12 Effective Ways to Increase Email Deliverability

Getting emails delivered to the recipient's inbox is one of the biggest challenges most email marketers struggle with. It's disheartening to see your emails land in spam despite all the effort and time you're invested in creating a compelling email.

But, this guide will put you out of this dilemma and get your email into the recipient's inbox by giving you 12 easy and effective tactics to improve your email deliverability.

Table of contents

• Difference between email delivery and email deliverability

  • What is email delivery?
  • What is email deliverability?

• How to increase your email deliverability

  • 1. Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
  • • Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
  • • DomainKeys Identified Mails (DKIM)
  • • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)
  • 2. Warmup your IP address
  • 3. Keep a check on sender reputation and blacklists
  • 4. Use double opt-in or confirmed opt-in
  • 5. Make it easy to unsubscribe
  • 6. Avoid spammy words in your emails.
  • 7. Don't use a purchased email lists
  • 8. Clean your lists regularly and use segmentation
  • 9. Segment your email list
  • 10. Maintain a consistent sending frequency and schedule
  • 11. Send emails that people love to engage with
  • 12. Monitor performance metrics regularly and fix issues

• Conclusion

Difference between email delivery and email deliverability

Before we get to the tactics, we want to clarify that email delivery and email deliverability are two distinct metrics.

What is email delivery?

Email delivery measures whether or not the recipient can accept your emails. If an email is not bounced, it's getting delivered to the recipient. Hence, you'll see a good email delivery rate.

Email delivery rate doesn't distinguish between email getting delivered to the inbox or spam folder. It measures the number of emails that didn't get bounced.

What is email deliverability?

After the recipient's server accepts the email, the next challenge is making it to the user's inbox and not the spam folder. This is where the email deliverability or inbox placement rate comes in. It measures the number of emails delivered to the recipient's inbox.

Now that we have clarified the distinction between these two metrics let's dive right into the tactics to increase your deliverability rate.

How to increase your email deliverability

Here is a list of the 12 most effective ways to help you increase your email deliverability:

1. Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

One of the key components of setting up the right email infrastructure is authenticating your sender domain.

Email authentication conveys to your recipient's server that the email is from a verified and legitimate domain, not a fraudster. Hence, email authentication is necessary, so your email doesn't end up landing in a spam folder and directly reaches your subscribers' inbox.

There are different ways through which you can authenticate your email:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

SPF is an email authentication method to verify that incoming email is coming from an authorised and legitimate sender not from a relay server.

• DomainKeys Identified Mails (DKIM)

DKIM ensures that no alteration is made to the message while transmitting it. Public-key encryption helps in encrypting a particular message. It involves linking the digital signature with the domain name in the DNS. The recipient system can verify using the public key to decrypt the signature. It ensures that the message is not modified while transmitting, and thus the email is authenticated.

• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)

DMARC ensures that the email is not a spam or phishing attack. DMARC uses both SPF and DKIM techniques to authenticate the email. In addition, it blocks all fraud messages sent from any specific domain.

2. Warmup your IP address

Before you send emails from a new IP address, it's imperative to do an IP warmup. This process is also known as domain warmup. You should reach out to your ESP as they'll help you set up the whole warmup program.

In theory, the process works like this: Send a small number of emails to your most active and engaged users. When these users open and engage with your emails, it signals to ISP that your emails are relevant and help build up IP reputation. As your reputation score build up, within a week or two, you'll be able to send a large number of emails without any deliverability issue.

"An IP reputation is hard to build, easy to lose, and hard to regain," says Rob Pellow, digital experience director at Armadillo. "Therefore, ensuring you are sending the best emails before they are sent will limit the damage caused, and monitoring, post-send, will allow fine-tuning — and it will allow you to know when further action needs to be taken to protect or improve your IP status."

3. Keep a check on sender reputation and blacklists

It is essential to have a good sender reputation or sender score. You can measure it based on

• complaints filed against you by the user

• the total number of spam reports of your company

• your company's email history to date

• your company domain's reputation, and

• the bounce rate

There are many tools you can use to check your sender's reputation, including

• Senderscore.org

• BarracudaCentral

• Google Postmaster

• Microsoft SNDS

All you need to do is put your IP or domain address in these tools, which will generate your sender score and insights to improve it.

Here's a small video to help set up your domain on Google Postmaster.

A lower sender reputation can get your IP blacklisted, which plunges your campaign's deliverability.

Mailmodo has a mechanism set up to inform you about the issue and run you through the process of getting it fixed. They also contact the blacklisting services company to remove names from their lists.

4. Use double opt-in or confirmed opt-in

Ensure that all the subscribers on your email list are genuinely interested in receiving your emails and have valid email addresses. One way to ensure that is to use double opt-in.

Asking users to verify their email address once they signup is an easy way to check the validity of their email address. It also prevents sending emails to users who are genuinely interested in your product, increasing email interaction and engagement.

