The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability

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When crafting sales email outreach, we often focus on the quality of our messages—personalization, timing, and unsubscribe options. However, a crucial factor often overlooked is email deliverability. Even with the best content, if your emails aren’t reaching inboxes, your efforts are wasted.

 

In this sales email guide, we’ll explore factors affecting email deliverability and provide best practices to ensure your emails land in prospects’ inboxes, avoiding technical pitfalls.

The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability

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What is Email Deliverability?

According to SendGrid, email deliverability consists of four components. 

 

  1. Delivery: the recipient’s mail server accepts your message. 
  2. Deliverability: your email lands in your recipient’s inbox (rather than spam, junk, or promotion folders)
  3. Delivery rate: the percent of emails accepted by your recipient’s mail server.
  4. Deliverability rate: the percentage of emails that land in your recipient’s inbox (vs. spam, junk, or promotion)

 

Essentially, email deliverability determines the success of your emails reaching inboxes. By improving deliverability, you increase the likelihood of your messages connecting with prospects, leading to higher conversions and win rates (assuming effective sales email strategies).

What Factors Impact Your Email Deliverability Rates?

 

24 factors impacting email deliverability rates

 

Any of the issues listed in the table above can negatively impact your sales email deliverability rates. Some of these items are things you can control (e.g., message quality, volume, and frequency); however, with deliverability, some sections are not under your control (in blue).

 

Why High Email Deliverability Is Essential for Sales

 

With CRM email integration, it’s easy for users to minimize the importance of email deliverability. That’s a mistake, as high email deliverability is essential for sales teams.

Why though? Isn’t the deliverability problem a conversation for IT? Nope. Here’s why. 

 

  • Deliverability controls reach

 

Imagine buying 1,200 leads at $75 per lead. You’ve just spent $90,000, but thanks to poor email deliverability, you can only email 500 of those prospects. That’s an immediate -$52,500 loss, not including lost sales opportunities. Your email deliverability controls your reach and access to customers. Improving email deliverability boosts your reach, automatically increasing your access to the people and organizations that want to hear from you. 

 

  • Deliverability controls lead to acquisition costs

 

If you can only speak to 500 out of 1,200 leads, your cost per lead balloons to a whopping $180 per lead. That’s a problem if you’re trying to maintain any kind of budget constraints. High lead acquisition costs = low profit. Generating more sales revenue amplifies the problem since deliverability has destroyed your profit margin. 

 

Related: What key sales metrics should you track to truly understand your business growth? Start with these 10 sales metrics.

 

  • Deliverability controls conversion rates

 

According to the Brevet Group, email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. Your sales email strategies are useless if your messages aren’t getting through to prospects.

 

  • Deliverability controls ROI

 

If you can only contact 500 out of 1,200 prospects, it’s going to be an uphill battle for you to achieve any sort of meaningful return on investment. You’ll have to increase your CLTV and/or average order values dramatically to reach a positive return on investment. It’s doable, but it’s a tough sell for your sales team.

 

Pro tip: Did you know that you can easily discover your CLV by looking at your CRM data? This blog will show you how.

 

  • Deliverability controls engagement

 

When your emails arrive in a prospect’s inbox, they’re much more likely to open, read, and act on your message. If they get value from your content, they’re primed and eager to receive more content from your organization. The more they consume, the more they’ll consume.

 

  • Poor deliverability equals poor utilization

 

Your sales reps may waste time and company resources attempting to follow up with prospects who never received your initial message. Sales reps often believe they’ve been building a relationship with a prospect who hasn’t heard of them and doesn’t know them—this is, of course, incorrect.

 

Based on the reasons above, you now know that your email deliverability isn’t simply an IT problem; it’s a sales problem. If you want to improve your sales team’s performance and you want to close more deals, email deliverability is, therefore, supremely important. 

 

Related: Crafting email marketing seems easy, but there are many factors that can influence its effectiveness. Get the foundation of email marketing sorted by following this Email Marketing 101 For Sales Teams.

 

What Prevents Your Emails From Getting Through to Your Prospects?

