When sending email newsletters, it’s essential to ensure the highest possible level of deliverability. But what does that actually mean? In practice, we’re talking about two key stages here. The first involves delivery rate – a metric that shows how many messages were technically accepted by recipients’ mail servers. MessageFlow can monitor this stage, giving you assurance that the message was received for processing by the addresee’s email service.
The second, and in fact more important from a campaign performance perspective, involves inbox placement rate, which reflects the percentage of messages that landed in the primary inbox rather than in spam, promotions, or other secondary folders. This is the metric that truly captures actual deliverability and directly affects whether a message gets noticed and read. Below, you’ll learn which factors have the biggest impact on this. Addressing them is the foundation of effective email marketing communication.
Consider using a dedicated IP address and individual sending infrastructure
When choosing an email communication platform, it’s worth checking whether it offers the option of using a dedicated sending infrastructure and IP address. This setup gives you full control over your sender reputation. Your campaigns aren’t affected by the behavior of other senders, and you build a trusted presence with mailbox providers on your own terms. As a result, you benefit from better deliverability and greater predictability of campaign performance.
That said, shared infrastructure can be a good option for smaller businesses or those sending campaigns less frequently. It’s often a more cost-effective solution that lets you take advantage of a pre-warmed IP address with an established reputation – something that can be challenging when starting from scratch with a new, unused IP. The key to success in this model is using a platform that carefully manages sender quality and actively screens participants in the shared environment.
With a dedicated IP address, you also gain maximum sending throughput, which is particularly important for transactional emails, where every second counts between the triggering event and message delivery.
Properly configure SPF / DKIM / DMARC protocols on your domain
The major security in the marketing world is the SPF (Sender Policy Framework). A server that has been secured by creating an SPF record checks in DNS if the received message comes from a server authorized to send messages from a given domain. If the address is not authenticated, the mail won’t be accepted. Therefore, if you use an external mailing distribution tool, update your shipping domain’s SPF entry accordingly.
Send to an up-to-date list of contacts, take care of permission to communicate and work on keeping the base hygienic
As part of this factor, we can distinguish several activities that we should perform:
- Systematically remove non-existent addresses (hardbounce) from the database.
- Exclude addresses that have objected to the processing of personal data.
This is very important because recipients who don’t want to receive correspondence may mark your emails as SPAM and this causes a reduction in reputation and can cause problems with deliverability.
- Send only to the base for which you have consent for marketing communication.
Email account providers will quickly find out that your emails are not ordered correspondence and will start classifying them as SPAM.
- Segment users according to specific conditions.
Thanks to this, your offers will reach exactly those people who expect them.
- Periodically check the database and clean it from errors.
Take care of this element, especially when you enable entry to the database through a form in which the subscriber can provide any information.
- Use double opt-in, i.e. double verification.
It consists in the fact that an email with an activation link will be sent to the address that subscribed to the newsletter on the website, and only after clicking on it, it’s added to the database. Then you can be sure that the address certainly exists and that it is actually operated by the person who had signed up.
Allow to unsubscribe easily
Each marketing message should contain an unsubscribe link that will allow the mailing recipient to unsubscribe from the communication. If you use it, it’s great, always check in the SMS message whether it is working properly before sending.
It’s better to allow the user an easy and intuitive way of unsubscribing than to face other less pleasant consequences, such as marking your emails as SPAM or deleting them without opening them (Gmail is particularly sensitive to this aspect). Both of these actions are a signal to email providers that you don’t care properly for the hygiene of mailings, which may cause them to classify your emails as SPAM or simply not deliver them.
Communicate with your audience on a regular basis
If the subscribers found their way to your database, it means that you have a consent to communicate with them and most likely they expressed such a desire.
Therefore, when you conduct marketing activities by sending email, it’s worth building a permanent, strong relationship with recipients through systematic communication. Your messages don’t have to, or shouldn’t, be purely for sale. Communicate by providing various interesting information, of course related to the service or the product you offer (you can generate a series of training and educational e-mails informing about new products / services, guides, articles, etc.).
