Ensuring your emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder is crucial for effective email marketing.

According to a 2020 study, 21% of opt-in marketing emails never reach the inbox, significantly impacting open rates and engagement.

This blog post provides a step-by-step checklist to enhance your email deliverability, helping you stay out of the spam folder and maximise your email campaign success.

Understanding Email Deliverability

Definition and Significance

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email to successfully land in a recipient’s inbox. High deliverability rates are essential because they ensure that your marketing messages are being seen by your audience, which can lead to higher engagement rates, improved customer relationships, and increased sales.

Factors Affecting Deliverability

Several factors influence email deliverability:

• Sender Reputation: This is based on the sending domain's history and email practices. Consistent, high-quality sending habits build a good sender reputation, which improves deliverability.

• Email Content: The relevance, structure, and formatting of your emails can affect deliverability. Well-designed emails that avoid spammy content are more likely to reach the inbox.

• Recipient Engagement: Engagement metrics such as opens, clicks, and replies indicate to email service providers (ESPs) that your emails are wanted and valuable, thereby improving deliverability.

Deliverability Checklist

A well-maintained checklist helps ensure you are following best practices to maintain high deliverability. Key steps include proper list management, content optimisation, and technical setup. Refer to the "Titan Stay Out Of Spam" checklist for detailed guidelines.

Technical Setup for Deliverability

• Email Authentication:

  • SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Setup: These protocols verify the legitimacy of your emails, protecting against spoofing and improving deliverability.

  • MX Checker Tool: For a comprehensive check of your domain's email authentication setup, use the MX Checker tool by Dmarcly. This tool helps you verify your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and provides step-by-step guides to set them up correctly, ensuring your emails are authenticated properly and improving deliverability.

  • Benefits of Authentication:

• Dedicated IP Address: Using a dedicated IP address can help establish a consistent sending reputation, which is crucial for high deliverability.

• Consistent Sending Domain: Sending emails from a consistent domain helps build brand recognition and trust among recipients.

• Compliance with Regulations:

  • Understanding GDPR, CAN-SPAM, etc.: These regulations require specific consent and opt-out mechanisms to be included in your emails.

  • Ensuring Compliance to Avoid Penalties: Implementing proper consent methods and clear unsubscribe options helps maintain compliance and avoid fines.

• Double Opt-In Sign Up Process: This process ensures that your subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails, reducing the chances of your emails being marked as spam.(Klaviyo)

  
  

  

  
  

• Create an Unsubscribe & Manage Preferences Link: Providing easy options for recipients to manage their email preferences reduces complaints and improves engagement. (Klaviyo)

In-Life Practices For Deliverability

• List Hygiene and Management:

  • Importance of Clean Email Lists: Regularly updating and cleaning your email list helps maintain high deliverability by removing inactive or invalid email addresses.

  • Techniques for List Cleaning: Employing strategies like removing hard bounces and re-engaging inactive subscribers can keep your list healthy.

    
    

    
  

  • Segments to create:

    • Soft Bounce Segment

      
      

    

    
    

    • Unengaged Segment

      
      

    

  
  

• Segmentation and Targeting:

  • Benefits of Segmented Lists: Segmentation allows you to target the most engaged subscribers, enhancing deliverability and overall campaign performance by sending tailored content that increases open and click rates. It also helps reduce unsubscribe rates by ensuring messages are relevant to each subscriber's interests and behaviours.

  • Engaged Segment: The Engaged Segment focuses on subscribers who have interacted with your emails within a specific time frame, maintaining high engagement levels and improving deliverability rates. Targeting these users with personalised content strengthens relationships and drives more conversions.

For more ideas on segmentation strategies, visit our Segmentation Blog Post.

• Personalise Email Content:

  • Use First Names: Incorporating the recipient's first name into your emails can significantly boost engagement metrics. Personalisation fosters a sense of individual attention and relevance, making recipients more likely to open and click through your emails. Studies have shown that personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, highlighting the importance of this simple tactic.

