Is your email stuck in the spam folder? Did you know an estimated 20% of legitimate emails never reach their intended inboxes? For sales and marketing professionals, this is a lost opportunity, wasted resource, and lower ROI.

This highlights the fact that crafting compelling content is not the only important thing; ensuring your emails make it to the intended recipient rather than the spam folder is more challenging. Though emails have a high ROI, this channel of outreach deals with one core issue: deliverability.

In this digital era, with changing algorithms, it is critical to improve your email deliverability to maximize your outreach success. In this guide, we will explore actionable steps and key factors influencing email delivery. Get ready to maximize your email outreach game!

Understanding Email Deliverability

What is Email Deliverability? 

Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to successfully land in your recipient’s inbox. People generally confuse it with emails being sent, but it is about if email bypasses the spam filters and avoids being marked as junk.

Good deliverability means most of your emails reach their intended target audience’s inbox, while poor deliverability may result in your emails being lost. Email Deliverability if influenced by various factors, including sender domain reputation, authentication protocols, and engagement metrics.

Why is Email Deliverability Important?

For most of the sales outreach efforts, email is often the first touchpoint with potential clients. High email deliverability can help you:

  • Boost ROI: Emails landing in inboxes have a higher probability of getting opened than those relegated to spam.
  • Increase Engagement: When more people see your emails, it directly correlates to better click-through rates and conversion.
  • Brand/Sender Reputation: Consistently high deliverability builds trust with both email providers and recipients.

How Email Deliverability Works? The Essential Factors

When we send an email, the journey is not that straight to the inbox. The email passes through several checkpoints before landing at the right place. Let’s understand some of the important factors influencing email deliverability before looking at strategic initiatives:

  1. Email Service Provider (ESP):
     Email service providers like Gmail or Outlook verify your email content, brand reputation, and authentication protocols.
    1. Content & Design Check: Don’t use spammy language, excessive images, and irrelevant content that can trigger red flags when passing through the SPAM filters.
    2. Authentication: The trio of protocols, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, are used to verify your legitimacy as the sender. This also ensures if emails have been tampered with or not en route.
  1. Recipient Behavior:
     ISPs (Internet Service Providers) also monitor how your recipients interact with the emails—Are they opening, clicking, or marking emails as spam?
  2. List Hygiene: A good segment of prospects, i.e., a clean email list where subscribers are engaged, is critical. Keep the email list clean by removing inactive email addresses and any outdated information.

Step-by-Step Guide to Improve Email Deliverability

Step 1: Build a Quality Email List

We have discussed how a clean and quality email list is one of the basic elements of a successful email campaign.

  • Double Opt-In: Here you seek a confirmation from your subscriber via email as a permission to send emails. This further ensures that you only have engaged users on your email list.
  • Segment Your List: Use list segmentation tools to group your subscribers and send them targeted emails, boosting engagement rates.
  • Offer Unsubscribe Options: Give your users the flexibility to easily unsubscribe if they are no longer interested.

Step 2: Maintain List Hygiene

Regularly clean your email list to maintain a good sender reputation and healthy list hygiene.

  • Remove Inactive Email Subscribers: Periodically identify and remove subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in the last six months.
  • Use Email Verification Tools: Verify email addresses using authentication tools to reduce bounce rates.

Step 3: Authenticate Your Emails

  • Set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This specifies which IP addresses or servers are authorized to send emails on your behalf.
  • Implement DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This adds a digital signature to your emails, guaranteeing they haven’t been tampered with en route to delivery.
  • Embrace DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): DMARC combines SPF and DKIM to tell ESPs what to do with emails failing authentication.

Step 4: Optimize Email Content

The content of your emails should be engaging and spam-free.

  • Avoid Spam Triggers: Avoid using common spam trigger words like “free,” “guarantee,” excessive punctuation, ALL CAPS headlines, or excessive exclamation marks.
  • Make it Mobile Friendly: Ensure that emails render convincingly on all device types.
  • Personalize Your Emails: Make your emails tailored to the target audience by using personalization tokens like the name, data, and more.
  • Keep HTML Clean: Your HTML code should be clean and free from errors.

Step 5: Monitor Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation matters as it affects your email deliverability to either inboxes or spam folders.

  • Warm up sending: You should gradually increase your email volume to build a positive sending reputation.
  • Monitor Bounce Rates: Check for high bounce rates and accordingly take measures like removing invalid email addresses from your contact list. Aim for a bounce rate below 2%.
  • Track Engagement Metrics: Keep monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribers to identify areas of improvement.

Step 6: Test Your Emails

Before launching any of your email campaigns, test these to identify potential issues.

  • Use A/B (Split) Testing: Split testing emails’ different elements, like subject lines, content templates, CTAs, and more, to see what works with your target audience.
  • Preview Your Emails: Using preview tools, check how your email appears in different clients and devices.

Step 7: Engage Your Audience

User engagement helps understand the email value and thus is one of the key factors in improving deliverability.

  • Send Valuable and Relevant Content: Figure out your email intent and relevancy, i.e., if it aligns with the interests of your subscribers.
  • Encourage Interaction (Engagement): Use engagement-based triggers, including calls to action (CTAs), trigger follow-up emails, and keep the content relevant.

Step 8: Leverage Email Automation Tools

Focus your energy on more strategic sales planning and let multi-outreach automation tools like Salesflow.io streamline your email marketing efforts. Your outreach sequence automation platform can significantly boost your deliverability by keeping the list hygiene in place, consistent and personalized messaging, following authentication protocols, and metric analysis. Here’s why:

  • Automated Sending: Schedule emails and follow-ups in advance and ensure consistent sending patterns, including the content.
  • Advanced Personalization: You can easily personalize emails for higher engagement.

Common Misconceptions About Email Deliverability

  1. If I send more & more emails, I’ll reach more people.
    • Reality: If you send multiple emails to unengaged users, you are asking for a cruel action, i.e., it can increase your spam complaints and damage your sender reputation.
  2. If I create a compelling email content, it will be delivered to the inbox. 
  • Reality: Yes, content is one of the factors impacting email deliverability, but the technical factors like domain authentication and sender reputation are equally crucial.
  1. Email deliverability and email delivery are the same.
  • Reality:
    • Email Delivery: This refers to emails getting delivered to the recipient’s email server.
    • Email Deliverability: On the other hand, it refers to emails getting delivered in the inbox, spam, or were marked rejected.

Conclusion

Working on email deliverability is an ongoing process. By understanding the basics and following this guide, you are already ahead of many sales and marketing professionals—building a quality list, maintaining list hygiene, authenticating emails, optimizing content, monitoring reputation, testing effectively, and engaging audiences.

Consider leveraging outreach automation platforms like Salesflow.io for their features that are designed for seamless integration of email outreach alongside LinkedIn campaigns. Salesflow.io can help you maximize engagement with prospects while ensuring high deliverability. Start optimizing your outreach efforts today with a free trial from Salesflow.io!