14-Step Email Deliverability Checklist for Higher Open Rates

Have you ever sent out an email campaign to be met with a disappointing open rate? You may have had high hopes before hitting send, but now it feels like your efforts fell flat. That’s what happens when your emails don’t reach your recipients’ inboxes and instead get stuck somewhere in cyberspace. The good news is that you can take actionable steps to improve your email deliverability, like following an email deliverability checklist. This article will explore the ins and outs of email deliverability, focusing on providing an inbox delivery checklist to help you get your emails back on track.

Email infrastructure can also play a key role in improving your email deliverability. Inframail’s solution helps you achieve your objectives by ensuring your emails consistently reach recipients’ inboxes, leading to higher open rates, better engagement, and improved results from your email campaigns.

What is Email Deliverability and Why is It So Important?

empty mailbox - Email Deliverability Checklist

Email deliverability is all about ensuring that your emails are successfully delivered to the recipient’s primary inbox rather than their spam folder. To achieve this, you need to authenticate your emails by setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, which help verify to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that you are a legitimate sender and that your email messages should be delivered to your recipient’s inbox.

This rate can be calculated with the following formula:

Deliverability Rate = (Inbox Emails / Total Emails Sent) *100.

How ISP Spam Filters Impact Email Deliverability and Ways to Avoid False Positives

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide spam control to protect their users and their networks from vast volumes of unsolicited or malicious emails. While these tools are sophisticated, sender error or inexperience can lead to emails being falsely suspected as spam, which hurts your email deliverability rate.

Adhering to email deliverability best practices multiply the chances of your messages reaching your target audience, thereby boosting the overall success of your email campaigns.

Email Delivery vs. Email Deliverability: What’s the Difference?

While email delivery and email deliverability might seem similar, there is a crucial distinction between the two. Email delivery refers to the successful transmission of an email to the recipient’s mail server, whereas email deliverability refers to the successful delivery of an email to the recipient’s inbox.

In other words, email deliverability is the next step after email delivery, ensuring that your emails reach the intended recipients. Adhering to proper authentication protocols and best practices maximizes your email deliverability and lessens the risk of being flagged as spam.

Why Email Deliverability Matters

Email deliverability is essential because it determines the success of your email campaigns. If your emails don’t reach your recipients’ inboxes, all your efforts will be in vain.

Poor Campaign Effectiveness: A successful email campaign requires engagement. You haven’t maximized your potential conversions if many of your emails go to spam.
ROI: Email deliverability issues reduce your ROI on outbound marketing campaigns, which can have serious consequences for the overall profitability of your business because you spike your customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Sender Reputation: If your emails regularly end up in the spam folder, it’s a signal to your ISP that something is wrong, which could lead to further filtering and harming your IP reputation even more.

14-Step Email Deliverability Checklist for Higher Open Rates

woman with laptop - Email Deliverability Checklist

Email Configuration: Setting Up Your Email for Deliverability Success

The configuration of your email server and email account is an essential factor that affects cold email deliverability. It’s also a factor that many email senders ignore from the very beginning. You can’t afford to ignore that if you want your outbound outreach to go smoothly without any bottlenecks. Check what to pay attention to.

1. Set up a separate email account for outbound

You’re sending various emails from your primary business email account (emails to my co-workers, friends, customers, partners, etc.). My entire team also sends emails using their addresses on the same domain (alice@yourcompany.com, bob@yourcompany.com, everyoneelse@yourcompany.com).

The truth is, I can’t entirely control the number or the quality of all emails coming out from my company’s regular email addresses on my regular company domain. And if I aim at top-notch deliverability scores in outbound, this is one of the top things I need to be able to control – the reputation of my domain and IPs. That’s why the most experienced outbound email senders set up a separate company domain and email addresses on this domain, which can be used exclusively for outbound email campaigns.

Using Separate Domains for Testing and Maintaining Your Main Domain's Reputation

Having done so, I have complete control over the number and content of the emails coming out from my outbound mailboxes, and I can easily adjust the sending settings in case I exceed quotas. I must be prepared for successful campaigns and outbound failures, so I’ll experiment and test extensively.

With that in mind, I’d rather avoid risking the reputation of my main company domain. I can set up a separate one that will allow me to dynamically test some campaign variations and feel secure at the same time.

2. Warm Up New Email Accounts

Once I have a fresh domain and newly set email accounts for outbound, I need to warm them up. What does that mean? The trick is to start sending a minimal number of emails from them at various times of the day and, ideally, reply to some of those emails. Start using the outbound-dedicated accounts as I’d typically do with a freshly set email account. I can also automate the process with the warm-up add-on that is at least 5x cheaper than other warm-up tools. It helps me build a strong email reputation and ensure that my emails end up in the primary inbox, not the SPAM folder.

