How do you maintain a healthy email deliverability rate and prevent your emails from being flagged as spam? Share one deliverability best practice or tactic you follow to ensure inbox placement.

Question

In the fiercely competitive world of digital communication, ensuring your emails land in the recipient's inbox can make or break your outreach strategy. Insights from a Lifecycle Marketing Consultant and a Digital Marketing Manager reveal actionable tactics to maintain a healthy email deliverability rate. The first expert emphasizes the importance of getting explicit consent from recipients, while the concluding insight highlights the need to regularly remove inactive subscribers. Discover these strategies and more, with a total of eighteen expert insights to elevate your email deliverability game.

Shayah Reed · Answer

Email marketing is one of my favorite ways to interact with our audience, and it's become a huge part of our overall content strategy! Having an engaged email list and a reputable sender status is a huge asset to a company.
It's so much easier to get in front of your audience with email than with social media—of course, there's no algorithm to compete with, but you do have to follow some best practices to make sure that your email lands in the inbox and not the spam/junk folder!
To ensure email deliverability and prevent emails from being flagged as spam, one best practice is to always get explicit consent from recipients before adding them to your email list. This is typically done through a double opt-in process, where subscribers confirm their email addresses after signing up. It ensures that your list is engaged and consists only of people who actually want to receive your content, reducing the risk of spam complaints and improving your sender reputation.
Something else I suggest is doing a "list clean-up" every 6 months. This is a crucial, but often overlooked, practice in maintaining a healthy email deliverability rate and improving your engagement metrics like open rates.
Why is this important? Over time, some subscribers may become inactive—whether they no longer find your emails relevant, they've changed email addresses, or they're simply not engaging.
When this happens, continuing to send emails to these inactive addresses can negatively affect your sender reputation. Low engagement (opens, clicks, etc.) is a signal to email providers that your content isn't valuable, increasing the chances of your emails being marked as spam.
Regularly cleaning your list, by removing or attempting to re-engage inactive subscribers, helps to ensure that your email list is filled with people who are genuinely interested in your content. This improves both your sender reputation and open rates, ultimately leading to better inbox placement and overall campaign effectiveness!
A good rule of thumb is to review and clean your list every 3-6 months, depending on your sending frequency and how active you are with email marketing.

Sascha Hoffmann · Answer

I have a checklist for email deliverability. This goes beyond ensuring the email addresses are correct; it avoids spam-trigger words, pays attention to the number of links, and considers regulations. It's simple to create a checklist and upload it to AI to eliminate the human factor. ChatGPT can analyze your email and cross-reference it with the checklist to point out potential flags. Moreover, it also keeps me in check with other best practices to ensure high response rates, like clear communication, conciseness, and a call to action. Response rates impact the deliverability rate in the long run, too.

Mohammed Kamal · Answer

Maintaining a healthy email deliverability rate is essential for effective communication. A key component is managing your sender reputation, which ISPs use to assess your domain's trustworthiness. To improve your reputation, establish consistent sending patterns with regular email campaigns. Avoid sudden volume spikes, as they can trigger spam filters and negatively impact inbox placement.

Marc Bishop · Answer

We make it a point to optimize our sending frequency and scheduling, ensuring that our emails are sent at times when they are most likely to be opened. This is based on analyzing user behavior data and patterns across different segments and time zones. By strategically timing our emails, we reduce the risk of them being ignored or marked as spam, thereby improving our overall deliverability.
One effective tactic we employ is to encourage new subscribers to add our email address to their address book or safe sender list as part of the onboarding process. This simple action significantly improves the likelihood that our emails will bypass spam filters and land in the inbox. It’s a direct and user-involved approach that helps reinforce our reputation with ISPs and ensures our content is readily seen by our audience.

Vaibhav Namburi · Answer

To maintain a healthy email deliverability rate, one effective tactic is to enable SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These authentication protocols help verify the legitimacy of your emails. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) ensures that only authorized servers can send emails on your behalf, while DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to confirm that messages haven't been altered. DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) builds on these, guiding email providers on how to handle messages that fail authentication checks.
Another important strategy is warming up your IP address. This involves gradually increasing your sending volume over time, which helps establish a positive sender reputation with email providers. By starting with a smaller list of engaged recipients and slowly scaling up, you demonstrate that your emails are welcome and not spammy. Together, these practices enhance your chances of landing in the inbox, boosting engagement and trust with your audience.

