How To Improve Email Deliverability with No Effort and Maximum Payback

No matter how brilliant your emails are, they must pass the first and the ultimate threshold in the first place: spam filters and blacklists. A high email deliverability rate – at least 95% of the emails sent – means a clear connection to potential buyers, whereas anything lower than 75% indicates problems with the quality of content, low previous engagement, or other issues.

There are quite a few ways to increase email deliverability, from using email deliverability tools to revamping your email messaging to working on your email sender reputation. Likewise, there might be issues with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs).

Read on to learn to deliver 95% or more of your emails to your target buyers.

What Factors Affect Email Deliverability?

The traditional process of sending an e-mail involves creating a text through one of the popular services (Outlook, Gmail, etc.), uploading it to SMTP (a special protocol that transfers data between servers), requesting another server, and delivery to the final addressee.

Importantly, it is SMTP that determines where the message will arrive – the Inbox, Spam, or be blocked – depending on the email sender reputation and additional factors like, for example, the level of engagement with previous emails and the peculiarities of the provider itself.

Here are the major factors affecting email deliverability:

Email Sender Reputation	Email sender reputation is arguably the main and most complex deliverability factor that unites most, if not all, other factors. Your ISP and ESP estimate your reputation on a scale from 0 to 100 based on the number of emails sent, how recipients engage with these emails, your spam complaint rate, emails sent to invalid and fake email addresses, and more. Emails with ratings of 70 or less are likely to end up in the spam folder or be blocked altogether.
Email Content	Current technologies are enough to understand an email’s true intent, even if it’s hidden behind clever words and ambiguous phrases. However, not only downright malicious emails but also spam emails are blocked.  For example, phrases like “free money,” “don’t delete,” or “you’re a winner” might not bode well for your email marketing campaigns. Avoiding too many high-pressure and sales words and phrases might be a good idea, especially for informational emails.
Domain and IP Health	The reputation of your domain and IP address plays a great role in the eyes of ESPs and ISPs. Even legitimate emails sent from unhealthy IPs and domains might be blocked. For this reason, avoid sharing emails with other senders unless you can vouch for them.
Sending Frequency and Volume	You can’t just start a business and send gazillions of emails to heterogeneous email addresses. In the eyes of ISPs and ESPs, it takes time to grow, while unnatural growth signifies unsolicited batch-and-blast emails that are no good to recipients.
User Feedback	The way users interact with your emails can have a great impact on your email deliverability rates. The more users mark emails as spam, move them to different folders, or ignore them, the higher the chance your next batch of emails will never reach their inboxes.

The good news is that fixing your email deliverability rate is possible, with different companies using different strategies and tools. For example, marketing professionals at phonexa.uk use proprietary email & SMS marketing software E-Delivery for smooth multi-channel messaging, behavioral segmentation, A/B testing and automation, and more.

But you don’t necessarily need software to improve your email deliverability rates. There are enough adjustments you can make manually before jumping on paid email marketing tools, and many of those tweaks will require time investments rather than money.

How To Improve Email Deliverability in Four Steps

Step 1 – Analyze the Current State of the Campaign

To choose the right way to increase email deliverability, you need to start by analyzing the current state of affairs with your email campaigns. In practice, this means evaluating your email campaigns through and through by all imaginable parameters. It might be tedious, but the more information you collect, the more accurately you can identify the problem and improve your email deliverability rates and email campaigns in general.

Here are the main dimensions to analyze so you can spot potential deliverability  problems:

Deliverability Metrics	Besides the email delivery rate itself, email deliverability metrics include the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and spam complaint rate. One minor metric going a bit askew might not become a problem, but two or more outliers might already prevent emails from hitting the right folder. Long story short, evaluate everything mentioned against the standards in your industry and dig deeper into underperformers, if any.
Authentication Protocols	DKIM, DMARC, and SPF are the three email authentication protocols used to verify your email sender’s reputation and prevent fraudulent tricks like phishing attacks or spoofing. If the protocols are incorrectly set up for your domain, you might have trouble with email authentication and deliverability rates.
Email Content	Suboptimal email design, poor content, or inadequate subject lines might be a factor, although unlikely the determining one, unless you do something crazy like leaving the subject line empty or including borderline content in your emails.

A thorough email deliverability audit is necessary if you want to improve your email deliverability rates and – even more importantly – ensure your emails will never miss the target inboxes again. Of course, having automated email deliverability tracking and analytics tools up your sleeve will speed up the process and increase its accuracy.

Step 2 – Create Useful Content 

It goes without saying content is King when it comes to email marketing. Creating a well-thought-out email sequence should factor in what emails you send for what interaction points and the timing and content of these emails. 

The more engaging the content, the better your sender reputation will become, as fewer users will mark emails as spam or delete them. setting up a newsletter, you can’t ignore the rule of the first impression. 

The path of least resistance would be using customizable email marketing templates. Ready-made templates will reduce the time required to design an attractive email and allow you to align the visuals with your branding, message, and target recipient. Likewise, you can use professional email marketing services if you’re unwilling to design emails independently.

Step 3 – Check Your Authentication

A common cause of low email deliverability is email filtering by the service providers themselves. They can automatically add them to the spam folder if they think these emails are suspicious. 

To reduce such risks, configure your DNS settings with protocols like BIMI, DMARC, and SPF to increase the system’s trust in the sender. Likewise, all other things being equal, send emails from your strongest domain.

Step 4 – Check if the IP Address Is Blacklisted

If you have completed all the settings and are creating quality content, but the emails still end up in spam, then you might’ve gotten blacklisted. 

You need email marketing tools to check this. If you find your address in these lists, be sure to contact the administrator. Find out the reason and ask for instructions to improve the situation.

The More Emails You Deliver, The Better It Gets

Email deliverability is a unique business metric that might make a difference between a successful and failed marketing campaign, and even more so for email-reliant businesses. Keeping your email deliverability rates in check is paramount for positive omnichannel customer experiences and optimal customer journeys, which ultimately affect your conversion rates, ROI, and bottom line.

The last thing to mention is the importance of automation in generating and converting email leads. It’s almost impossible to analyze huge amounts of data manually, so the more automated your data collection and analytics are, the more cost-effective you can be.