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10 Steps to Master Email Deliverability (Ultimate Guide)
The Complete Guide to Avoid the Spam Filter & Improve Engagement
Brandon Storey
August 3rd, 2024
Disclaimer: Our blog posts on deliverability and DNS settings, including DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records, are informative but not exhaustive. Making these changes can impact your sending capabilities. We strongly recommend consulting a deliverability expert or the beehiiv support team before implementing any changes.
Email is still one of the best ways to communicate with an audience online.
Regardless of new technologies, social platforms, or apps, email has remained on top, generating marketers and online business owners an average return on investment of 3600%.
While email is a powerful tool, it’s useless if your emails aren’t making it to your reader’s inboxes.
Think about it. If you spend hours (or days) crafting the perfect email every week, only to see that it’s landing in your readers’ spam folders, it can be incredibly discouraging.
That’s why you need to master email deliverability.
The reality is that only 79.6% of emails reach their final destination. That means about 1 in 5 emails are crushed due to poor deliverability.
In this guide, we’ll break down ten key steps you need to take to master email deliverability including some best practices you need to follow to ensure your emails land in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
Email Deliverability Explained
Email deliverability is primarily the rate at which your emails make it to your subscribers’ inboxes. As mentioned above, the average deliverability is about 79.6% – meaning 4 in 5 emails actually make it to subscribers’ inboxes after the email publisher hits send.
However, deliverability isn’t just how many emails make it to their final destination. It encompasses a broad combination of efforts and requirements, including:
the coordination of sender and domain reputation
spam rate complaints
list hygiene practice
technical authentication
subscriber interaction.
Together, these elements and practices help us determine how effective we are at getting emails to the inbox.
Email deliverability is the foundation of any successful email marketing strategy, especially if you run an email newsletter.
If your email isn’t getting to your readers’ inboxes, then they can’t open the email. If they can’t open it, they can’t read it. If they can’t read it, they can’t click on it. If they can’t click on it, they won’t buy anything, or take action where you want them to.
The end result is your subscribers aren’t being served the value they signed up for. And, you aren’t able to generate the engagement or the income you hoped for.
In many ways, deliverability is the most critical component of email marketing. If your deliverability rate is poor, it has a negative domino effect on every other part of your email strategy.
To learn more about getting started with email deliverability, check out Spamhaus’ Email Deliverability Guide (download).
How Is Email Deliverability Measured?
Email deliverability is measured with a simple calculation:
The number of emails that landed in your subscribers’ inboxes divided by the total number of emails sent.
Landing in inbox / Total email sends.
For example, let’s say you sent an email to 5,536 subscribers. Of those, only 4,208 made it to the inboxes.
4,208 / 5,536 = 76.0%
In this scenario, your email deliverability is 76%.
What Is a High Email Delivery Success Rate?
So, just how high should your email delivery score be?
Generally speaking, a good delivery range to aim for is 85% to 95%.
Most email service providers (ESPs) will state that they can offer email delivery of about 95%. If you can get your delivery to this range, you know you’re on the right track. If your delivery dips below 90% then you definitely need to start actively working towards improving your rate.
If your delivery is under 85%, then you should be shifting the majority of your efforts to get that number up.
How Can I Improve My Email Deliverability?
Wondering how you can improve your deliverability?
The best way is to step into the shoes of the ones who make email possible: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.
Can you guess how many emails are sent every day?
One million? One hundred million? One Billion?
Actually, it’s more like 347 billion. That’s about 43 emails for every person on earth sent every single day. And, email providers act as the highway to ensure these emails get to the right place.
The problem is – many of these emails are spammy, scammy, and unwelcomed by the recipients. So, if email providers like Gmail want to ensure people are using their highways to receive their emails, they need to do their best to filter out the garbage.
Guess how many of the 347 billion emails sent every day are spam.
In 2022, 48% of all emails sent were spam emails— That’s almost half!
Email providers are constantly working to maintain the ongoing onslaught of junk emails. One of the ways they do this is by punishing bad sending habits.
They have an algorithm dedicated to looking for markers of spammy emails to ensure recipients aren’t getting bombarded with spam.
So, how do you ensure your emails get delivered? Thankfully, there are a handful of proven strategies you can use to optimize your deliverability so that when you hit send, your email actually reaches your readers’ inboxes.
