6 Tips to Improve Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is the key to successful email marketing campaigns. Follow these tips avoid the spam folder and maximize returns for your cold email campaigns.
The question everyone wants to know the answer to is how to get more emails delivered to the inbox. Is email deliverability better with dedicated email servers, cloud email servers or SMTP email servers? All of these can be effective at sending emails, but getting them delivered to the inbox requires some work and effort. When developing your email marketing strategy, be sure to pay attention to these elements to improve your email deliverability rates.
1. Send From Name
Send emails from the email address of your company or organization instead of a personal email. Use a consistent send name that your subscribers will easily recognize. This will establish your brand and build credibility over time. Credibility leads to engagement which increases your sender reputation with ISPs.
2. Image Types
Images are a key element of an effective email and have a huge impact on email deliverability rates. Be sure to mix images and text as an email containing a single graphic will most likely be marked as spam. Reduce the overall number of images in your design and use the appropriate image format. GIFs are great for small, low color images (arrows, lines, logos). JPEGs (exported at 60-70% quality) are excellent for photographic images. PNGs are best suited for small images with transparency. The best practice is to use HTML based text whenever and wherever possible.
3. File Size
File size plays a significant role in how your message is received and displayed in the inbox. Keep the HTML file size below 102 KB to prevent clipping in Gmail and other inboxes. Limit individual image sizes to 40K. The total loaded weight should be below 800 KB, and ideally below 500 KB. Mobile emails gets even smaller with the recommended file size not to exceed 50k to 70k with images being at 20k or less.
4. IP Warm-Up
ISPs are on the lookout for spam emails and sending large quantities of email from new IPs is a surefire way to end up in the spam folder. To get more emails into the inbox, you need to build trust with ISPs. Start sending emails slowly and consistently in small quantities to warm up your IPs. The more recipients engage with your emails, the better your IP reputation will become, and ISPs will deliver more of your emails to their inboxes.
5. Sending Frequency
Pay attention to sending frequency. Sending too many emails is the number one reason customers unsubscribe from email lists. Although there is no clear answer to “How often should I send emails?” a statistic that may give you some insight about how often you should send emails is unsubscribes. If you are sending 4 messages a week and you see unsubscribes and spam complaints going up, that may be a sign to reduce your email frequency.
6. Inactive Subscribers
Email inactive subscribers less frequently or remove them from your list altogether. If ISPs see people are not opening your emails, they will assume they do not want to hear from you and will divert your messages to the spam box. In the long run, emailing inactive subscribers will hurt your email deliverability rates. Active subscribers will engage with your content, which lets ISPs know your communications are wanted and encourages them to deliver your messages to the inbox.
Final notes about email deliverability
Be compliant with the CAN SPAN Act and provide an unsubscribe link in your emails.
If you have links in your email make sure they link to reputable websites.
Smaller is better. Review emails carefully and consider total weight before sending them.
A foolproof way to avoid the spam box and improve your email deliverability rates is to ask your subscribers to add your “From” address to their address book.