How to Improve Email Deliverability? Follow this Checklist

One harsh truth about cold emailing: Best-crafted cold emails are worthless if they do not reach your prospect’s inbox.

Who is to blame?

Well, the culprit here is poor email deliverability.

It took us lots of trial and error to identify the factors responsible for low email deliverability and how to avoid it. 

In this blog post on improving email deliverability, we have mentioned everything you can do to ensure that your cold emails consistently land in your prospect’s inbox.

Let’s get started! 

Improve Email Deliverability: Table of Content

• Essential Checklist for Improving Email Deliverability
  • Improve Existing Low Email Deliverability: Key Points to Check
  • Pre Sending Checklist: Non Negotiables to Keep In Mind
• Improve Email Deliverability- Key Takeaways
• FAQs

Essential Checklist for Improving Email Deliverability

If your cold emails are not landing in your prospect’s inbox, you are missing out on potential business opportunities. Therefore, you shouldn’t compromise your email deliverability at all!

To make it easy for you to improve email deliverability, we have divided this section into two parts:

• The first checklist is for improving your existing low deliverability.
• The second is a pre-sending checklist that you can refer to when launching your cold email campaigns.

Let’s ensure your emails reach your prospects’ inboxes!

Improve Existing Low Email Deliverability: Key Points to Check

If you’ve recently noticed that your cold emails frequently end up in the spam folder, check out our list to identify and address the root causes of low email deliverability.

1. Check if Your Domain is Blacklisted
2. Technical Setup Overview
3. Keep Content Quality High
4. Check Email Verification Status
5. Take a Look at Your Email Sending Volume
6. Are Your Email Accounts Warmed Up

1. Check if Your Domain is Blacklisted

In many cases, a blacklisted IP domain is the reason behind poor deliverability.

ESPs usually blacklist domains or IP addresses if the emails continuously land in the spam folder.

So the first step that you should take to improve email deliverability is to check if your domain is in a blocklist or not. 

How can you check if your domain is on a blacklist? 

To check this, all you have to do is enter your domain through tools like Zerobounce, MXtoolbox, etc, and run a search.

How to recover your domain if it has been blacklisted?

Well, truth be told, it is almost impossible to recover your domain from the blacklist. You will likely have to buy a new domain.

But, there is the slightest ray of hope.

One thing you can try doing is submitting a request to ESPs for deleting your IP address from their blacklist.

For example, if you are using Google Workspace, you can submit your IP blacklist removal request to Google via their Sender Contact Form.

If your domain is not on a blacklist (Congrats! You don’t have to get a new domain. Money saved!). 

That said! Let’s look at the other factors that could be affecting your email deliverability.

2. Technical Setup Overview 

The second step you can take to improve email deliverability is to monitor the technical setup of your email accounts, such as SPF, DKIM, DNS, and DMARC. 

They are behind-the-scenes security checkers for ESPs. They help ESPs authenticate the email senders and verify the domain from which the email claims to be from. 

Therefore, setting up these authentication protocols properly for your email accounts is important.

You can use this tool to check the status of your technical setup. Once you find the issues, you can read this guide to fix them.  

Once the damage is done, it’s going to take time to reverse! 

Therefore, although you might have identified the issues in your technical setup, the damage done to your email deliverability will take time to recover from.

But…. What if there was a way to check all these issues before you launch your cold email campaign?

Saleshandy can help: 

You can use the Sequence Score feature by Saleshandy to check the setup of technical

configurations like SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and custom domains before you hit the send

button. Moreover, it will also highlight issues in your email writing and sequence setup

that can trigger spam filters.

3. Keep Content Quality High 

The next best thing you can do to improve email deliverability is to check the quality of your content. You might not be giving much thought to structuring your emails, but let us tell you that email providers carefully assess how your prospects engage with the emails. 

If they find out that your prospects are not engaging with your emails much they will start dropping your emails in the spam folder. 

