In today’s digital landscape, effective email communication is crucial for businesses and individuals. Whether you are sending marketing campaigns, transactional notifications, or personalized messages, ensuring that your emails reach the intended recipients inboxes is paramount. Email deliverability plays a pivotal role in achieving this goal. In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of email deliverability, explore common challenges, and provide actionable tips to enhance your email success rates. Let us unlock the secrets to getting your messages past spam filters and into the hands of your audience.
Key areas of Email Deliverability
Sender Domain: The domain from which emails are being sent. Anything after the '@' symbol is considered the sender domain. For example, in 'john.doe@forsta.com', 'forsta.com' is the sender domain.
IP Reputation and Domain Reputation: The reputation of the IP address and domain name from which emails are sent. A poor reputation can lead to emails being blocked or filtered into spam. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) monitor sender behavior to determine email delivery. Factors include volume of emails sent, spam complaints, and adherence to best practices. Maintaining a good sender reputation significantly impacts successful email deliverability.
Content Quality: Emails that appear spammy or contain certain keywords can trigger spam filters. Focus on relevant, valuable content that resonates with your audience.
Sender Authentication: Implement protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). These verify the sender’s identity and are crucial for deliverability.
Email Delivery vs Deliverability: Email Delivery refers to whether an email was successfully sent to the receiving server, while Deliverability refers to whether the email reaches the inbox, lands in the spam folder, or is not delivered at all."
Opt-out / Unsubscribe
Including an email opt-out option in bulk emails is essential for compliance with anti-spam regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and CASL, which require businesses to provide recipients with a clear and easy way to unsubscribe. Failing to include an opt-out link can result in legal penalties, damage to sender reputation, and an increase in spam complaints, which can negatively impact email deliverability rates. Furthermore, many major email providers, such as Google and Yahoo, now require a one-click opt-out email header for bulk senders to ensure that recipients can quickly and easily unsubscribe. This requirement helps improve user experience and prevent excessive spam complaints, which can cause emails to be blocked or sent to spam folders. Implementing a one-click opt-out also signals to email providers that the sender respects user preferences, increasing the likelihood of emails reaching the inbox rather than being filtered out.
Additionally, this requirement is enforced as part of the Forsta acceptable usage policy, meaning failure to comply could result in restrictions or suspension of sending privileges.
Further Reading:
Avoiding Being Labeled as SPAM
Managing Unsubscribe Links in Bulk Email Invitations
Understanding the Key Metrics
Before diving into strategies for improving email deliverability, it is essential to grasp the fundamental metrics that impact your success. These metrics provide insights into how your emails are performing and whether they are reaching their intended destinations. Here are some critical metrics to monitor:
Delivery Rate: The percentage of successfully delivered emails out of the total sent.
Bounce Rate: Bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered. There are two types of bounces:
- Hard Bounces: Permanent failures (e.g., invalid email addresses, blocked domains).
- Soft Bounces: Temporary issues (e.g., recipient’s mailbox full, server downtime).
Spam Complaint Rate: High spam complaint rates signal that recipients are marking your emails as spam. This negatively impacts your sender reputation.
Sender Reputation: ISPs (Internet Service Providers) evaluate your reputation based on factors like engagement, complaint rates, and authentication practices. A positive reputation improves inbox placement.
Strategies for Improving Email Deliverability
Authentication and SPF/DKIM/DMARC Setup: Configure SPF records for your domain, implement DKIM to digitally sign your emails, and set up DMARC policies to specify how ISPs should handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
You can quickly assess the technical domain setup and the content of your email by sending a test email to https://www.mail-tester.com
Maintain a Clean Email List: Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive or invalid addresses. Use confirmed opt-in (double opt-in) to ensure subscribers genuinely want your emails. This will also reduce the bounce rate for your domain.
Optimize Email Content: Craft compelling subject lines, use a mix of text and images, and avoid excessive use of links, capital letters, exclamation marks, and spammy keywords. Use a signature when appropriate, but keep your signature simple, short, professional, and if possible, free of graphics.
Clean Coding: Well-structured HTML and CSS coding enhance deliverability. Sloppy code may raise suspicions. Avoid usage of large images and unrelated links.
Navigating Spam Filters: Avoid certain words and phrases that can trigger spam filters, balance your content appropriately, maintain a professional appearance, and keep a low bounce rate by maintaining a clean email list.
Strategies to Prevent Email Throttling by Recipient Mail Servers
Occasionally, customers reach out to us with concerns regarding the timely delivery of their emails to recipients.
Mailbox providers (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.) often throttle emails coming from an email server IP or email domain to manage their incoming traffic and prevent spam. When an email server is throttled, it means that the provider limits the number of emails it will accept from that source within a specific time frame. This throttling can occur due to several reasons:
Reputation Issues: If the IP address or domain has a poor reputation (e.g., associated with spamming), mailbox providers may limit the volume of emails they accept.
New IP or Domain: When sending from a new IP address or domain, mailbox providers may initially throttle the volume of emails to assess the sender’s behavior.
Sending Frequency: Sending too many emails in a short period can trigger throttling. Providers want to ensure that senders follow reasonable sending practices.
If your IP address or domain isn't new and you're still encountering issues with email deliverability, please understand that there's no instant solution to improve it overnight. However, there are steps you can take to enhance deliverability gradually.
If you are a bulk sender, then the new requirements from Google and Yahoo include long-standing best practices that all email senders should adhere to in order to achieve good deliverability with mailbox providers.
What’s new is that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mailbox providers will require alignment with these best practices for those who send bulk messages over 5000 per day or if a significant number of recipients indicate the mail as spam.
The requirements can be distilled into 3 categories:
- Stricter adherence to domain authentication
- Give recipients an easy way to unsubscribe from bulk mail, and
- Monitoring spam complaint rates and keeping them under a 0.3% threshold.
Here are the bulk email sending guidelines from different mailbox providers and links to their support teams.
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Guidelines |
Support Link |
Postmaster Tools |
You can setup Postmaster tools for your sender domain and monitor spam rate, overall health of the domain etc. You can also contact their support teams to lift any restrictions enforced on your sender domains.
To avoid throttling by email providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, it's advisable to send your emails in smaller batches. By sending emails in smaller increments rather than all at once, you can help distribute the load more evenly across servers, reducing the likelihood of triggering throttling mechanisms. This approach allows for smoother delivery and improves the chances of your emails reaching recipients without delays. Additionally, consider spacing out the sending of your emails over time rather than sending them in rapid succession. This strategy not only helps in maintaining a good sender reputation but also fosters better deliverability rates over the long term.
If you encounter problems sending emails to any other providers, please consult their respective email support teams.