All the effort we put into writing emails would be completely wasted if they were to never actually arrive to the recipient’s primary inbox. Whether or not they arrive determines the deliverability of an email domain. For most of us unless we start seeing extremely low open rates on our emails we don’t usually spend much time thinking about our email deliverability. Understanding what impacts your email deliverability can empower us to increase the visibility of our emails and therefore the amount of responses we’re likely to get. This post will focus on the various aspects that can impact the deliverability of our emails.
DNS Records
Adding the right records will instantly help authenticate your domain so that it’s more likely to be trusted by receiving email servers. There are three primary records that you need to add:
- SPF - this record prevents email address forgery by making explicit which email servers can send from its domain.
- DMARC - this record contains the policy that the domain owner wants to use with regards to its email authentication practices.
- DKIM - this record ensures that the emails sent cannot be modified between the sender and the receiver.
Wrong Persona and Low Engagement
Low engagement can lead email servers to label you as spam. It’s an indication that you aren’t sending relevant information/content. Low engagement can be due to various reasons, but reaching out to the wrong people will certainly lead to low engagement as they aren’t going to find your email relevant to them. They will either ignore the email at best or label it as spam at worst. Both will negatively impact your email credibility and therefore deliverability.
Personalization
Sending the same email content over and over again can look like spam. Email servers can pick up on this and label the emails as spam. For those in sales who are not personalizing their emails but rather send the same email sequence to all of their leads risk hurting the deliverability of their emails. Variable “personalization” which swaps certain words like {{company}}, {{role}}, {{location}} etc. is not sufficient for avoiding the problem. It’s important to more meaningfully personalize each email with at least unique icebreakers for each recipient.
Spam Keywords
Email servers pick up on the words that are used in both the email subject line and body of each email. Emails that contain overly promotional language can be labeled as spam. Here’s a non exhaustive list of words to avoid:
Amazing
Cancel at any time
Check or money order
Click here
Congratulations
Dear friend
For only ($)
Free or toll-free
Great offer
Guarantee
Increase sales
Order now
Promise you
Risk-free
Special promotion
This is not spam
Winner
Too Many Links
Adding too many links within an email can look suspicious. Keep it to a minimum. Whenever possible it’s best practice to use links that have the same domain as the sending email address domain. It looks far less suspicious to email servers than linking out to external domains. If you’re using email sequencing software you might opt to track link clicks. Tracking often requires wrapping the links. This can increase the likelihood that the email will be caught by spam filters as the links look suspicious.
This is far from an exhaustive list of factors that can contribute to emails be labeled as spam, but addressing them will surely improve the deliverability of your emails. Adding DNS records, targeting the right recipients, personalizing messages without spammy keywords and avoiding unnecessary links will help ensure that your emails arrive as intended.
