Being a marketer, we understand it can be tough just managing your company, let alone your email marketing campaigns. That’s why, to help you ease any future issues with your sends and deliverability, we’ve come up with a list of deliverability recommendations that you should follow before and after you start sending.

• Remember: A lot of ESP take the guilty until proven innocent approach, if they never seen mail from you before, that are automatically suspicious of you. Once you send mail for a while they start to warm up to you. This is know as IP Warming, the more consistently you send the better.
  
  
• Whitelist me
  When confirming your new subscribers (e.g. via a welcome email), ask them to add your “From” address to their address books. It is a foolproof way to release all future emails from the constraints of the spam filters. This is so easy, yet practiced so rarely.
  
  
• Clean your list
  • Check for incorrectly formatted emails that may contain invalid domains (ie: abc@gmal.com should be @gmail.com)
    
    
  • Use a list cleaning and verification company that will take your list and “ping” each email to make sure they’re valid
    
    
  • Remove obvious spamtraps. You can do a quick search through your list for email addresses containing the words “spam” or “junk”.
    
    
  • We also recommend not sending to emails containing “mailroom@”, “mail@”, “info@”, “admin@”, “postmaster@”, “abuse@” and any general prefix email addresses. Many of these general mailboxes are not monitored and may be marked as spam.
    
    
• Use double opt-in when signing up members
  Double opt-in means that the subscriber must click a link in an email to verify that they want to receive future emails from you. This will reduce spam and verify that the email entered is a real email address.
  
  
• Set up your segments to include only the past 180 day openers and/or clickers
  By doing so, you are sure to send to only people who are interested and actually read your emails.
  
  
• Remove inactive subscribers & remove user complaints
  Send a reactivation email to subscribers who have not opened/clicked in the past 180 days. By doing to, you can confirm whether they still want to receive your email or not. If they choose to opt-out, or ask you to remove, you should suppress them from all future sends.
  
  
• Add a link to unsubscribe or preference center
  An unsubscribe link is required for all marketing emails, but a preference center is even better because it allows your subscribers to choose what type of emails they want to receive and/or how often they want to receive it as opposed to making them opt-out of all emails altogether.
  
  In addition, you should place the unsubscribe/preference center link both at the bottom of the email and the top. This helps decrease the amount of subscriber who may click the “mark as spam” button in the email browser.
  
  Also, for a preference center, we recommend giving subscribers to choose less/more emails. For example, give subscribers the option to receive weekly vs monthly emails so instead of unsubscribing altogether, they might only just want to receive one email per month. On the set up side, your segments can also be weekly vs monthly and once per month, you will send to both weekly and monthly, while the rest of the emails would be weekly.
  
  
• Send consistently and at a consistent time
  Sending emails once every two or three months can be more detrimental than sending multiple emails daily. Why? Your Customers might forget all about you.

  If subscribers fail to recognize the From field, they may delete your message, hurting your “open” ratio.

  ISPs and subscribers both love to see that you follow a regular schedule because it increases your open rate. Schedule your sends for the same time of the week or if you have a history of sends, you can choose “optimized” to send to subscribers at the time they usually open.
  
  

• Use consistent “from” addresses
  Change your address only if it’s a different set of subscribers. Changing the “from” address too many times causes ISPs to think your emails are inconsistent and looks like spam.
  
  
• Always include a plain text version of your email
  Spam filters like to see a plain text version of your email and sometimes email browsers can’t handle HTML so they display the text version. In addition, people who check email on their mobile device may have their devices set NOT to download the full images and HTML since it uses much more of their data. It may seem like a lot of work but you can easily generate a plain text version in EasyEditor by clicking “Generate plain text version”.
  
  
• Remind subscribers to save your email address as a safe sender
  Ask subscribers to add your email address to their “safe sender” or “address book”, so ISPs see that people want to receive emails from you and that your emails are not spam.
  
  
• Test all links
  Make sure all links go to the correct page and make sure there are no dead links. Spam filters can pick this up.
  
  

• Avoid dirty tricks
  What may have been effective in 1997 no longer works today. Remember, being caught red-handed in any of these practices may cause permanent damage to your deliverability ratios:

  • Hashbusting: Inserting random characters in the subject line or content to fool spam filters, e.g. “F.r.e.e. p.r.!.z.e”
  • Deceptive Subject Lines: Starting the subject line with “Re:” or “Fwd:” to suggest an ongoing communication with the sender.
  • Misleading Claims: Subject line stating that the recipient has won a prize, while the copy lists conditions that have to be met in order to claim it.
  • Image Text: Concealing a text message in an image to fool spam filters.
    
    
• Avoid Spam key words
  Certain keywords are a big no-no for ISPs and based on the amount of spam keywords in your email, you may trigger spam filters causing your email to bounce or land in junk. Here are some top keywords you should avoid in your subject and message:

Of course, this is only a short list. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of key words that can trigger spam filters. You can easily check your spam score when you’re finished creating your message in the Drag & Drop Editor by clicking “Utilities” (next to the Save button) and click on “Spam Check” and we’ll check your content for you!