Aqsa Tabassam · Answer

To keep my email deliverability high and avoid being marked as spam, I focus on warming up my IP address gradually. An IP address helps Internet Service Providers (ISPs) recognize who is sending the email. I learned that switching from a shared IP to a dedicated one or changing my Email Service Provider (ESP) requires careful management.
When I start sending emails from a new IP address, I don't send a lot at once. Instead, I begin with a small batch of emails to my most engaged recipients. I slowly increase the number over several weeks. This helps build trust with ISPs. By making sure the initial emails are opened and welcomed by recipients, I show ISPs that my emails are legitimate.
This method has helped me maintain a good email deliverability rate and keep my messages out of the spam folder.

Omer Lewinsohn · Answer

To maintain a healthy email-deliverability rate and prevent our emails from being flagged as spam, we focus on maintaining a clean email list by regularly cleaning and segmenting it. One best practice we follow is to use double opt-in for subscribers, ensuring that everyone on our list has confirmed their interest in receiving emails. This helps keep our list engaged and reduces the chances of sending emails to inactive or uninterested users, which can hurt deliverability.
We also regularly monitor bounce rates and remove hard bounces or inactive subscribers. Additionally, we ensure that our email content is relevant, personalized, and provides value to the recipient. This encourages engagement, which signals to email providers that our emails are wanted and boosts inbox placement.
Another crucial tactic is avoiding spammy practices, such as excessive use of promotional language, all caps, or misleading subject lines. By focusing on a subscriber-first approach and following email best practices, we consistently maintain strong deliverability rates.

Nadine Heir · Answer

There's no beating genuinely useful content. This means that your emails are not only well-researched and original content, they must also be entertaining and highly relevant to where your audience is.
This is harder to achieve than it sounds, and involves really knowing your audience. When you're a small business, this is easy and can be achieved by niching. As you grow, segmentation is the only way to achieve excellent deliverability, driven by opens, interactions, no-spam flags, and replies to your emails.

Henry Timmes · Answer

We maintain a healthy email deliverability rate by focusing on content optimization. One of the best practices we follow is ensuring our email content is relevant, personalized, and free of spammy elements. We pay close attention to subject lines, avoiding trigger words that could be flagged by spam filters, and keep our message body clean, concise, and focused on value for the recipient.
We also optimize the use of images and links, making sure our email design is balanced and that the text-to-image ratio remains healthy. This reduces the chances of being marked as spam and improves overall engagement. By regularly testing and refining our content, we enhance the likelihood of landing in our subscribers' inboxes, building a better sender reputation over time.

Ryan Doser · Answer

As a tech author who's tested numerous email systems, I've found that using a quality Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is essential for maintaining healthy email deliverability rates. In my experience, ConvertKit stands out from the crowd, consistently delivering better inbox placement than many alternatives. It's tempting to opt for cheap or free CRM options, but when it comes to ensuring your messages reach your audience, investing in a robust platform pays dividends.
Another critical factor in improving deliverability is using a business email address rather than a personal one like Gmail or Yahoo. This approach serves two purposes: it lends credibility to your communications and helps bypass spam filters. Major email providers like Google and Yahoo have sophisticated algorithms that are more likely to flag messages from personal email addresses as potential spam, especially when sent in large volumes.
By combining a reputable CRM like ConvertKit with a professional business email address, you're setting yourself up for success. These tools work together to build trust with both your recipients and email service providers. Remember, in the world of email marketing, cutting corners on your sending infrastructure can lead to your carefully crafted messages languishing unread in spam folders. It's worth the investment to ensure your emails consistently land where they belong: in your subscribers' inboxes.

James Oliver · Answer

Don't put any links in your signature.
Links in a cold email are a huge trigger for spam filters.
Instead, put your company name (unlinked) and a phone number. People will Google your company name and see your business that way.
A phone number adds another layer of trust without requiring a link.
Spammers never leave real phone numbers because that opens the door to receive hundreds of phone calls in a day.

Lana Rafaela Cindric · Answer

One of the key things that'll get you into the spam folder or affect your sender reputation is repetition. Spin syntax (AKA "spintax") helps a lot while still keeping your campaigns automated. For example, even if I'm addressing a big audience that fits all the same ICPs, so the copy has to be similar, I can still use spintax to add variation and make the emails look less similar to one another.
The simplest example is the email greeting:
{{ Hey | Hi | Hello }}
Whenever you send an automated email, spintax will choose one variation. One batch will get the "Hi" greeting, another "Hello," and the third "Hey."
Of course, you can get more creative and use it throughout the text!

Alex Milner · Answer

To maintain a healthy email deliverability rate and avoid your emails being flagged as spam, it is important to have good email-list hygiene and segmentation.
It is essential to regularly remove inactive subscribers who haven't engaged with your emails in 3-6 months, as continuing to email unresponsive contacts can harm your sender reputation.
Additionally, segment your audience and send targeted, relevant content based on their preferences or different behaviors. This increases engagement, improves open and click-through rates, and reduces bounce rates, ensuring better inbox placement and overall email success.
This is why it is also important to understand your audience and use a range of different data sources to segment and send targeted emails with the knowledge that they will be responsive to what you're sending.

Savanna Pruitt · Answer

Depending on the client and the message, I love to add a personal touch by mixing up the "From" name and preheader text.
Instead of the usual company name, I'll switch it to something like "Elliot from Company X" to make it feel like a real person is reaching out. It instantly makes the email more authentic and helps keep it out of the spam folder.
I also get creative with the preheader text and use it to tease what's inside. This gives people more reason to open the email, and it can make a huge difference in engagement and deliverability.

John Cox · Answer

To maintain a healthy email deliverability rate and avoid the spam folder, you need to understand this: 21% of emails never make it to the inbox. That's nearly a quarter of your efforts being wasted. So, what's one tactic I follow to ensure inbox placement? I regularly clean my email list.
Why? Sending emails to outdated or inactive addresses sends a red flag to email service providers. They see it as risky behavior, which lowers your sender reputation. When you consistently send emails to engaged subscribers, you improve your sender score, which is key to staying out of the dreaded spam folder.
One practical tip: I make it a habit to remove inactive contacts every 90 days. It may seem counterintuitive to cut people from your list, but quality beats quantity every time.
So, if you want more of your emails to land where they belong—in your customers' inboxes—don't hesitate to scrub your list regularly. It's one of the simplest ways to protect your email marketing efforts and keep your open rates healthy.

Nadine Abou el Atta · Answer

Keeping your email out of the junk folder boils down to your domain's Sender Score, also called Sender Reputation.
This is a score that goes from zero to 100, and it shows email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on the quality of your domain. In other words, it helps them evaluate the probability that you're a spammy email versus a quality one.
If your score is less than 70, you need to fix a few things.
The score is typically based on the age of your domain, the reputation of your IP address, the quality of websites associated with this domain, and, of course, spam reports from users receiving emails from your domain.
If you're using an email marketing provider such as HubSpot, MailChimp, ConstantContact, and so on, their quality and security measures are also added to the equation.
A few things you can do on the email side is to actively audit your potential email list. Remove even soft-bounce emails, not just hard bounces.
Segment your distribution list according to their stage in the buying journey.
Optimize your website, and try to encourage credible websites to link to it.
An email from LinkedIn won't have a negative sender score, for example.
The list is long, but the more you convince the algorithm that people want to receive your emails, the higher your score and reputation will be.

Alexander Henschel · Answer

One of the tactics that I find is different from others is to take advantage of personalization—not in the subject line or the salutation (and that's kind of the rule, but you know), but right in the email body.
I mean personalizing based on what the recipient has seen before from your content. So, if they've previously clicked links to an item, their next email might contain more that tickles them and be tailored to suit. This increases open rates and open rates lower your recipient's chances of spamming your email and maintain your deliverability.
It takes a very robust back-end system to collect user actions on a micro-level, but trust me, it is well worth it. If every email is personalized not to a name but to an interest, you significantly improve how relevant each email gets. It's like talking, and you're always hearing the finer nuances of the other person's interest.

Lee Murray · Answer

For warm email campaigns, the best practice is to remove people from your list who haven't opened any of your last five emails. It hurts to remove people you've worked really hard to acquire, but if they aren't opening them, they probably won't open them in the future. I have some brands I signed up for 10 years ago on an old email I never check still sending me emails when it's clear I haven't opened their emails for 10 years! This is just bad email list management.

18 Best Practices to Ensure Inbox Placement and Boost Email Deliverability

18 Best Practices to Ensure Inbox Placement and Boost Email Deliverability

Get Explicit Consent from Recipients

Use a Comprehensive Deliverability Checklist

Establish Consistent Sending Patterns

Optimize Sending Frequency and Scheduling

Enable SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Warm Up Your IP Address Gradually

Maintain a Clean Email List

Create Genuinely Useful Content

Focus on Content Optimization

Use a Quality CRM Tool

Avoid Links in Your Signature

Utilize Spin Syntax for Variation

Practice Good Email-List Hygiene

Personalize ‘From’ Name and Preheader

Regularly Clean Your Email List

Improve Your Domain’s Sender Score

Personalize Based on User Behavior

Remove Inactive Subscribers Regularly

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