Improving your email deliverability is an important part of email marketing. Your emails can be perfect, but if your emails don’t arrive in the inbox, this won’t benefit you at all. So how can you improve your email deliverability? You can read about it below!
Below are 11 tips for better deliverability. The more often one of the things below happens, the better your deliverability becomes. This is because it shows that you are not sending spam and are actually sending useful emails that people respond to positively.
If your emails get opened, this is good for your deliverability. This shows that your emails are worthy of being opened and therefore it is important to also focus on your open rate for your deliverability.
When someone responds to your email, it means that this person is (probably) happy with your email and has taken the time to respond. This creates interaction and this is positive for your overall deliverability. After all, people do not usually respond to spam, so this indicates that you are not sending spam.
If someone forwards your email, this is also good for your deliverability. It shows that your email is not spam. People generally do not forward spam. It also indicates that your email is valuable enough to forward.
Should your e-mail end up in the spam of someone and this person indicates that your e-mail is not spam, this is positive for your deliverability. With this action, the person lets the e-mail provider know that a mistake was made and that your e-mail is not spam. So this is direct feedback to the email provider.
Maybe you’ve done it yourself before to keep your inbox organized. Moving an e-mail to a matching folder. If this is done with your e-mail then this person indicates that your e-mail is valuable enough to keep. Therefore, this is good for deliverability.
If your email address is added to a recipient’s address book, this also sends a good signal. This indicates that your email address / email domain is valuable enough to add to the recipient’s address book.
Having your own domain name also has a positive effect on deliverability. If you send from an @gmail.com or an @yahoo.com account then this can have a bad impact on your deliverability. Having your own domain name verified by your hosting party with matching records will do a lot better.
There is still some difference between the deliverability of different email marketing software. That is why it is important to look at the average deliverability rate of your email marketing software, should you normally have a lot of problems with this.
Software | Deliverability Rate |
ActiveCampaign / MailBlue | 93% |
Mailchimp | 92,7% |
Mailerlite | 91,7% |
Brevo | About 91% |
CleverReach | 90,9% |
You have received permission to send emails. Don’t have this? This will result in a lot of unsubscribes and spam notifications, which in turn will cause you to end up in spam and cause you to have low deliverability. So always make sure you have permission to send emails and people have actually signed up.
When determining if an email is spam, it looks at the ratio of images to text. If there are too many images in an e-mail relative to the text, the e-mail may be marked as spam. This is bad for deliverability. For example, if an e-mail is 95% images and 5% text, the ratio is wrong.
For good deliverability, it is necessary to set the most important records. These records indicate that this is a legitimate email address and that you are not impersonating someone else. In addition, this can also ensure that your emails arrive in the inbox better without changes. More on this in the next chapter.
This record ensures that your emails arrive at the right place. So this is an important one for deliverability.
Setup: Link
Verify Correct Setup: Link
This record ensures that your emails cannot be forged by someone else and prevents someone else from using your name.
Setup: Link
Verify Correct Setup: Link
The DKIM Record ensures that the content of your e-mail is not changed during transmission. Thus, this ensures that all images, colors and all formatting remain the same in the inbox.
Setup: Link Verify Correct Setup: Link
This combines SPF + DKIM for additional email authentication. Make sure your SPF and DKIM are active for at least 48 hours.
Zoals zojuist besproken, is het dus belangrijk om een aantal records in te stellen voor het verzenden van je e-mails om de deliverability te verbeteren. Het gaat om ongeveer vier records, elk met een eigen doel:
We’ve just talked about what’s good for your deliverability and how to improve your entire email deliverability, but what shouldn’t you do? Here are some actions that are bad for deliverability and therefore you should avoid.
Moving your email to the spam folder will reduce your overall deliverability
If your e-mail receives spam complaints, this will reduce your overall deliverability.
This usually only happens if you send an email to recipients who have not subscribed or if you send a spam email without an unsubscribe button.
If your emails are deleted without even being opened, this will negatively impact your deliverability.
So now we know what to do and what not to do to improve email deliverability, but how can we measure it? Fortunately, this is pretty simple.
After following these steps, you will see your deliverability score and know if there is room for improvement. Do you have any questions about your email deliverability? Feel free to contact me!