding third-party domains, ensuring email authentication (SPF & DKIM), using Google Postmaster Tools, and monitoring bounces & complaints. He emphasizes that deliverability is about how you send, not a score from a tool.
Email marketer from Mailchimp shares that improving email deliverability involves several key strategies. These include authenticating your email domain, cleaning your email list regularly to remove inactive or invalid addresses, sending engaging and relevant content that recipients want to receive, and segmenting your audience to send targeted emails. Monitoring your sender reputation and addressing any issues promptly is also crucial.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that one often overlooked aspect of deliverability is the importance of consistent branding. Make sure your 'From' name, email address, and content align with your brand identity. Inconsistent branding can raise red flags with spam filters.
What the experts say3Expert opinions
Expert from Spam Resource explains that avoiding common mistakes, such as purchasing email lists, not having clear unsubscribe options, and sending irrelevant content, is essential for improving deliverability. These practices can lead to high bounce rates and spam complaints, negatively impacting your sender reputation.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that maintaining a good IP address reputation is crucial for deliverability. This means warming up new IPs properly, monitoring blocklist status, and sending consistently to engaged subscribers. Damaged IP reputation can significantly impact inbox placement.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that testing is valuable for monitoring the effectiveness of best practices, but it doesn't guarantee inbox placement. Good practices are what ensure you get into the inbox.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from DMARC shares that DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) builds upon SPF and DKIM to provide a comprehensive email authentication framework. DMARC allows you to specify how receiving mail servers should handle email messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks. Implementing DMARC is crucial for protecting your domain from email spoofing and phishing attacks, and improving your email deliverability.
Documentation from DKIM shares that DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) provides a way to authenticate email messages by digitally signing them. DKIM records in your DNS allow receiving mail servers to verify that an email message was indeed sent by your domain and has not been tampered with. Implementing DKIM is essential for improving email deliverability and preventing phishing attacks.
Documentation from Microsoft Learn explains that, for Outlook.com deliverability, it's essential to maintain a clean sending reputation. This includes adhering to best practices for email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), monitoring bounce rates and complaint feedback loops, and promptly addressing any issues. Microsoft also advises senders to provide clear unsubscribe options and respect recipient preferences to avoid being marked as spam.
Documentation from Google Workspace Admin Help explains that to improve email delivery to Gmail users, you should authenticate your email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Ensure that sending servers have valid forward and reverse DNS records (PTR records). Keep complaint rates low and avoid sending unwanted mail. They also recommend using Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your domain's reputation.
Documentation from RFC explains that SPF records are critical for email authentication. SPF records specify which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain. Properly configuring your SPF records helps prevent spammers from forging your email address and improves your email deliverability by ensuring that legitimate emails are more likely to reach the inbox.