Follow the ten steps below to master your deliverability so your emails actually make it to your subscribers.
Why Listen to Me? I’ve managed two email newsletters over the years including one with 100,000 subscribers and one with 30,000. I currently run a digital media business, Hockey Question, that gets over 50,000 visits per month.
1. Authenticate Your Email Domain
The first step to getting your deliverability on track is to authenticate your sender domain with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. This might all sound like jargon to you, but don’t worry. These are just a few technical steps you need to take to establish a reputable sender reputation on the back end.
What email authentication does is convey to your subscriber’s server that your email is coming from a verified email domain rather than a scammer.
Here are three ways you can authenticate your email domain:
1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
SPF is an authentication method to verify that an email isn’t coming from a relay server but from a legitimate, authorized sender.
2. Domain Keys Identified Mails (DKIM)
DKIM uses public-key encryption to ensure no alterations are made to an email while it’s being transmitted. This involves the use of a digital signature with the email domain found in the DNS.
3. Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)
DMARC is a safeguard against spam and phishing attacks. It uses DKIM and SPF methods to authenticate an email and blocks fraud messages from specific domains.
You can read more about exactly how to set up the three authentication methods above in this post here.
4. Brand Indicators for Messaging Identification (BIMI)
BIMI is an emerging email security technology that lets brands use verified sender logos in supporting email providers. You can set up BIMI by following the steps in this post we wrote.
2. Warm Up Your Email List
Before you send your first email from a new IP address, it’s crucial that you do what’s known as an email domain warmup (or IP warmup).
The process is pretty straightforward: start by sending your emails to a small group of your most engaged subscribers. Then, slowly increase the number of subscribers you’re sending to (while expanding your email sends to less engaged subscribers).
With this method, you’re essentially working to prove to email providers that your emails aren’t spammy due to recipient engagement. Engagement signals like high percentages of opens and clicks indicate to email providers that your emails are relevant and valuable to your readers.
This process is essentially working to build up your email sender reputation – similar to a credit score.
As more time passes and you’re consistently getting good engagement, email providers, in a way, grant you access to more credit – or the ability to send to larger groups of people at once without deliverability penalties.
One thing to keep in mind is that you should be consistent. Try to stick to a send schedule. If you’re sending sporadically to your subscribers, there’s a higher chance that you’ll trigger spam filters.
3. Check Your Sender Reputation
You know that email sender credit score I just mentioned above? There’s a way you can (sort of) measure what it is.
You can manually measure it by calculating:
Total spam reports of your company
Bounce rates
Spam rates
Unsubscribe rates
Complaints filed against you
Your company’s email history
Your domain reputation
Or, you can use one of the following tools to get an actual score like a credit report from a credit bureau:
For most of these tools, you simply enter your IP or domain address, and it will give you an email sender score (and oftentimes insights on how to improve it).
4. Tighten Up Your Opt-In Process
The next thing you’ll want to do is focus on your opt-in process.
This is how you collect email addresses and add them to your email list. A good opt-in process ensures you’re starting your email list off on the right track with active readers rather than unengaged subscribers.
Think about it – if you’re constantly sending emails to people who aren’t reading them or opening them, this is a negative mark email providers put on your “credit score”.
Low engagement percentages are a red flag to email providers and can negatively impact your email deliverability as they will think you’re spamming people.
With a single opt-in process, once someone submits their email address using your signup form, they’re in and can start receiving your emails. The problem is that many people use fake email accounts or throwaway accounts and bots can submit emails into forms.
The result with single opt-in is a higher percentage of subscribers won’t be real. Or, they’ll rarely interact with your emails, resulting in lower overall engagement and an increased chance of poor deliverability.
A better way to ensure the people who sign up actually interact with your emails is through a double opt-in process.
In double opt-in, after someone submits their email on a signup form, they have to go through a second step to officially be added to your email list. This is often done through an automated email that’s sent as soon as they fill out the form. In the email, they’ll be asked to click a link to confirm their subscription.
5. Make It Easy for Subscribers to Opt-Out
While it’s important to ensure you’re set up with a strict opt-in process, it’s just as important you have a smooth opt-out process.
