4 Best Practice Guide for Better Email Deliverability in 2024

Email marketing is the primitive yet influential mode of communicating and engaging the leads and prospects. You can achieve your goals and objectives by simply reaching out to the inboxes of the subscribers. Email marketing has transformed with the passing years, where automation has now become the lifeline of the business to engage customers via triggered messages.

But if we look at the other side of email marketing, there could be certain issues that one could face. For example what if your emails do not reach the inboxes of the users. Email deliverability becomes a huge issue with this mode of marketing.

It could certainly happen due to various reasons, maybe your infrastructure or the practices you are using might lack feasibility.

Well, this article will eliminate all your queries and issues that you might be facing regarding email deliverability. Know what are the best practices to follow through.

What are the reasons that affect the email deliverability

The deliverability for your emails might be getting because of the following reasons :

• Domain Reputation
• Email Content
• Email Sending limit
• Monitor IP Reputation

Read further to know about the above points and what all best practices you can follow to improve them.

1. Domain reputation and deliverability

Your domain reputation and IP reputation can affect the email deliverability to a greater extent. The domain reputation and IP reputation differ from each other, but they also affect each other. So, let’s say, if you do not have a good IP reputation, you can easily redeem it by adding new IPs or moving IPs. Also, you can send mail from different ESPs and can attain a great reputation.

On the other hand, if your domain reputation is not good, there are higher chances of your emails being considered as spam. Therefore, one should look into keeping their domain reputation variably higher than the IP reputation. 

Note : The IP reputation and domain reputation are both interconnected. If you are sending an email from an IP address that has a higher reputation but if your domain reputation is lower, it will affect the email deliverability rates in the long run.

Tools you can use to check and optimize the email health :

• Toolbox: You can test the performance of your emails, domains, and networks using the mxtoolbox.

How the tool works :

You can undertake various performance tests for your emails and domain. Further, you will receive a report highlighting the areas regarding your domain that you need to improve. The tool works marvelously depicting the email health’s status in one integrated report. Also, you can recognize the issues regarding web server, mail server, etc.

• SuperTool: Use this super tool to check the IP or host reputation. You can get validated information about all the DNS, blacklist, and SMTP diagnostics with this single tool. Simply enter the domain name or hostname and get integrated history regarding domain registration information or your IP address information.

•  DMARC: DMARC (domain-based authentication, reporting, and conformance) prevents your WordPress emails from going into spam. It gives you precise information about your email reports in case of any bottlenecks. You can know whether the sent mail is rejected or not. One can also know about the authentication of the mails.

• SPF: It refers to the sender policy framework. It checks the authorization of your IP address through which the mail is sent.  Keeping an SPF record is necessary and mandatory in order to prevent spam for your WordPress emails.

Note : Do not use more than one SPF record, in case you create other records for your service provider, then you must integrate all into one.

• DKIM: DomainKeys Identified mail, i.e. A DKIM record is used to validate the domain. DKIM proves that your email content has not been changed. It proves the validity and the authentication of the sender.

In order to add a DKIM record, you should reach out to your email service provider first.

Note : Recheck that DMRC, DKIM and SPF are properly configured while sending emails in wordpress.

2. Email content

Content is regarded as the marketing king. It not only affects the customer engagement but also the deliverability of your emails. If your transactional emails have a lot of exclamation marks or suspicious subject lines, they could be directly regarded as spam. Remember, that your spam emails greatly affect your domain reputation.

Here are few ways you can use to improve the content for your emails

• Practices to improve Transactional emails: Sales process usually consists of sending transactional emails to the users. These emails contain information such as password reset requests, purchase receipts, etc. Therefore, you must take care of even the tiniest elements of your email to achieve more email open and engagement rates.

Elements of an email you must keep a check on:

• Meta information: Apart from the context of your email, the meta-information influences the readability and open rates of your email. Make sure you deliver effective communication to the users within a limited space. Avoid putting the “from address” in the subject line as given in the below image.

• From & reply to addresses: Whenever a user looks at an email, his glance moves to the address from where he has received the email. Therefore, you should use the name of the application that has sent the email. In case you need a different “reply-to” address than the “form” address, you can use the “reply-to” header value so that the user can reply to the monitored email address. It could avoid the glitch in the communication between you and the user for future references.

