Email Deliverability
What is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the art and science of getting your emails into your recipients’ inboxes. It’s not just about hitting “send”; it’s about building a good reputation with email providers like Gmail and Outlook so they trust that you’re sending valuable content, not spam.
High deliverability is the key to successful email automation. This guide will walk you through the best practices for both your sending strategy and your email content.
The Technical Foundation: SPF, DKIM, DMARC
Before you send your first email, it’s important to have the right technical foundation in place. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are DNS records that act as a digital signature, proving to email providers that you are who you say you are.
We take care of all of this for you guys, so no need to worry about these. Just something to know about(or google).
For maximum control and the best deliverability, we strongly recommend using your own custom domains. Setting these records up correctly on your own domain is the single most important step you can take.
High-Volume Sending Strategy
How you send your emails is just as important as what you send. If you’re sending a large volume of emails, follow these steps to build and maintain a strong sender reputation.
Warm-Up Your Inboxes
Don’t go from zero to one thousand emails overnight. Email providers get suspicious of new inboxes that immediately send a high volume. Start slow and gradually increase your sending volume over several days or weeks. This “warm-up” process signals that you’re a legitimate sender.
Example Warm-Up Schedule:
- Day 1: 10 emails/inbox
- Day 2: 20 emails/inbox
- Day 3: 40 emails/inbox
- …and so on.
Diversify Your Sending Inboxes
Instead of sending 10,000 emails from a single inbox, it’s far better to send 100 emails from 100 different inboxes. This distributes your sending volume, reduces the risk of any single inbox getting flagged, and looks much more natural to email providers. AgentMail’s ability to create inboxes at scale makes this strategy easy to implement.
Protect Your Reputation with Multiple Domains
An email domain’s reputation is its most valuable asset. To protect it, use multiple custom domains for your outreach campaigns. If one domain’s reputation is inadvertently damaged, you can cycle it out without impacting the deliverability of your other domains.
High-Impact Content Strategy
The content of your email plays a huge role in whether it’s seen as a valuable message or as spam.
Personalize Everything
Address your recipients by name in the subject line and email body. Use other data points you have to make the email feel like a one-to-one conversation, not a mass blast. Generic emails are a major red flag for spam filters.
Write Like a Human, Not a Marketer
Avoid “spammy” keywords (e.g., “free,” “buy now,” “limited time offer”), excessive exclamation points, and using all caps. Write in a natural, conversational tone. The goal is to start a conversation, not to close a sale in the first email.
Be Strategic with images
Any type of image that isn’t an attachment but included in the message body actually sets of the spam alarms. Don’t do it. Also get rid of your open-tracker while your at it because how EVERY service checks if the reciepeint of your email opened your message is by encoding a small image into the body. Hurts deliverability!!
CTA Selection
Email providers are wary of emails links, especially in the first message of a conversation. A great strategy is to send your initial outreach with no links or images. Wait for the recipient to reply, and then send your call-to-action (CTA) link. This behavior is viewed far more favorably, as it’s now viewd as a “conversation.”