Once your subscribers agree to receive your emails, you need to make sure you make it easy for them to opt-out.
This may seem counterintuitive to growing a large email list. But, the truth is, a large list isn’t always a successful one.
If it’s challenging for someone to figure out how to unsubscribe, they’ll end up as dead weight on your list. What this means is you will likely continue sending emails to them, but they’ll stop opening them, signaling to email providers a lower engagement rate.
Even worse, if you don’t have a clear opt-out button for someone to unsubscribe, they may end up frustrated, and click the spam button to mark your emails as spammy. If this happens enough, it’s a sure-fire way to fast-track your sender reputation as spammy.
Being tricky and hiding your unsubscribe button isn’t a smart or effective way to improve your email newsletter. Rather, it’s a good way to end up with an overcrowded, “dirty” list that’s regularly marking your emails as spam. And, this leads us to our next step…
6. Regularly Clean Your Email List
Everyone wants the biggest list possible right?
Wrong.
Email marketing success is not found in the quantity of your list. It’s found in the quality.
The longer you keep unengaged and inactive subscribers on your email list, the more you risk harming your sender reputation and ultimately your deliverability.
Think of your email list like a garden. If you plant seeds, water them, and give them enough sunlight, you’ll have a nice yield one day you can live off of. But, there’s a crucial component you’re missing to ensure you get the best harvest possible: weeding.
If you want to ensure your garden grows to its full potential, you need to get rid of nasty weeds that are sucking the life from your garden. And, this isn’t something you do once. Rather, it’s a practice that should be done consistently.
Giving your users a way to easily unsubscribe from your list can help automate a part of your list cleaning. But, it’s not the only thing you need to do. It’s important to scrub your email list at set intervals so you’re only sending newsletters to people who actually engage with your emails.
Sending emails to unengaged or non-existent users can increase the odds that your emails bounce when trying to land on real subscribers who are actually engaged.
Every month or quarter, you should remove all inactive readers from your email list. You can use a platform like beehiiv to filter which subscribers haven’t opened or clicked on an email in a set time period (i.e. 90 days) and then remove them.
At beehiiv, we recently launched two brand new features that allow you to optimize your deliverability on autopilot!
With the new features, you can design a fully automated re-engagement campaign to remove dormant subscribers and keep your list clean. The result is improved deliverability and engagement for your newsletter.
To learn more, check out this recent post!
7. Write Non-Spammy Subject Lines
One critical factor that impacts your deliverability is your subject line. Not only does it affect whether or not someone will open your email (thus leading to better or worse deliverability), but… it can also automatically trigger spam filters regardless of your sender reputation.
One part of the email provider spam algorithm is analyzing sketchy subject lines. If email providers see certain words or phrases in a subject line, they may send a red flag which then sends your email to the spam folder immediately.
Your goal should always be to land in the inbox.
Here are some words and phrases you should avoid in your subject lines as they’ve historically been abused by email senders:
FREE
Eliminate your debt
Limited time offer
Claim your discount NOW!
100% FREE
Jackpot
Exclusive deal
Dear Friend
Please read
Congratulations!
For only $X amount
Hurry!
Act immediately
There are also certain symbols or styles of writing that can trigger spam filters like:
WRITING IN CAPS LOCK
Using exclamation marks!!!
Exaggerated or repeat symbols or numbers (i.e. $$$, 0% risk, 444)
You might be thinking some of these phrases actually could be useful for your niche or email topic. Don’t worry, there are always ways to entice your readers to open your email without sounding overly salesy.
Plus, email providers are focused primarily on subject lines (and preheader text). They don’t typically put much weight into what you say inside your email content. So your goal should be to keep your subject line attention-grabbing without being too spammy.
For a full list of subject line words to avoid, check out our full list of 200+ spam words.
8. Focus on High-Quality Emails
Now that you’ve covered the back end, the opt-in process, and subject lines, it’s time to get to your actual email content.
Unfortunately, when you’re crafting content, you have to keep two people happy: your readers and email providers. Just remember, while it’s still important to satisfy email providers, it’s far more important to keep your readers happy.
When your subscribers are excited about your content and engaging with it, positive sender signals will be sent automatically to your email providers which will improve your deliverability. That’s why the most important job of an email marketer or publisher is to focus on creating quality content.