Hence, you should assess your email copies while keeping these best practices in mind:

• Don’t use these spam trigger words: You should not use certain spam triggers or phishing phrases. Once ESPs identify these words, they will automatically label your emails as fraudulent and direct them to the spam folder. 

Here Are The Spam Trigger Words You Should Avoid ❌:

• Free
• Buy now
• Guarantee 
• Congratulations! 
• 100% Free
• WIN – click now
•  LIMITED TIME!
• You are a winner
• Here’s the deal

Like these, there are many spammy words that you should not include in your email copies, but how would you identify these words?

Well, Saleshandy offers a solution. 

The spammy word detector feature by Saleshandy highlights the spammy words in real-time while you are drafting your email. 

Personalized & Unique Content: If you use the same email copy for all your prospects, you make a great mistake. ESPs analyze the emails you send, and sending the same generic content doesn’t look like the emails were sent by a human.  

Now, you must be thinking about how you can send personalized and unique emails to all your prospects… 

Well, Saleshandy offers a solution for this as well.

• Merge Tag: With the merge tags feature by Saleshandy, you can personalize your email at scale by adding your prospect’s first name, company, industry, etc. 

• Spintax: The Spintax feature allows you to add variations to your emails, ensuring that you send unique email copies to all your prospects. 

• Attachments: If you have added too many attachments to your emails, then it’s no surprise that your emails are going to the spam folder. If you need to send multiple files, you should create links using Google Drive and then add them. Moreover, if you are attaching images, make sure you add only 1 image per email – not too many.

• Unsubscribe Link: The best thing you can do to improve email deliverability is to add an unsubscribe link to your emails. Always give your prospects a chance to avoid receiving your emails; otherwise, they will block you or mark you as spam. (And believe us, the latter one is the worst-case scenario)

4. Check Email Verification Status

30% of the workforce change their job roles every 12 months. 

What does this suggest? 

The data soon becomes outdated as prospects’ email addresses change. Hence,  buying an email list from a reputable B2B data provider that adheres to data laws and regularly updates its data.

So, how can you get an updated email list? 

Well, you can use  Saleshandy’s B2B Lead Finder to create your email list. It gives you access to its database of 700 M+ Profiles and 60M companies to find your lead’s accurate contact information in the most up-to-date. 

Moreover, it has search filters to segment the data and create a more enriched email list. 

Pro Tip: Never send cold emails to your prospects’ personal email addresses. Always use their professional emails.

Apart from this, Saleshandy also offers other features to maintain a verified and clean email list: 

Top Features by Saleshandy to Maintain a Clean Email List: 

• Do Not Contact List: With this feature, you can include emails that you want to exclude from your cold email campaigns. By using this functionality,   you can ensure that these contacts don’t get your emails. It’s an easy way to stay compliant and keep your sender reputation strong.
• Email Verifier: Saleshandy’s built-in email verifier enables you to verify your email address. 

5. Take a Look at Your Email Sending Volume

Let’s get this straight: cold emailing is not about sending 1000s of emails at once; it never was! It’s about reaching out to the right people at the right time.

A sudden skip in sending volume can decrease the email deliverability rates by 30%

You must monitor your email sending volume to improve email deliverability. This can be a major reason for the poor sender reputation.

One day, if you’re sending 4 emails, the second day 10 emails, and then suddenly, on the third day, you’re increasing the limit to 100, of course, ESPs will flag you as spam!

As mentioned earlier, ESPs are very smart; they monitor your email sending activities, and if they find something fishy, they will ultimately mark you as spam.

As per the best cold email-sending practices, you should initially send 10-20 emails and then scale up to 100-150 emails once you have warmed up your email accounts. Even after warming up, stay under 150.

Suggested read: How many cold emails to send per day

Automate the Process of Gradually Email Sending Volume

• Sender Rotation feature by Saleshandy allows you to automatically switch your email addresses to reach out to more prospects and maximize email deliverability.

