The question on everyone’s lips recently. With Google and Yahoo cracking down on sender requirements, email deliverability has been at the forefront of many brands and marketers' minds recently - and here’s why it should always be at the top of your list when diving into the world of email marketing.

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What is email deliverability?

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For those of you who are new to email marketing, here’s a quick rundown of what deliverability means and how it is measured .

Email deliverability is the main indicator as to whether you’re successfully landing in your customer's inboxes, or being left out in the cold and landing in spam. A healthy deliverability score allows your emails to land in the primary inbox (including Google’s other inboxes e.g. promotions), an unhealthy score means there’s a high chance your emails are landing in the dreaded spam, resulting in your customers not seeing all the content you’re sending out.

Your deliverability score can be impacted in a few different ways:

• Low open rate & click-through rate - if your customers aren’t interacting with your emails, your score will go down.
• Sending habits - how many emails you send and how often you send them. More emails = more likely to be flagged as spamming inboxes.
• Who you’re sending to - don’t just send to everyone in your list! Make sure you’re sending to your most engaged customers.
• Email content - spam filters determine whether your emails hit the main inbox depending on your content e.g. images, links, and subject lines.
• Sending infrastructure - where and what you’re sending from e.g. your sending domain, click tracking domain, and IP address.

Now, what are the email deliverability best practices?

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How to optimise your email account for deliverability

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After the initial set-up of your email account or a new sending domain, you'll go through a warming period when first sending out campaigns. This is the period of time when you need to establish a reputation with providers as a trusted email sender.

Your email service producer (ESP) or your mailbox provider (MBP) typically takes up to 30 days to decide on your reputation.

During this time, make sure you’re starting with a smaller volume of emails sent to your most engaged audience - people who have interacted with your emails/brand as little as 7 days ago. Once the warming period is over and you’ve shown you’re a legitimate sender, you can start sending to wider segments such as 30-day engaged users, or even as large as 120-day engaged users.

Anything above 80 is considered a good score, whereas anything below 65 would be bad. Anything between would be an average score. This score is decided by inbox and email providers, depending on your metrics; e.g, CTR and spam reports. In Klaviyo you can this in your aptly named 'deliverability' section. Simple enough!

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How to clean your email lists

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Cleaning is crucial! Make sure you’re only sending to people who want to interact with your emails. If a user signed up over a year ago and only opened and clicked on one email during that time, it’s likely they’re never going to interact with your emails again. These users are putting your deliverability at risk!

Meet the Sunset Unengaged Flow - your key to list cleaning with ease! 

A Sunset Flow is built to kick unengaged users to the curb. It’s your last resort to win back customers who haven’t interacted with your brands in over 180 days, and if they don’t, it’ll automatically suppress them for you. An easy list clean to make sure you’re not sending campaigns to unengaged customers.

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How email content affects deliverability

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As with any strategy in modern-day marketing, content is king - and email marketing is no different. Avoid being flagged by inbox providers and be smart about what you’re including:

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Avoid spammy subject lines

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You might think using all caps in a subject line will stand out in your customer’s inbox, but how can it stand out when it won’t make it past the spam filter? Other things to avoid include: using a lot of symbols, and spam phrasing like ‘100% FREE’ or ‘YOU’VE JUST WON’.

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Have a balance between image and text

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Image-heavy emails are at high risk of triggering spam filters due to spammers using images to avoid spam trigger words being detected - so inbox providers had to adapt. Email on Acid has found that you should have at least 500 characters included in your email to avoid being pulled up on spam filters. These characters can be included in contact information, company address, an unsubscribe link, as well as any copy in the body of your email.

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Refine your content

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Think quality over quantity. Get personal with the emails you’re sending out to your customers, as they’re more likely to interact and not mark them as spam. If you’re just putting together content and sending an email out for the sake of it - don’t! Only send emails that are built for your target audience.

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Easy to unsubscribe

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While you don’t want a high amount of users to unsubscribe from your newsletter, you’d much rather them unsubscribe than report your email as spam.

If you don’t make it easy for users to unsubscribe, they will start reporting your emails as spam! Spam complaints can seriously damage your deliverability, with even just a rate of 0.05%, inbox providers will start considering you as a bad sender.

Make sure to place an unsubscribe link clearly at the bottom of your email, and even adding one to the top is best practice - with Google Mail now automatically including one at the top of your emails.

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Dedicated sending domain

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A dedicated sending domain, also known as a branded sending domain, allows you to have more control over your sender reputation. Having a DSD is best practice and a must for bulk senders. It also improves your branding in the form of the address of your email, instead of saying ‘via email provider”, it will come directly from your branded email address

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Keep track of your deliverability score

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Now, how do you know if your deliverability has been impacted? Here are your two main indicators that mean you need to take action:

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Low open rate

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If you’re experiencing a sudden drop in average open rate across campaigns, there’s a high chance your emails are landing in spam. Also, keep an eye on your Welcome Series open rate - if your first email is below 40% open rate, you’ve got a problem.

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High spam complaints

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Keep an eye on your average spam complaints. Remember, if you’re hitting above 0.05%, your deliverability is in the red.

Keep your email deliverability in the green and you’ll avoid landing in spam!

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If you run an e-commerce brand and are looking for a digital marketing partner to take your business to the next level, please book a call with one of our team here.

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Written by Mia Ives - Account Manager

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