The more valuable your emails are to your subscribers, the more they will read and engage with them. At beehiiv, we’ve partnered with some of the brightest minds in the email newsletter world to create a robust course that teaches you how to write and design incredible email newsletters. Check out Newsletter XP here.
9. Segment Your List
It’s not enough to send high-quality emails. You also need to send relevant emails.
Think about it this way: you could have the greatest newsletter in the world. But, if you’re talking about dogs to cat people, you’re going to lose your audience.
Segmentation and engagement go hand in hand. By splitting your audience into different segments, you can ensure that the right people are receiving email content that’s relevant and valuable to them, making them that much more likely to read and engage with the next email you send.
Here are a few starting points for segmenting your audience:
Demographics: Age, gender, occupation
Geography: Country, state, city
Behavior: Specific interactions, actions, engagement level
Buyer’s journey stage: Awareness, decision-making, repeat customer
Just remember, your segmentation options don’t have to be rigid. The options are endless and they can change over time depending on your audience, your goals, and your content direction.
The bottom line here is that your audience doesn’t want to receive a generic email blast. They want personalized emails that speak right to their pain points and desires.
10. Email Deliverability Best Practices
Want some more tactics and tools you can use to improve your deliverability? Follow these email deliverability best practices and you’ll be well on your way:
1. Offer content quickly after signing up. The quicker you can get your readers to engage with your content, the more likely they are to stick around and stay engaged.
2. Sign up for Google Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS, and Yahoo Feedback (at beehiiv, we’ll handle Microsoft and Yahoo for you). These services give you reputation insights from specific email providers.
3. Adjust sends to engaged segments to build up deliverability. When in doubt about your engagement, always send your emails to a more frequently engaged segment. Once your opens and clicks start climbing, open up to less engaged people.
4. Test your emails for spam before you hit send. You can try using spam-checking tools to score your content. Your emails could get blocked or sent to spam for a variety of reasons. There are some free tools that can help you understand your likelihood of trigger spam filters. Keep in mind, these tools can’t determine a completely accurate test of your deliverability. Instead, they can offer potential points of interest to look for patterns of poor deliverability.
5. Regularly monitor and optimize your performance. You should be analyzing your newsletter stats every time you hit send. But, you should also do a deep dive into your metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes once a month in your ESP to check for patterns of poor deliverability to ensure you’re staying on top of engagement and deliverability.
6. Maintain the right text-to-image ratio. Email providers prefer emails that have more text than images. Try to maintain a text-to-image ratio of 60:40.
7. Use personalization as much as possible. Don’t just use first names. Incorporate behavioral data, user preferences, and purchase data when crafting emails.
8. Don’t send emails from too many names. You should maintain a consistent sender name “[email protected]”. Too many names can lead to people not knowing who they’re receiving an email from increasing the odds of triggering spam filters.
9. Don’t use purchased email lists. While this is a quick way to grow your list, it’s also a quick way to trigger spam filters (since you haven’t warmed them up and people may have not properly opted-in to your list.
10. Send your emails at the right time. You should test different send times with your audience as there will be certain days or times in the day when they are more likely to open your emails and engage with your content.
11. Use a reputable email service provider (ESP). The software you use to send your emails has a major impact on your deliverability. Make sure you’re using a trusted tool like beehiiv to ensure you have a solid deliverability foundation.
12. Set the right expectations with your subscribers. Only promise what you can deliver. This will drastically impact your engagement. Be clear about what your newsletter is about and how often readers should expect it. Your email signup form, welcome email, and the first newsletter blast your subscriber receives are crucial points to start from.
Leverage beehiiv to Improve Your Email Deliverability
If you want to make your email marketing a success, you need to ensure your emails find their way to your readers’ inboxes.
By focusing on deliverability, you’ll do wonders for your engagement rates. By following the steps above including the best practices, you’ll be well on your way to hitting a 90%+ deliverability rate.
If you’re looking to see email newsletter success by improving your deliverability, then look no further than beehiiv.
beehiiv is the email platform you need to elevate your email newsletter strategy with robust analytics to help monitor and optimize your deliverability, advanced growth tools, and a powerful email editor to give you full control over your email content.
Ready to take your email strategy to the next level? Try beehiiv today, absolutely free.
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