Thanks to AI, it interacts positively with my email account with real emails and email content, making the whole process more human. If I’d instead go on with the process manually, I’d remember that new accounts shouldn’t be used to send large numbers of emails. This is what spammers keep trying to do: set up a new email account, send as much as I can before I get blocked, forget about the blocked account, set up a new one, and repeat the whole drill.

The Importance of Gradual Warm-Up for Email Sending and Maintaining Quality Over Quantity

I’m not a spammer, so I won’t give my email provider a reason to think so. I’ll start slow, like ~5, then ~10, then ~20, then ~30, then ~50 emails daily. Gradually, I’ll add a few emails daily until I reach the planned number.

But I’ll try never to send more than 50-100 emails from one address a day, anyway. Remember that I’ll need some optimal sending capacity for the follow-ups. It’s not really about quantity but rather about quality. More about that later in this post.

3. Verify The Reputation Of Your Domain And IP

This is one of the crucial things to check, and the process will be described in a separate post coming soon. In a nutshell, several free tools on the web allow me to assess my domain’s reputation and the IP of my SMTP server (the server that sends my emails). For instance, I can paste my domain or IP at Talos to check if its reputation is good, neutral, or bad. It will also show me if my SMTP IP or domain has been classified in the right web category, e.g., Business and Industry. If I paste my IP, I’ll get more information from Talos, so if only I can get that number, I’ll have it checked. If I’m unsure how to get my SMTP server’s IP, I’ll consult my developer or admin or contact our support team for help.

4. Set Your SPF And DKIM

Those are two records I need to add to my email server configuration to prevent other email servers from thinking I’m a spammer. Here’s a whole post explaining what SPF and DKIM are (in simple words). I’ll make sure I read it and try to set it up. If I’m not tech-savvy, I’ll ask my email provider for help setting this up. If I’m a Woodpecker user, I can ask our support team to help me figure this out.

5. Check Your Email Provider Limits

Each email provider provides hourly and daily limits for the number of messages sent. If I exceed those limits, my account gets blocked, usually for at least a few hours. In some cases, my mailbox may be blocked for good. For instance, Gmail has established different daily sending limits for free mail accounts and paid accounts within Google Apps for work. But this is just one email provider.

If I’m not using Gmail to send my outbound campaigns:

I will define my email provider.
I will check their help section for information about daily sending limits.
If I don’t find any clear information, I will contact the provider directly and ask them about their daily and hourly sending limits.

Email Content: What Goes Inside Your Outgoing Messages Matters

My emails’ words, images, and links may alarm spam filters. They may also irritate my recipients. Both the filters and the recipients can mark my messages as spam. If any of them do that, I can end up on a blacklist. That’s why it’s crucial to send quality messages and avoid some tactics that may resemble spammers’ activities.

6. Check For Spam Words

None of the parts of my email should include words that usually appear in spammy email offers. Just be careful with salesy language and expressions. Don’t try to sell in any of your cold emails or follow-ups. Keep the emails in a personal tone. Do you email your friends using expressions like:

“once in a lifetime occasion.”
“special offer”
“one hundred percent free.”

Avoiding Spam Triggers: Crafting Value-Driven, Non-Salesy Email Content

I doubt it. But these are just flagship examples. The lists of spam-triggering expressions include items you would never expect to influence your email deliverability negatively. Of course, I won’t get into spam whenever I use the word “marketing” in my email. It’s more about the frequency of such words in my messages.

There’s certainly a way to describe my product or service in a non-salesy way. I’ll try to show the actual value. In my value proposition, I’ll try to briefly, yet precisely, answer the question, “what’s in it for my recipient?”

7. Add Personalization

Personalization plays an important role in boosting deliverability for two reasons:

Well-Personalized Emails Are More Prospect-Oriented

They don’t sound selfish and annoying to the recipient. Everyone likes to read about themselves and is interested in what other people say about their work. Especially if it’s something good, if I get my prospects genuinely interested in my email, they won’t likely mark my message as spam. On the contrary, they will be more open to responding to me and continuing the conversation.

Personalization Makes Every Email Look Different, Even Based On The Same Template.

If all my emails look the same, and I send hundreds of them quickly, I alarm the anti-spam mechanisms, and my email provider may block my account. Most email automation tools provide a system for merging custom information from my contact base into my email template.

In Woodpecker, we call them ‘custom-fields’ or ‘snippets.’ Except for standard fields like first name, website, company name, title, and industry, I can insert even whole sentences or paragraphs previously prepared in my contact base if I aim at highly personalized outreach.

8. Don’t Track Links And Opens If You Don’t Need To

Here’s how it works: I attach a micro image to my message to check whether my prospect opened an email. If the recipient allows images to be displayed, the 1-pixel image opens when the email opens, and the tool that tracks opens gets the information that this has happened.