By taking care of the regularity of mailings, you build a bond with the customer and the desired reception of your brand in the eyes of the recipient.
Encourage engagement to get the highest OR / CTR ratio
This point is closely related to the sending of messages that are intended to arouse the interest of the recipient. Anyone who implements marketing communication has a group of so-called inactive users, i.e. those who don’t read your correspondence. It’s a natural phenomenon, but it’s worth working on making at least some of them respond positively to your mailings, i.e. open and click them.
For this purpose, it’s worth testing various forms of emailings, e.g. by using personalization or emoticons in the title of the message, as well as attracting interest in the content of the email, a clear action button or the use of graphics that attract attention, e.g. a clock counting down the duration of the promotion works great. It’s also worth performing the procedure of encouraging the recipient of the message by sharing this message with others – this situation is a clear message for email account providers that this email was worth attention and commitment.
Sometimes, despite all efforts, it may happen that your newsletter will go to SPAM, if the addressee marks it as SPAM by transferring it to the main mailbox, we also gain a big plus in the assessment of anti-spam filters. Such a situation is possible when we build a group of loyal subscribers interested in what you want to convey to them.
All of the above actions are aimed at generating the greatest interest in your mailings, which will definitely help in overall deliverability, as it’s a clear sign that the communication you conduct is received by subscribers.
Take care of email design
Anti-spam filters scan your message before delivering it to the recipient’s inbox and one of the elements that is verified is the mailing content. It’s worth following a few rules in this regard:
- don’t use too large and heavy images (HTML code shouldn’t exceed 100kb)
- make sure that the mailing is displayed correctly on mobile devices
- pay attention to the ratio of text to graphics – good practice is about 500 text characters
- try to make your message as readable as possible, use catchy headlines, don’t go into details, it’s worth placing them directly on the page
- use a fixed message template (header, body, footer)
- use safe fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma
- take care of the order in the HTML code.
Avoid phrases that are commonly considered spamogenic
The main role of spam filters used by mailbox providers is to detect messages that show characteristics of unwanted communication. There is a set of words and phrases that have historically been strongly associated with spam and may still negatively impact how a message is classified.
While avoiding spam-triggering language is still a good practice, it’s important to understand that modern spam filters rely primarily on far more advanced criteria such as sender reputation, proper authentication, and actual user engagement. These are the factors that now play a decisive role in email deliverability.
That said, to ensure full compliance and high-quality communication, it’s wise to limit the use of suspicious phrases, especially when combined with other potentially risky elements within the message. Examples of expressions worth avoiding in bulk campaigns include:
- Sex, porn, viagra
- 100%
- Ladies and Gentlemen
- Test
- Credit card
- Congratulations
- $$$
- The address comes from a public database
- This is not commercial information according to…
- If you are not interested, we apologize
- It does not constitute an offer within the meaning of…
It’s also advisable to avoid excessive use of exclamation marks and writing words in all caps, especially in subject lines. Combined with other optimization practices, this can still help improve your campaign results.
Use an anti-spam tool and adjust accordingly
The strict rules of email providers make the sending of marketing emails a major challenge. If you have prepared an emailing and you are not sure if it meets all of the above-mentioned requirements, you can use our email testing tool. Link opens in a new tabMailchecker.net in a simple way, from the browser level, allows you to evaluate emails, at the same time giving tips on what should be improved to ensure higher deliverability.
Test before you send
Email tests are obligatory. Any tool will ever be able to notice some errors that we can see with the naked eye, by clicking the email in our own test inbox. First of all, it’s worth paying attention to whether the topic and preheader are displayed correctly, there are no typos, possible errors in personalization, whether the graphics are definitely displayed well and whether the links point to the right place on the page. At this stage, you can also see which tab the newsletter goes to. We encourage you to verify the test message also on a mobile device to minimize the risk of having a newsletter displayed incorrectly.
As you can see, there are many factors that affect the deliverability of your emails. Verify your actions in terms of the recommendations described above, try to implement them and we guarantee that the effectiveness of your mailings will increase by up to several percent. Good luck!