email marketing strategy

How To Increase Email Deliverability

The Goal

In this guide, we will look at the best email marketing strategy on how to increase email deliverability so that every email you send will not only avoid the spam folder, but will also hit into the primary inbox folder.

A good place to start is to understand what is the purpose of a spam folder. Do you know?

In my opinion, the answers are:

  • To kick out unwanted marketing emails that you did not opt-in or totally not related to your interest.
  • To keep us safe from viruses or scamming activities

If you have been following the tips I am going to share in this guide, you should be able to increase your email deliverability rate, and what this means is that you don’t belong in the spam folder.

1. Authenticate your domain email

  • Enabling Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) & Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) in the email service you are using will greatly improve your domain email deliverability. Enable all if you can, or if you have this option in your email service provider.
  • In short, enabling these protocols will tell the receiving email server that you really own this domain you are using & you are using a certain email service to send email the on behalf.
  • For my case, I can enable DKIM in hosting email settings & they have SPF settings in DNS settings. So. for most of the case, my email will not land in spam folder, but it will also depend on other factors in my email content as listed below

2. Avoid using spammy keywords

  • Avoid as possible using certain words in your subject line & email like ‘shopping’, ‘buy’, ‘free’, etc. The spam filter will auto block those emails. Because they are too long to list here, you can download the common list of 200 spammy keywords here

3. Check blacklists

  • You can check if your domain is blacklisted. I still remember there was once I newly purchase a domain name & it is blacklisted before even I create email account on that domain.
  • Is this a joke? No. It is due to someone previously using that domain name to send spammy email. If you are interested to check if your domain is blacklisted, you can check it for free using MXToolbox

4. Use double opt-in

  • The best is to use a double opt-in sign up process where you will send the confirmation email asking the subscriber to validate their email address. This will greatly improve your email deliverability, because this trigger as a two-way communication.

5. Clean up your list

  • Every now & then, clean up your list to make sure you are not sending to non-existing email address. Increasing of hard bounce rate are the fastest way to trigger spam & blocking your IP.

6. Include your brand name in your “from” field

  • In my opinion, in the “from” field, we should use our name including our brand name example like my case I always like to mention Andrew from GuidePAW to show that we are transparent to let you know everything about us & we are not hiding on anything from you.
  • Do you think you will trust or buy with someone that send you email using fake name & don’t even have a website or their own brand name?
  • Including your physical address & unsubscribe link in your email are also super important to let your subscribers have control on how they want to receive email from you.

8. Personalize your emails

  • Personalizing email subject lines will greatly increase email deliverability. The best way to do this is to include the recipients’ name in the email subject line & make sure to use the proper spelling.

9. Not overdoing

  • Just write your email naturally & keep the subject line & content as short as possible without overdoing with fancy huge graphics or attachments.
  • Another thing is to avoid using all caps letter & exclamation mark. This will mark as spam easily, even though you are not.

10. Whitelist your email

  • In my opinion, this is the most important & will overwrite any other point I mentioned above. It will be best if you can tell your subscribers to whitelist your email by adding your email address to their contact list & simply drag your email from spam folder to primary inbox.

Conclusion

There are many factors to ensure that your emails are hitting the inbox. As for, the best way is to use a real email delivery services. You may refer this article for my recommended professional & free email service provider here.

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