What’s the point of sending an email if it can’t be read? Shrodingers email is every email in your spam folder. Luckily, there are some best practices you can follow to increase your odds of having your emails read.

Email deliverability is tricky and an ongoing battle but this guide aims to to sum up the best practices that can be used to ensure your emails are being delivered where and when you expect them to.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the process of making sure that your emails are delivered to your recipients' inboxes.

This means that they aren’t being blocked or sent to someone’s spam or junk folder. In the simplest term, a successfully delivered email is an email that lands in the intended recipient’s primary inbox.

Maintaining good email deliverability rate is extremely important for the success of your SaaS company’s email marketing campaigns, as emails that are not delivered to the inbox are not seen by the intended recipients (likely your customers) and will result in lower engagement rates. Lower engagement rates will mean missing your KPIs and product-led goals from chapter 1 that will lead to a lower ROI for your campaign and overall business.

While email deliverability may sound like an easy problem to solve, it is anything but. 

Why Does Email Deliverability Matter?

A higher email deliverability will increase the success of your email campaign and therefore, the overall success of your business. 

Here are a few key reasons why good email deliverability is important:

1. Higher Engagement: Good email deliverability can lead to higher open rates, higher click rates, and ultimately better engagement and ROI for your email marketing campaigns. By getting your messages delivered to the primary inbox, you can achieve your marketing goals, whether it's driving new sales or building relationships with customers.

2. Maintain Customer Trust: When your customers expect to receive emails from you, they expect them in their primary inbox. If your emails are consistently sent to the spam folder or not delivered at all, subscribers may lose trust in your brand and grow unsure in your business as a whole.

3. Stronger Sender Reputation: ISPs and email clients track the reputation of email senders to determine whether to deliver their messages to the inbox or the spam folder. By maintaining good email deliverability rates, you can strengthen your sender reputation and improve your chances of getting your emails delivered to the inbox in the future. It’s a vicious cycle.

4. Avoiding Blacklisting: If your emails are consistently marked as spam or junk, your email server or domain may be added to a blacklist, which can prevent your emails from being delivered to any recipients. Being blacklisted can be difficult to recover from and will have a significant impact on your ongoing email marketing efforts.

If this sounds slightly scary and serious, it should. Email deliverability issues can completely derail your email marketing efforts.

Luckily, there are some email deliverability best practices you can follow to increase your chances of your emails landing where they’re supposed to.

Email Deliverability Best Practices

To achieve email deliverability rates that will be acceptable to your business, you will need to follow a few best practices and guidelines to help ensure that your emails make it to their intended inbox.

Let’s dive into some best practices that we have seen firsthand at Loops that will help your emails hit the primary inbox.

DNS Records

One of the most important factors in email deliverability is your DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it is the system that converts human-readable domain names (like google.com) into IP addresses (like 8.8.8.8). Your DNS records tell email servers where to find your email server.

If your DNS records are not set up correctly, your emails may never reach their destination.

If you're unfamiliar with these terms, think of a DNS record like a phone book. When you want to find someone's phone number, you look them up in the phone book. Similarly, when an email server wants to find your email server, it looks up your DNS records.

If a DNS record is a phone book, then consider your IP to be your phone number. When someone wants to call you, they look up your phone number in the phone book (DNS record). Similarly, when an email server wants to find your email server, it looks up your IP address in the DNS records.

DNS records have several different types, but the two most important for email deliverability are A records and MX records. A record points to the IP address of your email server, and MX records tell email servers where to find your email server. If your DNS records are not set up correctly, your emails may never reach their destination.

SPF Record

Another important factor in email deliverability is your SPF record. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and it is a system that helps to prevent email spoofing. Email spoofing is when someone sends an email that appears to come from one email address, but is actually coming from another. This can be used to trick people into thinking that an email is from a trusted source, when it is actually from a malicious actor, so it's important to ensure these are properly set up.

‍DKIM and DMARC

Additionally, we highly recommend DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). These systems help to further prevent email spoofing and improve email deliverability.

DKIM is a system that uses cryptographic signatures to verify that an email was actually sent by the domain it claims to be from. This helps to prevent email spoofing, and also allows email providers to more easily identify and filter spam emails.

DMARC is a system that builds on top of SPF and DKIM, and provides a way for email providers to give feedback to senders about whether their emails are passing authentication checks. This feedback can be used to help improve email deliverability.

‍Dedicated vs Shared IP

You almost definitely do not need a dedicated IP. Shared IPs are fine, and in fact, many email providers require that you use a shared IP. A dedicated IP is only really necessary if you are sending a very large volume of email (more than a few hundred thousand per day). If you're not sure whether you need a dedicated IP, just ask your email provider (hopefully us!).

“Promotions” Tab

Landing in the "Primary" tab in the inbox is always a concern to our users, but in general, it's not something to worry too much about. If you send promotional material (a sale, a promotion, bragging about an achievement) and it ends up in the "Promotions" tab then that means the system is working! That's a promotion and it's accurately labeled.

“Updates Tab”

Typically, product updates, especially if they're explicitly labeled update in the text of the email will result in the email being placed in the "Updates" tab of the inbox as opposed to the "Promotions" tab.

Mail Warming

Finally, another important factor to consider when trying to improve email deliverability is mail warming.‍

Mail warming is the process of gradually increasing the number of emails that you send from a given address, in order to improve the chances that those emails will be delivered. This is because some email providers may consider a sudden increase in email volume from a sender to be suspicious, and may mark those emails as spam. By gradually increasing the number of emails that you send, you can avoid this issue.

There are quite a few services that offer mail warming but they all seem to generally produce similar results. I would personally recommend approaching them with a bit of caution as their goal is to actively manipulate Gmail and other companies spam filters. There's a chance that you may be penalized in the future for using services like these. The best way to warm an inbox is by slowly sending relevant mail over time and gradually increasing volume.

There are a few other factors that can affect email deliverability, such as buying email lists, scraping emails from the internet, and which email bucket (sales, product, marketing, application/transactional) your emails are being sent to. However, the factors listed above are some of the most important to consider when trying to improve email deliverability.

Implementing Email Deliverability Best Practices

Implementing the above email deliverability best practices should be considered before your SaaS even begins sending your first email marketing campaigns. 

If you neglect these best practices from the start and find yourself landing in spam folders (or worse, being blacklisted) you are going to have an uphill battle to dig yourself out of that unnecessary hole. 

Ensure your domain records are properly set up, send some test emails, and gradually increase the amount of emails you are sending before blasting an unsolicited email campaign to thousands of potential customers.