What's your best tip for improving email deliverability?

Being viewed as a legitimate sender in the eyes of mailbox providers and your subscribers is the first step to the long path to great deliverability and requires authentication. SPF specifies which IP address and/or hostnames are authorised to send from your domain. DKIM confirms that the email was actually sent from your domain. DMARC protocols are designed for combating fraudulent email where a sender can specify to allow, quarantine or reject mail that fails DMARC. Getting these three in place will help set the foundation to launch your email success from.

I have worked with DTC brands to send thousands of emails in 2022 & 2023. The best tip to improve deliverability (that I've seen work firsthand and pull its weight) is to shift from the shared domain of your ESP to your own custom domain where the emails you send build up your reputation. Make the change. Do a warm up sequence starting with your most engaged segments. Ensure that the content you drip is non-promotional, offers a ton of value, and creates a sense of positive anticipation in your audience. Also encourage your email readers to proactively whitelist your ID (this is especially important for Gmail). From there on out, you must stick to a clean email template without a profusion of images & links. The more you can mimic communication from a friend, the better the inbox SPAM filters will treat you.

Continuously test various components of your emails to identify which factors yield higher open and click-through rates. By conducting A/B tests, you can optimize your email campaigns based on subscriber preferences and engagement, subsequently improving your sender reputation. As mailbox providers track engagement metrics, having a higher engagement rate increases the likelihood of your emails reaching your subscribers' inboxes and ultimately enhances your deliverability. When conducting A/B tests, it's essential to focus on one variable at a time to accurately determine its impact on performance. Beyond the common variables like subject lines and send times, consider testing the following more unusual elements: 1. Graphic vs plain text emails 2. Button shape, color, text 3. Tone and voice, copy length 4. Visual elements (header image vs no header image, gifs, videos) 5. Emoji usage 6. Testimonials and social proof

Maintaining a strong sender reputation is crucial for achieving consistent email deliverability. It's not enough to simply react to issues as they arise - you need to be proactive in monitoring your reputation & staying ahead of potential problems. By regularly tracking your sender reputation data & using it to inform your sending practices, you can improve your inbox placement, reduce your risk of being flagged as spam, increase the engagement & effectiveness of your campaigns. Pay attention not just to basic metrics shared by your ESPs, but also use postmaster tools from ISPs directly and perform seedlisting tests regularly. Armed with this information, you can make data-driven decisions about list hygiene, content strategy, & sending frequency that will keep your email program healthy & your audience engaged. If you want to boost your email deliverability & stand out in today's crowded inbox, start monitoring your deliverability proactively - and watch your sender reputation soar.

The simplest trick I know to boost email deliverability is to lengthen your email copy in the body of the email. The spam filters look at words and length. It's hard to figure out exactly what words the spam filter is looking for so the easiest thing to do is to add more length to your copy.

When it comes to email deliverability there are lots of factors to think about and certain things you should have in place right from the start but creating content your subscribers love and will engage with has to be one of the keyways to keep your deliverability in prime condition. But what does this mean? Well, in a nutshell, give them content that's informative, interesting, interactive, the kind of content you would want to read. Not just sales, sales, sales, buy, buy, buy, offer, offer, offer. For example, if you run a beauty business, don’t just try and sell products, send your subscribers tips, success stories, how-to videos, ask them questions, surveys, the list is endless. If you get this right, you will see a nice stream of opens, clicks, and in some cases replies, which will all help in keeping your deliverability on the right track.

Here's a strategy to maintain deliverability in a mature email marketing program. Regularly create a segment of delivered email addresses. That is, any address that has successfully received an email in the past 30, 60, 90, 180 days. Further segment this by clicks. When sending campaigns, first send the segment of clickers, followed by the segment of openers, and then new contacts, prospects, mixing into this segment small percentages of contacts that are less active, less engaged, within the 90 or 180 days out. Throttling sends in this way warms up inbox providers to your content. Watch the metrics by segment and be ready to react to any drops in deliverability.

By consistently sending a similar number of emails each day, without any major decreases, and keeping a 1-5 minute gap between each email, you can build a positive trust score for your email account. This steady pattern lets email servers know that your messages are genuine and not spam. As a result, the chances of your emails reaching your subscribers' inboxes are increased, which can lead to better engagement and communication with your audience.

Pay great attention to your acquisition sources in order to minimise the amount of inactive and invalid addresses making it onto your lists. You should use an on-the-fly list validation mechanism on your sign-up form to prevent users from entering a typo address; on top of this, use a reCaptcha or honeypot field to prevent bot signups. If you can, use double-optin which remains the best way to capture clean data. Remember that bad data - subscribers who are not engaging with your emails or marking them as spam, invalid addresses and spam traps - will eventually hinder your ability to reach the inbox.

The best thing you can do to keep (or boost) high deliverability rate is to adjust email campaign schedule and segmentation to audience engagement. Engagement became the most important parameter for the sender rating among ISPs. What does it mean? This is essential to add to segmentation rules based on subscriber engagement. For example, if you have German small business audience you are targeting with regular email campaigns than you should have several segments based on how often subscribers click\open\react on your emails. Send as less as possible to low engagement audience. You shouldn't send email campaigns to high\low engagement audience with the same frequency. Of course, deliverability much more complex knowledge but I would rate the engagement as the most important instance among others.

It's great watching your list grow & grow. But beware, the longer you keep inactive and unengaged users on your email list, the more you risk damage to your reputation and deliverability rates. Providing a clear and easy way for your users to unsubscribe from your emails helps automate the process, but it’s also important to scrub your list on a regular basis so that your email list is healthy and only includes people who engage with your emails. Start segmenting your lists based on engagement, stop sending to those subscribers who haven't opened an email for over 6 months.