• Daily Quota: With this feature, you can set the daily sending quota of each email address to 50 or less.

• Set Time Interval: You can set the time interval between each email to be sent. For a more human-like approach, keep it between 60 and 190 seconds.

• Email Ramp Up: You can use this feature to set your daily sending limit. As per our experience, keep it between 10% and 15%.

6. Are Your Email Accounts Warmed Up?

This is the most common mistake that cold emailers make: They warm up their email accounts for a week or two and then stop. However, you must continue the warm-up process to maintain optimal email deliverability rates. 

Here is how you can warm up your email accounts: 

Option 1: Manually

Week 1: 5 to 10 emails/ day
Week 2: 20 to 50 emails/ day
Week 3: 50 to 70 emails/day
Week 4: 70 to 100 emails/day

And the process goes on…. 

Not a desirable process due to the time and effort that goes into it: 

Option 2: Automatically (Obviously the best one too) 

You can use Saleshandy, an all-in-one cold emailing software, to warm-up your email accounts automatically. It has partnered with TrulyInbox, an email warm-up tool that mimics human-like email-sending mechanisms and conversations.

 Moreover, it also provides a detailed deliverability report to track your key metrics such as bounce rate, open rate, deliverability score, etc. 

7. Have You Run A/B Tests?

Not A/B testing your cold emails is the biggest mistake that can ruin your email deliverability. Why?

If you’re not monitoring which subject lines or CTAs yield the best results, your cold emailing efforts are unlikely to succeed. Without this insight, you’re navigating without a compass. The more variety you incorporate into your cold emails, the better your email deliverability will be.

Therefore, consider using Saleshandy’s A-Z testing feature to improve email deliverability. This feature allows you to test up to 26 variants of subject lines, CTAs, and email copy.

Pre-Sending Checklist: Non-Negotiables to Keep In Mind 

If you are about to launch your cold email campaign, then you need to follow these best cold emailing practices to ensure high email deliverability: 

1. Use a Reputable ESP
2. Buy Secondary Domains & Set up Cold Email Infrastructure
3. Warm up Your Emails
4. Make Sure You Have Verified Email List
5. Ensure Compliance
6. Write Content That Doesn’t Trigger Spam Filters
7. Don’t Forget Regular Monitoring and Adjustment

1. Use a Reputable ESP

Getting a good ESP can increase email deliverability by 10% 

Using the best ESP is like using a native postmaster who knows the routes and ensures that your emails are delivered every time. 

Hence, make sure you choose a reliable ESP. To help you out, we have drawn this comparison table: 

Cold emailing experts at Saleshandy recommend Google and Microsoft as the best ESPs (Email Service Providers) for cold emailing.

2. Buy Secondary Domains & Set up Cold Email Infrastructure

If you want to increase email deliverability, protect your primary domain’s reputation, and scale your business, you should buy secondary domains.

Here is an example of secondary domains: 

• domainname.io
• domainnameabc.com
• domainname.uk
• domainname.org

Before buying these domains, you can check their reputation using tools like The Spamhaus Project. 

Once you have bought the secondary domains, you can set up your cold email infrastructure. 

To set up your cold email infrastructure, you can either opt for ESPs like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 or consider platforms like Maildoso. 

However, we recommend you compare these options and decide which works well for you.

Suggested Read: How to Set Up Secondary Domains & Email Accounts for Cold Outreach?

3. Warm Up Your Emails

Once you have set up your cold email infrastructure, now is the time to warm up your email accounts.

Properly warm up your email accounts to build a solid sender reputation and make ESPs see you as more human, ultimately increasing your deliverability score.

Also, as mentioned in the above section, do not turn off the email warm-up after the ramp-up period.

4. Make Sure You Have Verified Email List 

The next factor you should consider to increase email deliverability is to send emails to verified email addresses.