Email deliverability is a complex subject. It depends on many factors—some of which you control, some you don’t. If you want to improve email deliverability, the first step would be to investigate your technical setup on the organization domain level. You’ll want to pay close attention to Google’s email authentication protocols.

 

When it comes to email deliverability and marketing campaigns, prioritize these three areas:

 

  1. Authentication: you are who you say you are, and Google can verify your organization. Good authentication means scammers can’t impersonate your business to customers. This indicates to Google that you’re a trustworthy sender. 
  2. Engagement: are your subscribers reading and interacting with your messages? Gmail monitors subscriber engagement with your domain and compares that against other domains. The better your engagement, the better your delivery rate. 
  3. Complaints: your prospect unsubscribed from your email list. One week later, they received another sales pitch from you offering a discount. Frustrated, they mark your email as spam. Abuse complaints like these destroy your delivery rates. 

 

Now that you understand the factors that can harm email deliverability and the key areas to focus on for improvement, let’s explore some strategies to enhance your email deliverability.

How to Improve Email Deliverability (Step-By-Step Guide)

 

4 easy ways to improve email deliverability

 

Step 1: Follow the Email Authentication Standards

 

Google has adopted various email authentication standards in an effort to ensure that users receive trustworthy emails. These authentication standards are as follows: 

 

  1. Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF is a DNS record that specifies which email servers are allowed to send emails on behalf of your domain/organization. This prevents email spoofing, protects your reputation, and improves deliverability. 
  2. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This is a method of email authentication that relies on a digital signature to verify identity. DKIM verifies that each email message has been sent by an authorized sender and hasn’t been tampered with on its way to your inbox. 
  3. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): This protocol expands on SPF and DKIM, adding another layer of protection. DMARC specifies how recipient servers should handle email messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks. It also enables message senders to receive reports about the deliverability of their email messages. Here’s a helpful guide that shows you how to set up DMARC properly.
  4. Authenticated Received Chain (ARC): This protocol Preserves SPF and DKIM authentication results for forwarded messages. Occasionally, message forwarding changes the content of the forwarded message. When that happens, legitimate messages may fail SPF or DKIM authentication.

 

In addition to the above, Starting on February 1st, 20224, Google requires that all email senders who send emails (less than 5,000 messages per day) to Gmail accounts must meet the following requirements:

 

  • Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. 
  • Use a TLS connection for transmitting email. For steps to set up TLS in Google Workspace, you’ll require a secure connection for email.
  • Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%.
  • Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard, RFC 5322.
  • Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.
  • If you manage a forwarding service, including mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify you as the forwarder. Mailing list senders should also add a List-id: header, which specifies the mailing list, to outgoing messages.

 

Now, if you send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts, you’ll need to meet the following requirements. 

 

  • Set up SPF and DKIM email authentication for your domain.
  • Set up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain. Your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to none. 
  • Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. 
  • Use a TLS connection for transmitting email. For steps to set up TLS in Google Workspace, visit Require a secure connection for email.
  • Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.30%. 
  • Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard, RFC 5322.
  • Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.
  • If you manage a forwarding service, including mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify you as the forwarder. Mailing list senders should also add a List-id: header, which specifies the mailing list, to outgoing messages.
  • For direct mail, the domain in the sender’s From header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment.
  • Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.

 

Google’s strict requirements, while challenging, are designed to prevent malicious email activities. They’ve stated that “Authenticated messages help to protect recipients from malicious messages, such as spoofing and phishing messages. They help to protect you and your organization from being impersonated. Finally, authenticated messages are less likely to be rejected or marked as spam by Gmail.

 

Ignoring these requirements can lead to severe consequences, as Google may mark your messages as spam or reject them with a 5.7.26 error, resulting in a significant setback.

 

Step 2: Warm up Email Clients
Previously, you could send email blasts to your entire list. However, that’s no longer effective.

 

A cold email warm-up involves sending bulk emails in small, segmented batches. Consider this a gradual introduction, slowly familiarizing your email address with Gmail’s algorithm. Take your time.

 

A gradual introduction allows you to establish a good sending reputation with email clients over time. A cold email warm-up means your message is far more likely to end up in their inbox vs. the promotions or spam folders. You’re showing email clients that (a.) you’re a legitimate and trustworthy sender, and (b.) you get the chance to test and refine your email marketing campaigns, gauging Google’s response over time. It’s a win-win-win. 

