Essential Steps to Ensure Your Emails Pass the Deliverability Test

Email marketing remains one of the best ways to communicate with your audience online. Despite recent technological advancements, email marketing consistently delivers a higher return on investment for business owners.

While email marketing is a powerful tool, it becomes useless if they are not getting to your audience’s inboxes. In this blog post, we’ll explore essential steps you need to take for your emails to pass the deliverability test.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to the rate at which your emails successfully get to your recipient’s inboxes without being flagged as spam. On the other hand email delivery simply means the email was sent. You can identify potential issues that can stop your emails from getting to your audience by email deliverability test. 

Factors such as sender reputation, authentication protocols, email content and engagement metrics influence email deliverability. Your chances of successfully reaching your audience can be increased by understanding these factors.

Why is Email Deliverability Important?

When your email deliverability rate is poor, it reduces the effect of your email marketing strategy. If your emails are not successfully delivered to your recipient’s inboxes, they can’t be read and no actions will be taken. A high deliverability rate remains a crucial component of email marketing. Below are four reasons why email deliverability is important:

1. Better Email Engagement 

When your emails successfully get to the inbox of your recipients, it increases the chance at which they open, read and interact with the emails. Higher interaction with your emails ensures effective communication with recipients and drives sales.

2. Improved Sender Reputation 

Getting low spam complaints and successfully getting into the inboxes of your customers improves the sender’s reputation. When email providers track your sending history, high engagement from your customers increases the chances of inbox placement. 

3. Higher ROI From Email Marketing Campaigns

Reaching the inbox ensures your marketing messages are seen by potential customers, leading to more conversions. Better deliverability translates into increased sales, customer retention, and overall business growth.

4. Stronger Customer Trust and Brand Reputation

Emails that consistently land in inboxes build credibility and trust with your audience. When customers receive timely and relevant emails, they are more likely to engage with and remain loyal to your brand.

Step-By-Step Process to Ensure Your Emails Consistently Pass the Deliverability Test

It is crucial that your emails successfully get to the inboxes of your recipients and there are various strategies to ensure that. Below is a step-by-step process to ensure your emails consistently pass the deliverability test:

1. Use a Verified Domain and Authenticate Your Emails 

You can use a verified domain to get your deliverability on track. Using a verified domain to authenticate your emails ensures that your emails are coming from a reputable source and not from scammers. This can be done using the sender policy framework (SPF) which ensures that the email is coming from an authorized sender rather than an illegitimate source. 

Domain keys identified Mails (DKIM) adds a cryptographic signature to your emails ensuring they are successfully transmitted. Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) combined the methods of SPF and DKIM to authenticate your emails and block fraud messages.

2. Warm Up and Maintain a Healthy Email List 

It is essential to perform what is known as an email domain warmup (or IP warmup) before sending your first email from a new IP address. The procedure is quite simple, begin by distributing your emails to a select few of your most active subscribers.  Next, gradually broaden your email sends to less engaged subscribers while increasing the number of subscribers you’re sending to. 

In essence, you’re trying to convince email providers that your emails aren’t spam by using recipient interaction with this technique. High percentages of opens and clicks are engagement indications that let email providers know your communications are interesting and relevant to your readers. 

3. Conduct Regular Email List Cleaning

The size of your list does not determine the success of your email marketing campaign. The quality determines it. You run a greater risk of damaging your sender reputation and, eventually, your deliverability the longer you retain inactive and disengaged subscribers on your email list. 

You may automate a portion of your list cleaning by providing people with an easy way to unsubscribe from your list. To ensure that you are only sending newsletters to individuals who are genuinely responding to your emails, it is crucial to clean your email list periodically.

4. Provide a Clear Unsubscribe Option

As crucial as it is to have a rigorous opt-in procedure, it is equally critical to have a seamless opt-out procedure. After your subscribers consent to receive your emails, you must ensure that they may easily opt-out. This could seem like the opposite of building a big email list. 

In actuality, though, a big list isn’t always a good one.  Subscribers become inactive weight on your list if they can’t easily unsubscribe. This implies that even though you will probably keep sending them emails, they will no longer open them, indicating to email providers that your engagement rate is declining. 

Even worse, if you don’t have an obvious unsubscribe button, people can become irate and classify your emails as spam by clicking the spam button.

5. Make Your Opt-In Procedure Tighter

You should concentrate on your opt-in procedure. An effective opt-in procedure guarantees that your email list is off to a strong start with engaged readers rather than inactive ones. Sending emails to recipients who don’t read or open them regularly may negatively impact your credit score according to email providers. Email providers will assume you’re spamming people if you have low engagement rates and this can hurt your email deliverability. 

With a single opt-in procedure, a person is in and may begin receiving your emails as soon as they use your signup form to provide their email address. The issue is that a lot of individuals use disposable or phoney email addresses, and bots can enter emails into forms. A greater proportion of subscribers will not be genuine as a result of a single opt-in. Or, they won’t respond to your emails very often, which will decrease engagement overall and raise the possibility of bad deliverability.

6. Pay Attention to High-Quality Emails

Unfortunately, you have to satisfy both your email providers and your viewers while creating content. Keep in mind that keeping your readers happy is far more vital than keeping your email providers pleased, even though the former is still important. 

Your deliverability will increase as a result of your email providers automatically receiving favourable sender signals from your subscribers who are enthusiastic about and interacting with your content. The primary responsibility of an email marketer or publisher is to concentrate on producing high-quality content. Your subscribers will read and interact with your emails more if they find them valuable. 

7. Segment Your Email List

Sending emails of a high calibre is insufficient, you must send relevant emails. Engagement and segmentation go hand in hand. You can make sure that the appropriate individuals are receiving email content that is important and relevant to them by segmenting your audience. This will increase the likelihood that the recipients will read and interact with your subsequent emails. 

Some places to start when it comes to audience segmentation include demographics (occupation, age, and gender), location (nation, state, city), behaviour (particular exchanges, deeds, and degree of involvement), stages of the buyer’s journey (awareness, decision-making, and repeat business). Just keep in mind that you don’t have to limit your segmentation options. Depending on your audience, your objectives, and the direction of your material, the alternatives are virtually limitless and subject to change over time.

FAQs

1. Why do my emails go to spam even though recipients subscribed?

Emails can still end up in spam due to poor sender reputation, lack of proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), or spam-triggering content. To avoid this, ensure your emails follow best practices, engage your audience, and maintain a clean email list.

2. How frequently should my email list be cleaned?

It is advisable to clean your email list at least every five to six months. Remove inactive subscribers, invalid email addresses, and those who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time to improve deliverability.

3. What’s the best way to test email deliverability?

You can use tools like Mail-Tester, Google Postmaster Tools, or GlockApps to analyze your email placement and identify any issues affecting deliverability. Regular testing helps ensure your emails reach inboxes consistently.

Conclusion

Ensuring your emails pass the deliverability test is essential for a successful email marketing strategy. By authenticating your domain, maintaining a strong sender reputation, optimizing content, and monitoring engagement, you can maximize your chances of reaching your audience’s inbox.

Regularly test your email deliverability and stay updated on best practices to adapt to evolving email algorithms. With the right approach, you can improve inbox placement, boost engagement, and drive better results from your email marketing campaigns.