• Subject of the emails: The subject lines are the catchy deal for the subscribers to open and read the mail. Your subject line must be limited to 50 characters or fewer than that. Also, it must be relevant and could deliver a meaningful message to the user. Convey all the relevant information in your subject line. In case, it’s long then shift it to the “Pre-header” of the mail.

• Postmark app to check spam score: Use the postmark app to review your content.  You can check the spam score for the email messages by simply copying and pasting the content and header of the mail in the box as shown in the below image.

Note: The lower your spam score is the higher are the chances of the mail deliverability to the users. Your email should have an eligible spam score of 5 or lower than that.

What are the email headers and how to view them :

Email headers depict all the relevant tracking information of an email. It explains the navigation an email takes as it processes through various servers. The headers denote the IP addresses, time-stamps, and the information of both sender and recipient. 

How to view email headers

1. Firstly, sign in to your email in a web browser.

2. Now, open the email for which you want to check the headers.

3. Next to Reply, click More, the three vertical stacking dots.

4. Click Show original

5. A page with the email headers will open in a new tab or window.

If you wish to know about the blocked, bounced, spammed, and unsent emails, you can provide the headers information to the technology center and get the appropriate information.

3. Email sending limit

Sending email with a considerable limit is yet another important component for a viable email deliverability rate.

You can send an email with a warm up plan to attain the necessary outcomes. You can warm up your IP in a manual and automated way. Read further to know how to warm up your email in an automated and manual way.

• Warm up manually: If your IP is new, you can warm up it manually but if you need to add more IPs to the existing warm IPs, you can automatically warm up your IP with the API or UI. You need to send more and more emails to your IP address to manually warm up your IP. If you have a new IP address, you are required to attain a higher reputation so that users can identify your mail. If you have a single IP address, you can break up or segment your contacts and then schedule the campaigns. It would avoid the cases of email blocks or bounces.

• Automated warm-up: As stated earlier, you should have two or more IP addresses to get the benefits of an automated IP warmup. You can warm up one IP and the already warmed up IP can then receive more messages even beyond the hourly limit. Automated warmup enables NotifyVisitors to control the number of messages sent to individual IP addresses or servers at one time. It prevents the distortion in the reputation of the sender.

Note : NotifyVisitors limits the amount of mails being sent on an IP address per hour. If the requests exceed the hourly limit, the excess will be sent to the already warmed up IPs.

View the below table to know the hourly email sending schedule for an automated IP warmup :

Warmup Age (Days)	Hourly Email Limit
0	20
1	28
2	39
3	55
4	77
5	108
6	151
7	211
8	295
9	413
10	579
11	810
12	1,000
13	1,587
14	2,222
15	3,111
16	4,356
17	6,098
18	8,583
19	11,953
20	16,734
21	23,427
22	32,798
23	45,917
24	64,284
25	89,998
26	125,997
27	176,395
28	246,953
29	345,735
30	484,029
31	677,640
32	948,696
33	1,328,175
34	1,859,444
35	2,603,222

4. Monitor your ip reputation 

Similar to your domain reputation, your IP reputation matters equally to better up the email deliverability.

Here is one amazing tool to monitor and evaluate your IP reputation.

Google Postmaster tool :

Google Postmaster tool enables you to see through the loopholes in your email deliverability. Also, it reveals unique insights to help you understand the problematic areas in your email practices.

Google gives you a concrete understanding of your email practices. You can get analyze the following things :

• Spam rates– Know the percentage of the DKIM authenticated emails that led Gmail users to complain.
  
  
• Authentication – Check the authentication of the domains whether they have been passed through the SPF, DKIM, or DMARC standards.
  
  
• Domain and IP reputation – View the perceptions of Google about your domains and IP addresses.
  
  
• Encryption –  Check the sent emails via TLS encryption.
  
  
• Delivery errors – Dig deeper into the errors that your authenticated mail might contain.

Note : You can evaluate the reputation scores given by Google. It individually assigns a score(bad, medium, low and high) to your domain and the IP address. If you receive a low spam rate score that complies with the google guidelines, it implies that most of your mails will be successfully delivered to the users and are not marked as spam.

Conclusion

Follow the above practices to achieve the optimal deliverability rates for your email campaigns.