 

Furthermore, you’ll get the following benefits:

 

  • You learn about the dos and don’ts of message timing. The right person, the right message, the right frequency, and the perfect volume.
  • You can experiment with various forms of segmentation (e.g., list-level vs. infrastructure-level segmentation). 
  • Email clients learn to trust you, your deliverability rates improve, and your subscribers receive high-value content. 

 

Step 3: Clean up Your Email List

 

Consider this essential hygiene for your email list. The more organized your emails and accurate the recipient addresses, the more likely you’ll achieve high email deliverability rates.

 

  • Prune your list

Only send content to subscribers who want to be on your list. If a large portion of your list never opens your messages or engages with your content, you’ll want to remove them. Keeping these inactive subscribers on your email list means delivery rates will suffer. Disengaged subscribers are much more likely to flag your email messages as spam. For inactive subscribers, win them back via a win-back campaign or remove them from your email list if they’re still unresponsive.

 

Pro tip: Use the following cold email templates, crafted to help you reconnect inactive subscribers.

 

  • 1-click unsubscribe

Your competitor has a customer who wants to unsubscribe. They decide to hide (remove) their unsubscribe link. What does their customer do? Mark their emails as spam. 

 

  • Verify email addresses

Imagine asking someone for their phone number only to receive a fake number that’s been disconnected. That’s a bounced email. Bounced emails hurt your delivery rate and your reputation. If you’re going to add people to your list, make sure that their emails are legitimate. 

 

  • Work with proven providers for email list acquisition

 

Email service providers like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Convert Kit aren’t built for email list acquisition. If you want to run a cold email marketing campaign, it’s best to work with tools and providers like Apollo.io, Reply.io, and other outbound tools. These providers have the know-how and expertise needed for cold email outreach while keeping deliverability rates high.

 

  • Test your messages

Use pre-deployment tools, inbox placement, and A/B split testing tools to verify that your emails are ready for prime time. Using these tools, you’ll be able to see what your messages will look like on various devices and apps. With the right toolset, these best practices are simple to do and easy to maintain. 

 

Step 4: Optimize Your Messaging to Increase Email Performance

 

Do you use spammy subject lines and excessive stop words in your content? Are you employing spam trigger words that email clients might flag as spam? Examples of trigger words include: 100% free, be your own boss, consolidate your debt, free gift, and fast cash. Refer to this list for more examples of trigger words.

 

Additionally, there are lots of words that, if used inappropriately, will get your email messages sent to the spam folder. If you want to keep your content out of the promotions and spam folders here are some helpful tips you can follow.

 

  1. Use double opt-ins to confirm interest. 
  2. Send relevant content to the subscriber segments that requested it.
  3. Use the same “From” name for every email. 
  4. Include your physical address in every email so your identity can be verified. 
  5. Avoid extreme formatting (e.g., colorful or different-sized fonts, ALL CAPS, all bold/italics, etc.).
  6. Use client HTML code for your email templates (avoid broken code).
  7. Don’t like to suspect or sketchy websites.

 

Focus your attention on creating content that conveys value. Your content should be personalized, relevant, and valuable to your subscribers. The better you are at creating high-value content for your subscribers, the easier it will be to keep them happy and on board with you.

 

Email Deliverability is the Hidden Key to Sales Outreach Success

 

Your email deliverability rates are paramount. Poor deliverability rates mean your hard work is wasted if prospects never see your emails. To improve win rates, focus on enhancing sales email deliverability.

 

With powerful CRM email integrations, it’s easy to overlook the importance of deliverability, but it’s a critical factor for sales teams. Prioritize deliverability, and you’ll discover a hidden lever for boosting sales revenue and profits on demand.

 

If you want to adopt sales CRM software with powerful email functions, check out Pipeline CRM. Our email marketing solution allows you to set up automated email drip campaigns, send targeted bulk emails, and craft personalized messages effortlessly using our built-in AI writing assistant. Give Pipeline CRM a try, and tell us what you think!

 

Looking for more guides to improve your email marketing performance? These guides and email templates may interest you: