Digital Growth Team Blog

Email Deliverability: Best Practices for Avoiding the Spam Folder

May 1, 2023

Email marketing is a powerful tool to reach out to customers and build brand awareness. However, the success of email marketing depends heavily on email deliverability. Poor email deliverability can reduce the effectiveness of email marketing, increase costs and damage the reputations of both the sender and the recipient’s email servers. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing best practices to avoid the spam folder and increase email deliverability.

Keep Your Email List Clean:

Start with keeping the email list clean; it’s vital in improving email deliverability. Remove bounced and inactive email addresses from your email list. Your email service provider or ESP should provide reports on email bounce backs and unsubscribes. Regularly remove these email addresses from your list to increase your email deliverability.

Be Consistent with Your Sending Habits: If you have infrequent sending habits, it can have negative effects on your deliverability. Your email will have a higher chance of being flagged as spam and receiving a lower open rate. Being consistent with your sending habits can help improve your deliverability rate, as ESPs will recognize your emails as consistent behavior.

Avoid Spam Triggers in Your Email Content: The email content is a major factor in avoiding the spam folder. The text and images in your email should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your target audience. Avoid these common spam triggers:

  • Using all caps or excessive punctuation.
  • Using words like “free”, “discount”, or “offer.”
  • Using images or fonts that are too small or too large.
  • Using excessive exclamation marks or question marks in your subject line.

Test Your Senders Score: Sender Score is a metric that measures the reputation of the outgoing email server from which the email was sent. It uses a score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the best score. Mailbox providers use this score to filter incoming emails. Keep your score above 80, and you can lower the risk of your email landing in the spam folder.

Authenticate Your Sending Domain: Email authentication is the process that verifies the identity of the sender domain. Sender identity authentication is necessary to protect your email campaigns from being flagged as spam. Email providers authenticate domains using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Contact your email service provider to check if they support authentication.

In conclusion, email deliverability can have a significant impact on email marketing. By following these best practices, you can avoid the spam folder and increase email deliverability. Remember to keep your email list clean, be consistent with your sending habits, avoid spam triggers, test your sender’s score, and authenticate your sending domain. Making these changes will help your email marketing campaign reach out to your target audience effectively.