Learn more about double opt-in and how to set it up

5. Make it easy to unsubscribe

You must ensure that your subscribers don't have any issues while opting out of your email list. If the unsubscribe process is confusing or difficult, they will make your email spam affecting your deliverability rate.

It's a good practice for you to let them opt-out easily if they want an out. So, include a clear unsubscribe link or button in all your emails. Besides, use enough white space so users can click without clicking on any other link.

The easier you'll make, the lesser the chances of spam complaints.

6. Avoid spammy words in your emails.

It's easy to get trapped in a spam folder due to a single spammy word you used in your email, be it subject line, preheader text, or email copy.

These words trigger the spam filters and signal them that the email contains spammy content. Thus, landing in the junk folder. Some of these triggers words are as follows:

• Claim your discount NOW!

• Act immediately

• Claim your discount NOW!

• Jackpot

• 100% FREE

• For only XXX amount

We have curated a list of 284 spam trigger words you should avoid improving email deliverability.

Besides spammy words, you should also avoid:

• Using characters in your subject line like ", >,! etc.
• Writing in All CAPS
• Symbols or exaggerated numbers like 777, $$$, 0% risk.

7. Don't use a purchased email lists

Buying email lists might seem the easiest way to reach the maximum number of people. But, it might impact your email deliverability due to the following reason:

• You don't have the approval of the recipients.
• The email address might be invalid or doesn't exist.
• It's against the email laws and can have legal repercussions.

So, be good email marketers and create your email list using the right practices. Check out our email list guide to grow your list today!

8. Clean your lists regularly and use segmentation

Over time some subscribers will stop engaging with your emails or change their email address due to a change in job or any other external reason. If you keep sending them emails, you might not get any engagement due to such reasons.

That's why periodically cleaning such addresses from the email list is imperative to maintain a healthy deliverability rate.

Here's are a few best practices to maintain email list hygiene:

• Remove hard bounced email addresses,

• Have a suppression list and include the following users in that lits

  • Inactive users
  • The user who stopped engaging with your emails
  • Users who have unsubscribed

• Implement a sunset policy to define the criteria and periods to put the recipient into the suppression list.

9. Segment your email list

To improve deliverability, you must engage with your subscribers with relevant and valuable content. No one likes to hear a generic email that seems impersonal and invaluable. This is why you need to segment your email subscriber based on different criteria, such as

• Demography: Gender, age, ethnicity, occupation
• Geography: Country, city, pincode
• Behavioral data: Past interactions, engagement level
• Stage in buyer's journey: Awareness, consideration, or decision-making
• Lifecycle stage: New or existing customers, frequent buyers, loyal customers

A segmented email is more targeted and resonates with the recipient. When you make an effort and go the extra mile, it gets reflected in your email's performance. Besides, when you combine segmentation with personalization, you'll see a tremendous increase in email engagement boosting your deliverbaility rate.

Read how SBNRI maintained their email list hygiene with Mailmodo, leading to a 16% increase in open rates.

10. Maintain a consistent sending frequency and schedule

You need to make a consistent schedule for sending your email with the right frequency and timing so that people don't ignore your email.

There is no use in sending emails when people cannot view them, so choosing the right time and day is essential based on industry, email campaign type, and your receipt's interaction behaviors.

Sendinblue research suggests the following day and timing across different industries.

Besides the timing, maintaining a consistent frequency also helps improve deliverability as it eliminates the chances of spikes that might occur if you send many emails at once. Read how Project Pro achieved 3X open rates by improving their email deliverability.

11. Send emails that people love to engage with

The emails you send should hook readers and offer value simultaneously. The more engaging your email will be, the more people will wait for your email, and you'll see higher engagement.

Higher engagement signals to ISPs that recipients enjoy your emails, and it will put emails in the recipient's inbox.

One of the best ways to bring more engagement to your email is by incorporating interactive AMP widgets such as shopping carts, quizzes, spin the wheel, polls, embedded forms, and so on. Mailmodo helps bring interactivity with these AMP components inside your recipient's inbox.

Who can resist engaging with an email like this? 👇🏼

Check out more such interactive quiz email templates

12. Monitor performance metrics regularly and fix issues

Keep measuring the performance of your email campaigns in the analytics dashboard. Here are a few things you should do:

• Check performance metrics like unsubscribe, click-through rate, bounce rate, or spam complaints.

• Check your sender's reputation using tools like Google Postmaster

• Recipient's engagement level.

Before you send emails from a new IP address, it's impertaive to do a IP warmup. This process is also known as domain warmup. You should reach out to your ESP as they'll help you set up the whole warmup program.

Conclusion

These are some ways to increase your email deliverability and build a superior email marketing funnel.

If you want to learn more about email deliverability, feel free to reach out to the Mailmodo team. At Mailmodo, we ensure that our users get the best deliverability and send highly converting email campaigns. The use of interactive emails makes the emails more engaging, which creates more users responding via clicks and form submissions, increasing the email deliverability