  • Balance Text and Images: Striking the right balance between text and images is crucial for both engagement and deliverability. Maintaining a 60:40 text-to-image ratio ensures that your emails are visually appealing and informative without triggering spam filters. Overloading an email with images can lead to deliverability issues, while too much text can bore the reader.

Source: Sendx

• Avoid Oversending: Limiting the frequency of your email campaigns helps reduce the risk of spam complaints and unsubscribes. Sending too many emails can overwhelm subscribers, leading to negative interactions with your brand. Aim to strike a balance where your communications are frequent enough to stay top-of-mind but not so frequent that they become a nuisance. Ensure you’re within the below metrics & adjust accordingly.

• Encourage Replies: Prompting recipients to reply to your emails fosters a two-way conversation, which can enhance engagement and improve deliverability. Encouraging replies not only shows that you value their feedback but also signals to email providers that your emails are welcomed by recipients. Including clear calls-to-action for replies, such as asking for opinions, offering support, or inviting questions, can make your emails more interactive and engaging.

Source: Tillamook

• Optimise for Mobile Too: 62% of Opens Occur on Mobile: Given that most email opens happen on mobile devices, it's vital to ensure your emails display properly on both mobile and desktop. Mobile optimization involves using responsive design, larger fonts, easy-to-tap buttons, and properly scaling images. In each template, Klaviyo’s ‘styles’ tab lets you automatically optimise for mobile.

• Avoid 'Spammy Words': Certain words and phrases can trigger spam filters, causing your emails to be marked as spam and never reach the inbox. To avoid this, it’s important to steer clear of commonly flagged words such as "free," "guarantee," "urgent," and "winner." Creating a comprehensive list of spammy words and phrases can help you review your content and avoid 

• Add Alt Text and Links to All Images: Including alt text for images ensures that your email content is accessible to all subscribers, including those using screen readers or with images turned off by default. Adding links to images also enhances click-through rates, providing more opportunities for subscribers to engage with your content.

Source: Klaviyo 

Reviewing & Optimising Deliverability

• Tools for Tracking Deliverability Metrics: Use tools like Klaviyo's analytics to monitor key performance indicators, such as open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. These insights help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your email strategy for better deliverability.

• Use GlockApps to Test Your Deliverability: Regularly test your emails for deliverability issues using GlockApps to identify problems with spam filters, authentication, and inbox placement. This proactive approach helps ensure your emails reach the intended recipients' inboxes.

Source: Glockapps

• Monitor by ESP (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail): Tracking performance by email service provider (ESP) can help identify specific issues affecting your emails' deliverability with different providers. By understanding how each ESP handles your emails, you can tailor your strategy to improve performance. In Klaviyo head to the Deliverability tab to see your negative engagements by channel. If a particular ESP shows high bounce or negative engagement rates, consider sending plain text emails to improve deliverability. This approach can help maintain a good sender reputation and increase the chances of your emails being delivered successfully.

• A/B Test to Maximize Opens: Experiment with different send times, subject lines, and preview text to determine which combinations yield the highest open rates. By testing these elements, you can optimize your emails to capture the audience's attention more effectively.

• A/B Test to Maximize Clicks: Test various CTAs, designs, and content to determine the most effective combinations for driving clicks. This process helps you refine your email campaigns to increase engagement and achieve better results.

Titan Case Study

Following the above tactics, we took this brand out of spam.

Their deliverability score rose from 49 to 84 (a 71.4% boost). We also reduced bounces, spams & unsubscribes by 64%, 48% & 19% respectively.

Follow the above tips for similar results.

Conclusion

You could have the best emails in the world… But you can’t make sales from spam.

By prioritising deliverability, you not only increase the reach of your campaigns but also build stronger relationships with your audience, ultimately driving higher engagement and conversions.

Mastering email deliverability is essential for maximising the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. By understanding and optimising factors such as sender reputation, email content, recipient engagement, and technical setup, you can significantly improve your emails' chances of reaching the inbox. 

Take action today to implement these strategies and monitor their impact on your email marketing efforts. 

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