Tracking links changes my native link into another one, usually on a domain different from the original link I put in my email. When my recipient clicks the link, they get into the tracking address and are immediately redirected to the original address I wanted them to. Links that redirect the recipient to another place look suspicious to anti-spam mechanisms.

9. If You Track Links, Do It Right

Because of the nature of the link-tracking process described above, I need to do it right if I want to track links in my cold emails. Here’s more on how to do it safely. I’ll remember that too many links distract my prospects’ attention from the CTA. I can’t get them distracted or confused if I want to see replies.

10. Keep The Form Of The Email As Simple As Possible

I won’t try to make it look fancy by adding HTML templates, pictures, GIFs, colorful fonts, and other fireworks. Plain text emails look more natural to spam filters, which measure the HTML and pic-to-text ratios. If my email has less plain text than everything else, it looks suspicious and may get into spam. I’ll explain more about it in this post.

11. Polish Your HTML Signature

I can use a plain-text signature. However, based on our experience, most B2B email senders want to use their professional company signature, including their photo, company logo, etc. I can do that, but make sure the HTML of the signature is neat and well-organized. If I’m using an HTML signature right now, I’ll open the </> HTML mode in the edition of my campaign in Woodpecker.

Optimizing Email Signatures: Clean HTML and Plain-Text Options for Better Deliverability

I’ll see what an HTML signature looks like. If the footer’s HTML is messy and takes much more space than the text of my message, it may trigger the spam filters. It’s a good idea to consult my developer and ask them to look at my HTML footer if I use one. Polishing the HTML positively affects my email deliverability. I can also test out a plain-text signature. If I’d like to take a shortcut, I can use our free email signature generator. We ensured all the templates were built with neat HTML code that wouldn’t send my emails to spam.

Contact Base: Quality Over Quantity

The quantity and quality of my contact list tremendously impact email deliverability. A junk prospect base may spoil even the best cold email campaign I’ve worked hard on. That’s why I need to pay attention when preparing the contact list for my outreach.

12. Upload Contacts In Batches

I’ll collect contacts for a specific campaign. Don’t buy 5K contacts thinking, “I’ll figure out what to send them later.” I can prepare a campaign for a specific batch of prospects. I can plan campaigns for small batches (even 20-50 contacts) and test the efficiency of my email copy and delivery settings this way. Why does it matter? If I upload contacts in smaller batches, I have better control over the quality of my contact base.

13. Care About The Quality Of Contacts

That’s why we recommend not buying ready-made lists of prospects, including thousands of records. My task is to ensure the quality of my prospect base. I’ll ensure I have the proper names, company data, and verified email addresses. Most list-building tools offer email verification. Some of them will even return my credits for email addresses that turned out to be invalid.

Ensuring High-Quality Contact Lists: Email Verification and Smart Segmentation

Woodpecker will also double-check my prospects’ email addresses before sending them. I won’t guess email addresses, and if I have a more extensive contact base, I’ll split it into some segments and verify the emails before uploading them into a cold email campaign. Seeing that many emails I send get bounced may be a sign that I should look at my contact base.

I can try another list-building tool or contact-based provider in such a case. Buying an extensive contact base at once is not a good idea because it disables dynamic quality testing and improvement.

14. Send Only To Business Addresses Of Individuals

Suppose most of my emails look like this: john@company.com, j.smith@company.com, john.smith@company.com, etc. I can assume that my emails will go to my recipients’ business mailboxes—where they should get them. If I’m sending my emails to info@company.com or sales@company.com, the chances that my message will be read and processed get drastically smaller.

My emails should be addressed to individuals at a company and customized for those individuals. If I send hundreds of identical messages, I’m just dropping leaflets. The people who get the leaflets may get annoyed and mark me as a spammer. Even a few manual spam reports can get my IP into blacklists.

Email Reputation Audit

Check if my email has been backlisted.
Email deliverability checklist
Assess the quality of my IP.
Analyze my current stats to get a better insight. If I’m not getting enough opens and my reply rate is lower than 5%, I likely have one of the following issues:
Check if I’ve done the technical setup correctly.
Make sure I’m targeting the right audience! Here’s why it’s essential to build my buyer persona for proper B2B lead generation.

Email Deliverability Checklist

Are I personalizing my cold emails? Get some inspiration from these cold email templates.

Technical configuration: The technical configuration behind my email deliverability is like my car’s engine. I won’t make it from A to B without it. My technical setup primarily consists of email authentication protocols that make my emails more secure. Email service providers reward this improved security with better inbox placement, leading to more opens for my campaigns.
Set up my SPF
Set up my DKIM

How To Set Up My DMARC

Set up my custom tracking domain.
Boost Email Deliverability with A Custom Tracking Domain
Set up my exact profile (no fake names or photos).