ESPs see high bounce rates as a sign of sending emails to people you don’t know (Spam).

So in the worst-case scenario, your domain may be blacklisted by ESPs.

You should clean your email list and remove invalid email addresses to prevent all these.

Most cold emailing tools like Saleshandy come with an in-built email verification feature.

You can use this to check your email list and remove any potentially invalid addresses.

5. Ensure Compliance

You should always comply with local data protection and privacy laws. This will protect you from angry prospects, possible legal action, and hefty fines.

For example, the average violation of the GDPR law is about € 66,000.

Compliance is not a hard point that affects email deliverability, but we wanted to mention it to keep you informed.

Here’s what you should do if you want to stay compliant when sending cold emails worldwide (US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, etc):

• Do not use click-bait-like subject lines.
• Be open about your identity. Give your full name, designation, company name, and physical location.
• Make sure your cold emails are relevant to the prospect.
• You must have a way for your prospect to unsubscribe from your emails, like an unsubscribe link.

6. Write Content That Doesn’t Trigger Spam Filters 

Here, we have summarized what you have to follow when you are writing your cold email copies to improve your email deliverability:

• Personalized subject line and email body
• The whole email should be around 50 to 125 words
• Do not use spammy words.
• Maximum 1 link or 1 image

Next, let’s look at the most common mistake most cold emailers make!

7. Don’t Forget Regular Monitoring and Adjustment

A common mistake we notice is that most cold emailers do not optimize their campaigns to maintain good email deliverability.

To increase email deliverability, you should track various metrics and A/B test various elements of your cold email, like subject lines, CTAs, or the offer to improve your campaign’s performance.

Here, we have broken down what the various metrics mean. You can use this as a reference to optimize or scale your campaigns.

Open Rates

Once Open Rates > 50%  →  Time to scale
Open Rates between 30% and 50% →  Test more subject lines
Open Rates < 30%  →  Check your deliverability

Reply Rates

Reply Rates > 10% →  Time to scale
Reply Rates between 5% and 10%  →  Test your CTA
Reply Rates < 5% →  Check your offer & deliverability

Keep Track of New Regulation Updates: Moreover, you need to monitor updates to ESPs’ email-sending regulations regularly. Recently, Google rolled out a new update in February 2024.

Improve Email Deliverability- Key Takeaways

Let’s quickly recap all the best practices you should follow to improve email deliverability: 

• Choose a reputable ESP
• Buy secondary domains
• Warm up your emails
• Follow a human-like email-sending pattern
• Verify your email list
• Write short, relevant, and personalized emails

There you have it! Now, you have all the best practices for improving email deliverability.  Put them into action and see your open rate climb.  

Additionally, a good email deliverability rate is between 95% and 99%. Hence, try to maintain it! 

PS: For the best email templates, subject lines, and deliverability, try Saleshandy For Free!

FAQs

1. What Is the Difference Between Email Delivery and Email Deliverability?

When cold emailers start, they often need clarification on email delivery and deliverability. Let’s explain the key difference between both terms to clear this confusion.

Email delivery means your message reaches the recipient’s email server. Whereas email deliverability refers to whether your email lands in the inbox or the spam folder.

2. What Factors Hurt Your Email Deliverability Rate?

When it comes to cold emailing, email deliverability can make or break your campaign. To maintain high deliverability rates, here are key things you should absolutely avoid:

• Not purchasing email lists from reputable sources
• Using spam-trigger words
• Not setting up email authentication protocols
• Inconsistent sending practices

3. How to Improve Email Deliverability?

Maintaining high deliverability rates is not a one-day task. You have to regularly work on it and follow all the above-mentioned best email deliverability practices to ensure your emails never land in the spam folder. 

 Here is what all you need to do: 

• Keep a clean email list
• Authenticate your emails (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Create engaging content
• Use A/B testing
• Monitor important email metrics like open, click, and reply rate
• Provide an easy unsubscribe option