Bonus: Anti-Spam Checklist

In simple terms, deliverability refers to whether or not your emails actually make it to your subscribers' inboxes. And let me tell you, **it's the most important thing in email marketing!**

Think about it this way: if your emails aren't being delivered to your subscribers, all the time and effort you put into creating awesome content, the best strategies, and crafting the perfect subject lines goes to waste. It's like setting sail on a grand adventure and getting lost in the Bermuda Triangle before you even leave the dock!

• Low open rates: If your subscribers aren't opening your emails, it could be a sign that your emails are getting stuck in spam filters or not making it to their inboxes at all (a low open rate with nowadays inflated open rates would be 10-30%)

• High bounce rates: A high percentage of bounced emails can signal to email providers that your email list is outdated or that you're sending unsolicited emails (a high bounce rate is over 1.5%)

• Increased complaints or unsubscribes: If you notice an uptick in the number of subscribers complaining about or unsubscribing from your emails, it could mean that they're not happy with the content or frequency of your emails (a high unsubscribe rate is over 1%)

• Low numbers such as open rates, click rates, and revenue across the entire account: including post-purchase flow, abandoned cart flow, and 1st welcome email.

The simplest way to know if your deliverability is damaged is to look at your 10 last campaigns. If you see open & click rates like in the screenshot above - oh boy you have problems!

• Your email list quality: The quality of your email list can have a significant impact on your deliverability. If you're sending emails to a bunch of invalid, inactive email addresses, or a purchased list - it can hurt your reputation with email providers and land your emails in spam folders. That's why it's important to regularly clean up your email list and remove any invalid or inactive email addresses.

• Your sender reputation: Your sender reputation is a score that email providers use to determine whether your emails are trustworthy and worth delivering to their users' inboxes. If you damage your sender's reputation it’s really hard to bounce back and fix it, because your email domain will already be marked as “spam”.

• Your email content: The content of your emails can also impact your deliverability. Emails that contain spammy language, excessive use of images, or too many links can trigger spam filters and result in your emails being flagged as spam. It's important to create valuable, relevant, and engaging content that resonates with your audience and encourages them to open and engage with your emails.

The best way to fix your deliverability is to send emails to those subscribers who click and open your emails often, excluding everyone who’s bouncing and who’s not opening your emails. Basically, target people who opened and clicked your email at least once in the last 30 days, people that started checkout, added to cart, viewed product, or were active on-site at least once in the last 30 days, and placed order at least once in the last 90 days.

Here’re more effective ways to improve your deliverability

• Send more plain text emails which tend to have better open rates, click rates and simply pass spam filters better.

• If you’re sending a designed email make sure to have a healthy image-text ratio (screen below only has 2 images). Don’t send image-only emails as they’ll get filtered as spam. If you do include images, make sure to suppress them and keep the image size as small as possible (overall best practice for email is to keep its size under 100kb).

• Don’t include too many links as links tend to make emails much heavier and too many links will also trigger a spam filter.

• Don’t use subject lines with caps lock only.

• Ask to be moved to a primary folder.

• Send relevant content that’s more likely to be clicked: surveys, giveaways, blog posts, videos and etc

• Ask people to reply to your emails - the reply is one of the strongest engagement actions that your subscribers can do to your email. Encourage people to reply to your emails, because it helps a lot!

If you do all these things it’s guaranteed that your deliverability will go up, however, it’s a long process. Apps like InboxAlly and InboxMailers might help you fix your deliverability quicker.

If you’re seeing good open + click rate I’d suggest increasing your segments. If you’re emailing engaged 90 days, go up by 30 days (engaged 120) and see how it performs, if the numbers are still good - go up. Repeat this process over and over again.

If you haven’t yet, set up a dedicated sending domain ↓