Maximizing Email Deliverability
There are three main facets to email deliverability
Content (subject, images, key phrases, etc)
Practices (frequency, cleaning, opt-out, etc)
Infrastructure (servers, dns, DKIM, etc)
Content - What you send
Use more words and fewer images
Avoid attachments if possible… especially stuff that adds no value like images in your signature. Use linked images instead of embedded (attached) images
Make sure youe Email Service Provider (ESP) supports including a plain text version of your email along with the HTML version. If not, find a new ESP.
Use branding to make sure recipients know it’s really from you. You don’t want them accidentally marking it as spam.
Avoid spammy words and phrases
Keep your emails reasonably short
Stay away from custom fonts, backgrounds, or colors. Readability is just as important as deliverability.
Practices - How you send it
Every campaign/appeal email you send should have a single addressee. DO NOT use the old “BCC 50 recipients trick” and think you won’t get marked as spam… because you definitely will
Clean up hard-bounces - if an email address hard-bounces, remove that from your mailing list ASAP. Repeated attempts to contact a non-existent email address will make you look sketchy to downstream email servers.
Use an appropriate Opt-In process … Don’t purchase lists of email addresses to populate your subscriber base
Infrastructure - The technical bits
Don’t (ever) send business emails from a generic domain such as gmail or yahoo. Buy a real domain and set it up properly.
Make sure your domain is using ALL of the following:
Are you using a custom Tracking Domain? (because you should be!)
Are you using tracking pixels in your emails? If you’re using a platform such as SalesLoft, then you absolutely are. These are tiny image links embedded in your emails that are invisible to recipients, but are followed by your email client to display the [invisible] image. Each email sent typically has a unique URL for these images which makes it possible to track email open rates on a person-by-person basis.
The problem arises when the domain of these links doesn’t match the domain of the email sender. For example, the email comes from “[email protected]”, but the tracking image URLs are something like “https://tracking.salesloft.com/ufhwurh-fusrah-fysdhts.jpg”.
When links inside an email (for images or for anything else) don’t match the domain of the email sender, your “spam score” goes up and increases the risk of your email ending up in the junk folder.
Most marketing platforms with tracking will allow you to set up a custom domain to use for these tracking links… Follow those instructions so that your tracking links look more like “https://trk.smalltechstack.com/ufhwurh-fusrah-fysdhts.jpg”
Resources
2019 Email Deliverability Benchmarks Study - https://go.everyaction.com/WC-2019-06-EmailDeliverability_LP.html
Test your deliverability using these free services:
