Email marketing can be a high-stakes game of chance. You work hard to craft the perfect message. You send it off, and there's a rush of anticipation ... followed by utter disappointment when you realize that instead of reaching your loyal customers' inboxes, your email has been sent to the dreaded spam folder (or worse, bounced). While improving your email deliverability won't guarantee that every email you send reaches its intended destination, it will get you closer to getting those emails opened and read by engaged readers. This article will reveal the best inbox delivery practices to help you improve your email deliverability, ensuring more emails reach recipients’ inboxes and drive higher engagement rates. 

Inframail's email infrastructure can help you improve your email deliverability, delivering more emails to your customers' inboxes. With Inframail, you can rest assured that your email infrastructure is optimized to get your emails where they need to go.

Table of Contents

• What is Email Deliverability and Why It Matters

• 13 Email Deliverability Best Practices

• Key Metrics for Email Deliverability to Monitor

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What is Email Deliverability and Why It Matters

Email deliverability refers to the number of emails you send that land in your subscribers’ inboxes—instead of being blocked or marked as spam. The better your email deliverability, the more your emails reach their intended recipients. Emails that bounce or get sent to spam by recipients or mailbox providers (MBPs) negatively affect your email deliverability. 

The difference between email delivery and email deliverability represents the ability of your emails to reach their intended recipients’ inboxes. Email delivery refers to the number of emails your subscribers’ MBPs accepted. 

• “Delivered” means just that: The emails have been delivered but might have landed in the spam folder. 

• “Deliverability,” tells you how many of your emails land where you want them to land: in the inbox. 

The Importance Of Email Deliverability 

While email deliverability may not be a commonly tracked metric like click-through rate or unsubscribes, it’s a crucial factor in every successful email marketing program and should be included in campaign reporting. Measuring deliverability allows marketers to gauge the health of their email lists and sender reputation and whether or not their campaigns are reaching the intended audience. 

Understanding Email Deliverability Rates: Why They Matter More Than Delivery Metrics

Your email marketing program may appear successful if 97 percent of the emails you sent were delivered. Still, if half of these emails didn’t pass spam filters, your campaigns might not have been as effective at connecting with the audience you wanted to reach. While email delivery metrics are important, knowing your email deliverability rate will better reveal what improvements you need to make to get more of your audience. 

A reasonable email deliverability rate should be at least 85 percent—the higher, the better. A rate of 98 to 99 percent is ideal. Any deliverability rate below 70 percent indicates that an email marketing campaign needs some improvement to show MBPs and recipients that the emails have value to offer. 

A Little Background: How Email Works

Before we discuss how you can improve your email deliverability, let’s review how email works. As senders, we think we can just click a button, but behind the scenes, much more is required to get an email from one person or company to another.

1. The Email Goes To The SMTP Server 

Whenever a sender creates an email and hits “send,” that email is transferred from server to server via the Simple Transfer Mail Protocol (SMTP) until it reaches its destination. To determine that destination, the SMTP contacts the Domain Name System (DNS) server and checks whether that domain has any mail exchange servers with information about where the message should be sent. 

A DNS is like a phone book. Just like a phone book connects a person’s name to a phone number so that you know what to call, a DNS links domain names (hostnames) to specific IP addresses so emails know where to go. Each domain name and IP address link forms a DNS record. Each DNS record holds extra information that helps mailbox providers verify that a sender is authorized to send and receive email and that they’re using a legitimate emailing program. 

2. The Email Is Checked And Verified 

Once the SMTP has confirmed the email’s intended destination, it transfers the message to the email recipient’s Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) server, commonly hosted by an internet service provider (ISP, also known as a mailbox provider or email client) such as Gmail, Microsoft, or Yahoo. 

Before the email reaches the ISP’s server, additional checks are run on the sender’s authentication, IP, domain reputation, and infrastructure to ensure it is safe and can be trusted. Each MBP has its own internal “rules” to determine which emails make it to the inbox versus the spam folder. So, your Gmail deliverability may look different from your Microsoft deliverability, for example. 

3. The Email Is Delivered 

It is delivered once the email has successfully passed through the ISP’s gateway. The sender’s reputation and subscriber engagement history will determine whether the mail will pass spam filters and land in the inbox or fail to pass the filters and end up in the spam folder. 

An email program’s health determines the inbox placement rate. This health relies on adherence to email best practices in areas like list hygiene and subscriber engagement. Still, infrastructure and authentication also play a significant role in an email program’s success.

Why You Need Solid Email Infrastructure

Your email infrastructure—the hardware and software used to send emails, including your IP address and DNS—is critical to verifying your identity and trustworthy reputation. A solid email infrastructure ensures your emails remain secure, showing MBPs that your domain is reliable and safe.

Essential Email Authentication Protocols and Their Role in Deliverability

MBPs use email authentication protocols to confirm that an email comes from whom it claims to come from and to protect recipients against spam, hacking, and phishing attempts. Authentication must be set up correctly for emails to land in recipients’ inboxes. 

These authentication protocols include: 

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) 

SPF checks follow an email’s path from origin to destination to help identify which IP addresses have the authority to send emails to a specific domain. MBPs and filtering systems can use the SPF record to tell forged emails apart from legitimate ones. 

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) 

DKIM adds a digital signature secured with encryption to every email sent. MBPs and receiving servers can use DKIM to validate senders and increase recipient protection against spoofing and phishing. 

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) 

DMARC is a framework atop SPF and DKIM authentication protocols to address exact domain spoofing and phishing attacks, stopping cybercriminals from pretending to email from your brand’s domain. 

It helps prevent unauthorized domain use in the “From” address of email messages by allowing senders to specify how MBPs should treat unauthenticated or non-compliant messages through three available policies: 

• Policy is ‘none’ (p=none): MBPs will take no action and deliver the mail as normal 

• Policy is ‘quarantine’ (p=quarantine): MBPs will send the message to spam/junk 

• Policy is ‘reject’ (p=reject): MBPs will drop the message, and it will not be delivered to recipients 

A Note On IP Addresses 

You can have a shared or dedicated IP address. As the name suggests, shared IP addresses are used or shared by different senders, while only one sender uses dedicated IP addresses. Since internet service providers use your IP address to evaluate your sender reputation, using a dedicated IP address can be a way to put you in full control. You should always consider your send volume, mailing frequency, email marketing expertise, and email marketing budget before deciding which type of IP address to go with. 

A few pointers when deciding which IP address type is best for your organization:

• Dedicated IP addresses are more expensive than shared ones. Dedicated IP addresses only work well for brands that frequently send large volumes of emails, as that’s needed to establish a solid send history and reputation. Dedicated IP addresses need to be warmed up since sending large volumes of emails from a new IP address can trigger spam filters. You need to manage and maintain a dedicated IP. 

• Shared IPs are more forgiving, as any mistakes you make with email marketing are balanced out by the best practices employed by all the other senders using the same IP. But the opposite is also true: On a shared IP, the negative actions of other senders can impact your reputation.

Key Components to Managing Your Sender Reputation

Email clients use sender’s reputation to determine whether an email is likely to be trustworthy or not. Your sender reputation can mean the difference between landing in the inbox, getting sent to spam, or—even worse—being blocked completely. A poor sender reputation means fewer emails are delivered to subscribers’ inboxes, and fewer subscribers get your emails—meaning fewer subscribers can convert. A bad sender reputation hurts your ROI. Significant factors of sender reputation include email engagement and list hygiene. 

List Engagement 

List engagement refers to how subscribers interact with your emails. There are two types of engagement: 

• Positive engagement: You can track positive engagement through signals such as subscribers rescuing an email from the spam folder or marking it as “not junk,” opening the email, clicking on a link, forwarding the email, or replying. 

• Negative engagement: Watch for negative engagement signals, including deleting the email without opening it or marking it as spam or junk. Getting spam complaints is the number one thing that hurts your sender’s reputation. 

