Email Deliverability From A To Z [Free Ebook]

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What makes an excellent email marketing specialist? One that’s a deliverability know-it-all! There are so many things that go into delivering (get it?) an excellent mail that our Deliverability Engineer took it upon himself to reveal the ins and outs of getting your email to the top.

You may remember that we had an excellent series of blog posts focused on email deliverability. We thought that putting those posts together and adding an additional “chapter” in there would be the perfect way to share Irek’s knowledge.

To give you a recap of the blog series and a preview of our free guide, here are some things you’ll learn about:

Read more:

News: Gmail and Yahoo! have both announced major changes to their email authentication requirements and spam prevention policies, set to take effect in February 2024. One of the announced changes is the requirement that bulk email senders start using custom domains for their email campaigns. Learn more about these and other changes in our blog post covering the Gmail and Yahoo authentication announcement.

1. ESP’s Role In Email Marketing

Most marketers think that deliverability rates are influenced solely by their ESP. That is true – to some extent. The reality is that email marketers get help from us, but most of the work is on their side.

So, as far as deliverability goes, what can an ESP do for you? Irek explains this based on his experience:

  • SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and others – we keep up to date with all the technical requirements to make sure that your email gets delivered.
  • Bounces, feedback loops, unsubscribes – got any bad apples in your bunch? We’ll find them!
  • State of the art tools to help you create excellent emails
  • Permission-based email marketing – our Compliance experts and the power of HYDRA stand at our gates to keep our reputation high.

2. Don’t be mistaken for a spammer

Sometimes you may think you’ve got the next best email marketing campaign to ever grace people’s inboxes. Funny subject line, crazy pictures, a weird call to action. What’s not to like? A lot. This chapter focuses on what distinguishes delivered emails from those that are immediately flagged as spam.

You can create a catchy subject line or an email with great images inside – but you have to know how to do it right! But subject lines and images are not the only things that ISPs look at. Here are other aspects of your email that can label someone as a spammer:

  • Misleading content
  • Generic subject lines
  • Imitating private conversation
  • Masking links
  • Generic from address

There are certain trends, that seem to be repeating with a specific type of ‘bad senders.’ Numerous people already faced them and started avoiding these messages (even instinctively). So, getting into the same basket with those senders, even with your best intentions, can derail your results and make all the work that you put into collecting your list go to waste.

More on why your emails are going to spam and how to stop them from doing so in the future.

3. Content in emails

Speaking of spammers, they have become very sneaky in their ways.  It’s not enough to look for some specific phrases or keywords since abusers are constantly working the anti-spam filters to see what works and what doesn’t. Filtering based on a single or few words became too easy to get around.

In this guide, Irek focused on five aspects that can make or break the content within your email. However, there is a lot of focus on wording, there are two ways that wording can derail your email:

  1. Word after word: trying to be clever about not using words that they deem popular (and banned by ISPs) like: free, buy now, or limited time, is not very smart. These words are obviously marketing terms that have been accepted by our community, ISPs know that!
  2. Words and tricks: it goes without saying, but separating letters by spaces or punctuation sigs puts a red target on your email

4. Looking at your results

What if you’ve already got some ongoing campaigns? Is there any way that you can check if something might not be clicking with your deliverability? Yes! Our awesome Deliverability Manager talks about two simple things that can give you a heads up that something might be wrong:

  1. A sudden drop in your results after an individual message was sent
  2. A steady drop in results over a distinct period of time

These might be indicators that either your content didn’t do well or that it’s time. The great news is that these are both things that you can work on to make sure that your deliverability is on point.

Get the guide!

So, ready to learn more? Great!

Download and read our guide to become an expert yourself.

The goal of this guide is to teach you enough for you to be able to achieve (and keep) the highest deliverability possible by identifying issues with your content or list, long before they become serious enough to make an actual impact.

You will learn about:

  • the most important parts of list generation and list maintenance
  • the influence your content has on delivery
  • what kind of behaviors can get your emails in trouble
  • what will help you get better mailing statistics (improving your open and click rates by simply delivering every single message)
  • what you as the sender can do outside of it all to leave a good impression on both your subscribers and ISPs
Email deliverability a to z

Email Deliverability from A to Z

Learn what email deliverability is about and what you the sender can do to improve it.

Download guide

Irek Rybiński
Irek Rybiński
As GetResponse Deliverability Engineer, Irek Rybiński lives and breathes email deliverability. Over the last 10+ years, he's been working in the email marketing space. He spent most of this time developing tools and running various compliance and deliverability projects. He's always on top of things revolving around email, which is why you can often meet him at M3AAWG, the global forum that works to reduce the threat from bots, malware, spam, and other online exploitations.