Cold Email: Improve Email Deliverability in 7 Steps

Email deliverability, or the ability to successfully land your messages in somebody’s inbox, is extremely important. You can have beautifully designed, perfectly optimized emails — but if nobody receives them, that’s not really going to matter. Here are a few actionable steps to help you improve email deliverability.

Focus on IP credibility

Sometimes, brand emails get sent straight to the spam or junk folder by ISP filters because the brand’s IP address appears untrustworthy. Your job is to build credibility for your IP address, ensuring that your emails will bypass spam filters and land in the inbox. To improve your IP address, send small groups of emails to engaged members of your email list. When those emails are received and opened, ISP filters will slowly start to trust your IP address.

Be consistent with sender name

Some brands set their company name as their sender name. Others choose the name of their CEO. Still others combine this tactic, such as “Jordan at Contently.”

Whatever sender name you choose, be consistent with it. And keep in mind that using your brand’s name as the sender name can help eliminate spam complaints, leading to better email deliverability.

email deliverability best practices

Don’t send too many emails

Sending too many emails can hurt your email deliverability. If you regularly deluge your subscribers’ inboxes with messages, that can lead to them marking your emails as spam — and that can lead to poor email deliverability. Strike the right balance to improve your email deliverability score.

Send emails on a regular basis

You don’t want to send too many emails. But it’s equally as important to not send too few. How do you strike the perfect balance? As a general rule of thumb, send one email a week. You can run tests to see if more often or less often than that might be better for your specific audience.

By sending regular emails, your email deliverability score is likely to improve. Sending random emails can lower your sender score — an important number that shows your sender reputation. If your sender score is too low, mailbox providers might reject your email outright. A consistent email sending schedule can help improve email deliverability.

Use segmentation

Email segmentation can improve your open rate. When you segment your email list, you divide it into smaller pieces based on certain criteria. Your segments might include:

Gender
Age
Interests
Geographic location
Position in sales funnel
Survey results
Past purchases

Segmenting your email list helps ensure that each subscriber is receiving only the emails that are most relevant to them. In turn, this can improve email deliverability.

Clean up your list

Regularly go through your email list and delete any inactive emails. This can help you avoid spam traps. Spam traps are email addresses that ESP’s use to catch spam and blacklist senders. Every month or two, comb through your email list(s) and remove email addresses that have not engaged with your messages in the past six months (including addresses where your messages have returned as undeliverable).

Provide easy opt-outs

When people no longer want to receive your emails but can’t find a way to quickly unsubscribe, they might mark your emails as spam. That hurts your email deliverability. To get around this, make your unsubscribe link very clear, and make the process of unsubscribing easy and painless.

For example, the footer of this Teaonic email clearly says “unsubscribe.” And when you go to the link, you can unsubscribe with just a single click. Making it easy to opt-out of emails is an email deliverability best practice.

easy unsubscribe for better email deliverability

Wrap-up: Improve email deliverability

Feeling motivated to improve your email reputation? Use our email template catalog here at BEE to design high-quality, well-designed emails that won’t be marked as spam. Improving your email deliverability rate can take a little work — but it’s an essential step for every business to take!