Foundations of Email Deliverability

The foundation of good email deliverability is sending email that is:

1. Wanted – meaning you offer something of value to the recipients.

2. Expected – meaning your recipients remember subscribing or remember their business relationship with your brand.

The ISP’s don’t have a crystal ball that tells them if the recipients wanted or expected the email… they have something better: statistical information on how tens of thousands of their users interacted with your email – most importantly the complaint rate and the engagement rates of the email. They know what percentage of people clicked “this is spam” on your email, what percentage read your message, what percentage deleted without reading, and how long people read it. All of this goes into their algorithms and they infer whether your email is wanted and expected.

ISPs also look at the content of the message to try to discern if it is spam or not. Some keywords or language in email can contribute to spam filtering.

Technical details on how many connections to open, email authentication, warming-up schedules, etc also matter to spam filters. We will either configure the software for these technical details or advise you on what to do.

Another perspective is this blog post on our site: The Who, What, and How - A New Understanding of Email Deliverability

About our recommendations

It is the ISPs that decide if they will put your email into the Inbox or the Spam folder or not accept your email at all. These recommendations are specifically designed for you to help you maximize your email deliverability by helping you send email that the ISPs want to put in the Inbox. It’s up to you to decide if you’re willing to take these actions.

If you need help with how to implement these, we’d be happy to help you with technical support or additional deliverability consulting.

These steps don’t guarantee that you’ll make it to the Inbox, but based on what you’re sending, we believe that they could help you improve your deliverability.

Deliverability enhancement is also an iterative process. Once we have some sending history we will have some more data and may have more advice to offer.