Email Domain Warm-Up

Email warm-up gradually increases sending volume and frequency to establish a sender reputation for my domain. If I suddenly start sending hundreds of emails per day, email service providers will think I am a spammer. When doing email outreach, it’s essential to continue email warm-up even after the initial warm-up stage to keep my sending domain’s reputation in good shape.

Manually warm up my emails (option 1 ):
- Week 1: 10 to 20 emails per day
- Week 2: 20 to 40 emails per day
- Week 3: 40 to 80 emails per day
- Week 4: 80 to 100 emails per day
Automatically warm up my email address (more desired option 2 )
Use deliverability and warm-up boosters like Lemwarm to get my emails directly into the audience’s inbox.
Deliverability booster runs 100% on autopilot and helps me Avoid the spam folder with a tailored deliverability strategy.
Improve sender reputation with human-like conversations.
Maintain high deliverability with a detailed deliverability report.
To learn more about increasing my business opportunities by creating a Lemwarm account, check out how Lemwarm improves my deliverability.

Email List Quality And Hygiene

Having invalid email addresses in my list can damage my reputation and deliverability. Luckily, it’s easy to ensure this doesn’t happen to me.

Don’t buy email lists with unverified email addresses.
Always send campaigns to individuals’ professional email addresses instead of generic ones. ‍
LinkedIn is the best source of B2B leads, as people update their job positions and company regularly.
I can get important information about my leads through LinkedIn scraping. I use a system that allows me to consistently get verified email addresses from fresh data sources.

Email Verification

Target LinkedIn prospects, extract emails, and send outbound campaigns automatically.
If I have an existing list and am unsure about the data quality, I use Lemlist’s free email checker.
Check if an email address is valid
Send high-quality cold emails
Email providers carefully assess whether or not my prospects engage with my emails.
The only way to facilitate engagement and get replies is to focus these emails on my prospects and their needs. In other words, make them unique and well-structured.

Don’t Use Complex HTML!

Don’t use fancy signatures–there’s no need.
Create a clean-looking and memorable signature with Lemlist’s free email signature generator.

Don’t Add Any Attachments To My Emails

If I need to send a file, I’ll just use links (e.g., Google Drive).
Include images if I’d like–but not too many. Check out more information on how images affect deliverability.
Don’t use spam trigger words and phishing phrases (WIN, free, viagra, etc…).

Always Personalize Cold Emails

I use liquid syntax for ultra-personalization (e.g., when I want to change intro lines for different audience verticals automatically).
Don’t Use ALL CAPS IN MY SUBJECT LINE.

Use Spin Syntax

If my lists are more extensive than 300 people (e.g., where I have four different intro lines, they will spin randomly).

Always Email A/B Test

Test email to know what works best for me.

Maintain A Good Reputation

Avoiding spam filters ensures my email reputation stays intact by following the guidelines email providers have provided me with.

Volume: Do not exceed my email provider’s limit. Ideally, I’ll keep the emails sent between 50 and 200 per sender per day. If I need to deliver more emails, using multiple senders is best.
Consistency: If I don’t send any emails but suddenly start blasting 500 emails daily, I will run into trouble. I’ll try to establish a process with consistent daily volumes. When I need to increase it, I’ll go step by step.
Keeping a good ratio: From email sent to email received.
Lemwarm is a deliverability booster. Make sure to set up the email warm-up feature within Lemlist. It will help me maintain a higher ratio of emails sent to received.
Sending speed: I never send all emails simultaneously—I use a system that allows me to spread them throughout the day.

Monitor The Following Key Metrics

Open rate is no longer a reliable metric, but I should still monitor it
The reply rate should be higher than 8%
The bounce rate needs to be lower than 2%
The unsubscribe rate needs to be lower than 5%
Always put an opt-out link!

Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Cold email is no longer an effective outreach process. With increasing privacy regulations, inboxes have become more secure and less accessible. Traditional email providers like Gmail and Outlook have responded by growing technical barriers to entry for cold emailing. These barriers make it harder to reach your prospects and stay off their spam and promotions tabs.

To fix this, you need a better email infrastructure. A cold email expert like Inframail can help you get there. At Inframail, we are revolutionizing cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a flat rate. We provide:

Microsoft-backed deliverability
Dedicated IP addresses
Automated technical setup

It scales its cold email outreach efforts efficiently:

Agencies
Recruiters
SDRs

The Benefits of Inframail: No Technical Headaches and Unlimited Inboxes

Using Inframail to scale your cold email outreach will save you time and effort. Forget about the technical configurations and just focus on reaching your prospects. Inframail takes care of the complex email infrastructure setup so that you can hit the ground running.

The main benefits of using Inframail include:

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Use dedicated email servers
Access priority support for up to 16 hours daily.

Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.

Inframail provides the robust email infrastructure you need without the usual technical headaches, whether you're:

An agency looking to scale outreach
A recruiter connecting with candidates
An SDR driving sales

Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.