No matter how well-crafted your emails are, they won’t drive results if they don’t land in the inbox. That’s why email deliverability is the foundation of any successful email marketing strategy. Whether you're troubleshooting existing issues or looking to strengthen your setup for long-term success, this essential checklist will help you maximize deliverability and keep your campaigns performing at their best. 

7 Tips for increasing email deliverability

✅ Inbox placement. Some of the biggest obstacles to deliverability fall in the category of inbox placement issues. One thing you can do is break down opens and clicks by domain and check if any domains have numbers that are performing much lower than other domains. For example, let’s say you have a 3% open rate for Yahoo Mail versus a 20% open rate for Gmail. In a situation like this, there’s probably a spam folder issue at the domain with the much lower open rate.  

✅ Sending IP addresses. Review the number of sending IP addresses versus the minimum/maximum daily and monthly volume. We recommend having one IP address for every two million email messages per day to avoid any sort of delay in delivery. A best practice for a dedicated sending IP address is to send at least roughly 200k email messages per month. If you send much less than that, mailbox providers likely will not see enough volume from the IP address to generate a solid reputation over time.  

✅ Review your domain segmentation strategy. Separating subdomains for separate email streams helps segregate domain reputation. This helps to prevent issues with marketing best practices from negatively impacting deliverability for transactional email messages. Review your technical settings to make sure everything is configured correctly. It’s essential that domains are authenticated properly and show SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Run a test to make sure your email headers and message settings are fully correct and set up to maximize deliverability.  

✅ Don't forget about domain warming. If you have plans to configure new IP addresses or new sending domains (including subdomains), introduce them slowly through IP warming or domain warming. Implement Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) properly, and consider a Brand Indicator for Message Identification (BIMI) sender logo to stand out in the inbox. Keep in mind: If you implement the bare minimum with no reporting and no DMARC policy, you won’t be protecting the email domain against phishing. 

✅ Register sending domains. Register sending domains so you can monitor domain reputation closely. Pro tip: Sign up for Google's Postmaster Tools reputation dashboard to monitor your reputation score.   

✅ Implement a subscriber lifecycle management (and sunsetting) policy. Suppressing inactive subscribers after a set period of time helps to improve inbox placement by boosting engagement. To help with re-engagement, we recommend a win-back campaign targeted at inactive subscribers. Move them to this list and drop them from any regular campaigns to keep from dragging down engagement and landing in the spam folder, especially with Gmail.  

✅ Review your overall email marketing and engagement strategy. Have you considered refreshing your welcome message, including a thank you message? Be sure your sign-up process is clear and easy to find with a link or form on every page of your website. 

Growing your list and driving engagement is more effective with the right kind of email touchpoints. The most important thing is for your messages to be seen and that means making it to the inbox. To learn more about deliverability, check out our one-pager, How to maximize deliverability and steer clear of the spam folder.