List Hygiene 

List hygiene refers to how clean and up-to-date an email list is. Email marketers must regularly check their lists for incorrect email addresses and unengaged subscribers to maintain healthy list hygiene. There are three types of email addresses you’ll want to eliminate from your lists: 

• Unknown users: Unknown users are invalid or unrecognized email addresses in a sender’s database. They include abandoned and shut down email addresses by the client and incorrect email addresses containing typos. Sending to these types of email addresses will lead to higher bounce rates. 

• Recycled spam traps: Recycled spam traps, sometimes called repurposed spam traps, are email addresses that used to be active but are now used by MBPs to catch spam and other types of unwanted email. A user could have used the email to opt-in at one time but has since abandoned the address. Recycled spam traps are more common on old and infrequently used sending lists. 

• Pristine spam traps: Pristine spam traps, also known as actual traps or honeypots, are email addresses created solely to capture spammers. These addresses were never legitimate. They can’t be used to create accounts, sign up for lists, or make purchases so that they can catch senders with poor list-building practices. 

The Impact of Invalid Email Addresses on Sender Reputation and Deliverability

Sending to these email addresses negatively impacts your sender’s reputation and the chances of an email passing the receiving mail server’s gateway into the inbox. For best results, you should implement a list validation solution that identifies incorrect or invalid emails at the point of capture and prevents them from being added to your list. 

Why Organic Email List Growth Beats Buying Lists for Deliverability and Compliance

You should also grow your email list organically rather than buying or renting it, as there is no guarantee that the names on a purchased list consented to be added to the list or even belong to real people. Purchasing an email list is a bad idea for several reasons, including:

• You’ll violate privacy laws like GDPR—and run the risk of hefty fines. The people on these lists don’t know you and are thus more likely to mark your emails as spam. 

• You don’t have control over the quality of these email addresses. 

• Companies with poor email acquisition practices can repeatedly send their email campaigns to spam traps, quickly landing them on blocklists. 

• Keeping your email list clean and accurate helps you prove your trustworthiness to MBPs and recipients, enabling you to land in more inboxes and reach more people.

Related Reading

• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam
• Email Sender Reputation

13 Email Deliverability Best Practices

1. Perform Volume Management

It's common for malicious senders to use an IP address with no existing send history or reputation to send as many emails as possible within a short time frame—before MBP filters can catch them and block them. As a result, MBPs favor senders with an established history of consistent sending. If you’re sending from a new domain, slowly build volume and frequency over time so you don’t trigger spam filters. 

Mastering IP Warming and Managing Email Frequency for Optimal Deliverability

This concept is known as IP warming. It can also be a good idea to spread campaigns to large numbers of subscribers over a few days so there are no volume spikes, but this mainly applies when you’re a new sender or don’t have a history of sending too many people at once. 

You’ll most likely want to increase your send frequency at certain times of the year, such as during the Black Friday weekend and holidays. In these cases, it’s good to slowly increase your send frequency in the run-up to these events. Be aware of how many emails your subscribers expect or want to receive. Sending too many emails in a short time frame can potentially annoy subscribers and lead to unsubscribes that hurt your sender’s reputation.

2. Segment And Personalize

Segmenting your list based on your audience’s demographics and behavior is an email marketing best practice, as is personalizing your emails to suit their preferences. Writing customized content with personal appeal through practices such as including subscribers’ first names is also helpful for connecting with your audience.

Following these personalization best practices positively affects your email deliverability. Subscribers will be more likely to stay engaged with content tailored to their specific needs. Better engagement means fewer unsubscribes, fewer spam complaints, and higher chances of conversion, improving your email marketing deliverability.

3. Create A Suppression List

Most brands have inactive subscribers on their lists. These people don’t officially opt-out, but they also don’t read or otherwise engage with the brand’s emails in any way. If you have inactive subscribers, it’s a good idea to group them to avoid sending them anything else apart from a possible re-engagement campaign. Why? If they keep receiving but not engaging with your emails, that’s a bad sign to MBPs, and it can negatively impact your email deliverability. 

Managing Inactive Subscribers to Boost Engagement and Email Deliverability

Low engagement rates cause MBPs to think your content is spammy or unwanted, leading to a lower sender reputation. By sending fewer emails to inactive subscribers, you can focus more on those who engage with your content and improve your email deliverability. 

When you should add someone to your suppression list depends mainly on your email frequency. If you email your list three times a week, you might consider someone inactive if they haven’t engaged with your emails for more than a month. If you only email your subscribers twice a month, you’ll want to wait longer before considering someone inactive.

4. Have A Compliant Opt-In Process

We already mentioned above how important it is to avoid buying or renting email lists because, among other reasons, the people on those lists haven’t chosen to be contacted by you. The same goes for anyone you add to your list without explicit confirmation that they want to be there. Yes, that means implementing a double opt-in process. 

The Benefits of Double Opt-In and Building a Quality Email List

While having a single opt-in is still legal in the United States (not so much in Europe—check the GDPR rules), it’s not an email best practice. For example, someone who gives you their email address to receive order confirmations might not want to receive your promotional emails. Having people confirm they want to be on your email list increases your chances of getting high engagement and decreases your risk of unsubscribes and spam complaints. 

Pro tip: Ask new subscribers to add you to their email address book. That’s a surefire way to stay out of the spam folder. 

5. Offer Easy Opt-Out Methods

Email best practices require senders to make it easy for subscribers to opt out of their programs. That means having an easy-to-spot unsubscribe link in all of your emails. It’s even better if you offer a one-click unsubscribe process. Someone who already decided they don’t want to hear from you anymore doesn’t want to go to a new tab to confirm their unsubscription when they’ve just clicked “unsubscribe.” 

Generally speaking, it’s annoying and won’t leave a good impression. What you do want to do is confirm that they’ve successfully unsubscribed. If you’re running multiple email campaigns, include a link for people to update their email preferences. That way, they can opt out of some of your communications while receiving others. 

6. Build Brand Recognition

A less technical factor that impacts your email deliverability is your brand recognition. The more your subscribers know and love your brand, the more likely they will open your emails. A high open rate is a positive signal for mailbox providers to trust your brand and send its emails straight to the inbox. 

Building Trust and Recognition Through Consistent Email Branding

To ensure your email marketing program benefits from positive brand recognition, consider these best practices: 

• Keep your branding consistent across all channels: While it may be tempting to try flashy techniques with my email templates, it’s more critical that subscribers spot an email as coming from me, especially if they already trust me. Consistent branding also helps me build a relationship with my subscribers. If my branding extends to my subject lines, it is easy to spot in the inbox. 

• Foster trust by making my identity clear: I should include my brand name in my sender’s “from” address so there’s no hesitation about whom the email is from. I can also try including a person’s name, such as sending promotional emails from “Jennifer at Validity” rather than “Validity.” Often, these personalized sender names perform better. 

• Send emails from my domain: The domain I’m sending from plays a key role in successful branding. I should always send from my company’s domain. Sending from a free email address provider such as Gmail looks spammy and comes across as highly unprofessional. 

7. Avoid Email Subject Line Malpractices

Your subscribers aren’t the only ones reading your subject lines. Their email clients are, too, and most have strict filters to weed out spam. Those filters catch the same things recipients tend to find annoying, including: 

• Subject lines in all caps 

• Subject lines full of exclamation points 

• Subject lines using spam trigger words such as “free,” “buy,” “earn,” “prize,” and “winner” 

• Subject lines in strange fonts 

• A good rule of thumb is to make your subject lines descriptive and engaging without overdoing anything. 

8. Be Mindful Of Email Body Malpractices

A good email is an email that can be read in its entirety. If it can’t, you risk frustrating the recipient, and they might just unsubscribe—or worse, send you to spam. To increase the chances of receiving your emails in full glory, follow these tips: 

• Be careful when using fancy elements like forms, videos, or dynamic scripts like JavaScript that not all mailbox providers display. 

• Avoid including any attachments. I optimize the images I embed not to slow down the email’s load time. I use alt text for my pictures in case my subscribers’ email clients don’t automatically load images. 

• Maintain a balanced text-to-HTML ratio to avoid looking spammy to the filters. 

• Keep links to a minimum and ensure they are complete since URL shorteners can set off spam filters.

