Home > Empowering Tips > Improve Email Deliverability With 5 Best Practices
In this digital era, email is one of the most common business communication methods. As an email sender, you expect emails to always reach your recipient’s Inbox. You’d want to avoid emails landing in the Spam or Junk folder, which would be ignored and forgotten.
The chances of an email reaching the recipient’s Inbox is determined by the sender’s email deliverability. The better your email deliverability, the higher chance your emails will land in your recipient’s Inbox.
Good email deliverability can be achieved with the following good email practices.
Throttle your email delivery
Many email service providers (ESPs) enforce a daily limit on how many emails a sender can send to their servers. It is an essential approach to prevent spam and to protect their users. If you exceed this limit, your emails will be blocked or marked as spam, either temporarily (usually within 24 to 72 hours), or till the ESP whitelists you. The block may be applied to your email address, your domain (all users from your domain are affected), or IP address (all users who are using the same SMTP mail server IP as you are affected).
To avoid hitting the limit, it is best to send emails in smaller batches at one time. This practice is called “throttling”. For example, if you have 10,000 emails to send, divide the delivery to multiple days, with 20 recipients per email, 500 emails per day.
Clean up recipient list regularly
Regularly check and update your recipient list to remove email address that is no longer in use. Repeatedly sending emails to invalid or inactive users may trigger spam filters, affecting your sender reputation and deliverability rates.
If you send marketing newsletters, make sure you provide a way for recipients to unsubscribe. In addition, never purchase email list as many of them are invalid, inactive or recycled. Even if they are valid, the users did not provide you the consent to deliver them emails. Sending emails to people who don’t want your email will do you no good. Hence, it is important to keep your recipient list clean and updated.
Avoid spammy words in your email
ESPs utilize spam filters that capture words or phrases that are constantly used in spam mails, like “discount”, “free”, “limited-time offer” and “guaranteed win”. Email that was found to contain such words will be flagged as spam, which lowers your sender reputation. Avoid this by sending high-quality and valuable content, with good grammar.
Protect your email account
A legitimate email account that is compromised or has been infected with malware can be misused for sending illegal spam mails, which can affect its email delivery and deliverability. Knowing so, it is crucial to keep your email account protected and safe from security threats, such as using strong and unique password for your account, employing encrypted connections to send and receive emails, using secure and reliable mail client, and keeping your device clean from malware and viruses.
Use a dedicated SMTP service for email delivery
Sharing the same outgoing email server IP with other companies may be a cheaper solution, but it also means that you are sharing your sender reputation with others. If they follow poor email practices or engage in risky sending behaviour, your IP reputation will be tarnished, causing your emails to land in the Spam folder, or worse, get discarded by the recipient’s server.
Using a dedicated outgoing IP eliminates such risk. In addition, dedicated service generally comes with dedicated SPF record setup, complete with DKIM and DMARC configuration, which helps improve email deliverability.