9. Sender Rotation

Sender rotation helps you send multiple email accounts with a distributed email volume. When you use multiple accounts, the chances of sending over emails using only one account and falling under spam are reduced by a significant margin. 

10. Automated Personalization

Personalization is good, but you can’t scale without volume. And you can’t even sit and personalize each email by yourself, right? Here is where tools like Saleshandy will help me personalize my email content and automate the flow so that I can relax and enjoy the fruits of personalization. 

11. Spintax 

Sometimes, using the email copy with just a few customizations with merge tags isn’t enough. Well, Spintax can help here. This feature allows me to create variations in my text. Look at it to understand it better in Saleshandy’s Spintax feature. My imagination is the only limit; with spintax, I can offer different experiences to the same set of recipients. 

12. Sequence Score 

Sequence score is your best friend who will not let you make mistakes in the first place. It will stand by me and correct me on every move I make. The Sequence Score evaluates my email content and places it in green or red sections based on set standards, helping improve my email deliverability. 

13. Important To Know: Policies, Laws

We know that policies and laws are decided by the country you are in. Every country has specific guidelines and rules they want all email senders to follow to better the receivers and secure their privacy. 

Here are some laws and policies you need to keep in mind. (adding a country name to give you more clarity on where the law will be implemented.) 

• CAN-SPAM Act (USA) 

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 

• Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) 

• Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) (UK) 

• Australian Spam Act 

• New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages 

• India follows the Information Technology (IT) Act 2000  

• IT (Amendment) Act 2008. 

Regarding technologies, generative AI is taking over personalization, segmenting, enriching profiles, and many more components.

Related Reading

• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Best Email Domains

Key Metrics for Email Deliverability to Monitor

Bounce Rate: Understanding Email Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are considered high if they fall outside the 2% to 5% mark. Hence, always try to cap it at 2% max and clean your list once this number is high. 

Open Rate: The First Step to Engagement

An open rate between 15% and 25% is considered a good benchmark for cold emailing, and for email marketing, it can be slightly higher, around 20% to 30%. However, it differs from industry to industry. 

Inbox Placement Rate: The Main Objective of Email Deliverability

Reaching inboxes is crucial and the main focus of email deliverability. A 95% and above inbox placement is a good number to follow. 

Click Through Rate: Getting Your Readers to Take Action

Again, as it varies from industry to industry, the average industry rate is around 1% to 5%. But if you want to set a quality benchmark, you can consider 2% to 3%. 

Read Rate: Understanding How Many of Your Emails Are Getting Engaged

A read rate of 20% and above is considered a quality benchmark. This means five out of every 50 emails you send are getting engaged. 

Forwarding Rate: A Sign of Valuable Content

A 5% to 10% rate is generally considered as high as if 5 of 100 emails you sent are getting forwarded, which signifies that your recipients are interested in your email and find it valuable. 

Complaint Rate: Understanding Spam Reports

Anything over 0.1% is not good regarding the complaint rate. Anything above the number might get blocklisted. Spam complaints or any complaint should not cross this % in any case. 

Domain Reputation: Your Email Sending Profile

The domain reputation score is counted on a scale 100; anything above 70 indicates a good reputation. 

Authentication Success Rate: Making Sure You’re Validated

Authentication is no joke; authenticators like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF try to achieve 100% success. No risks allowed.

Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Inframail is changing how cold email works, focusing on: 

• Deliverability

• Simplicity

• Scalability

Maximizing Email Deliverability and Reliability with Inframail's Features

With Inframail, users can create unlimited inboxes for a single flat rate. They also get a dedicated email server with automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup. These features ensure that emails are delivered rather than going to the spam folder. The Microsoft-backed infrastructure also offers reliable performance to reach your goals without interruptions. 

Simplifying Email Outreach with Inframail’s Comprehensive Support and Setup

Inframail also offers 16-hour priority support to help you tackle any roadblocks that may arise. Forget traditional cold email setups that leave you to figure out complex technical configurations independently. With Inframail, you can buy domains, set up your email infrastructure, and reach your prospects immediately.

Related Reading

• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Check Email Deliverability Score
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives