Other channels rise and fall, but email has been a pillar of digital marketing since the very beginning. So much so, many marketers assume they’ve got a solid grip on how it works – you write an awesome email, load up your contact list, and pull the trigger.

The only problem is: that’s not the entirety of it. That’s just the beginning. The real challenges happen after your campaign has been sent.

After all, the only way your awesome email marketing can succeed is if it reaches your contact’s inbox. Your deliverability is how often your campaigns successfully reach inboxes versus landing spam folders, bouncing, etc. And it’s a critical factor in email marketing success.

So how can you improve your deliverability, if it’s something that only happens after the campaign has left your hands?

Your Reputation is Key

Having a bad reputation might have made you seem cool in school, but it’s the exact opposite in the email world. You, as an email sender, have a sender reputation. This is a rating from 1-100, and when it dips too low, ISPs will reject your emails automatically.

There are services you can use to check your sender reputation, and it’s well worth monitoring, because it’s all too easy to damage your score.

If you want high deliverability – which you do, since campaigns in junk folders don’t generate results – you need to keep your reputation score high.

Avoid Damaging Your Score

There are a lot of factors that go into your sender score, and many ways you can inadvertently chip away at it. Fortunately, you can avoid many of the pitfalls by following a few best practices.

Practice Data Hygiene

The #1 source of sender reputation problems is your contact list.

Put it this way: if you have a list of 1000 contacts, the odds are good that there are some bad addresses in there. This can be the result of many things: simple typos, a contact changed jobs, the address has been repurposed as a spam trap, etc. Every email list decays naturally over time.

So if you send a campaign to those 1000 contacts, you’re going to get various unsuccessful deliveries. Things like hard bounces (where the email address doesn’t exist, for example) can and do happen all the time. Let’s say you end up with 50 contacts with various problems like hard bounces, or they come back as spam traps.

Now, if you don’t bother removing those invalid lists or spam traps, that tells spam filters that you don’t much care about who you’re sending to. Indiscriminate email blasts are classic spam activity, and this can (and will) knock down your sender score.

When you’re looking at a list of, say, 80,000 cold contacts instead, this becomes an even bigger potential issue. That’s why it’s critical to run your list through email verification/validation processes and hygiene checks. These processes run your contacts through various filters and tests to remove bad data before it can impact your sender score.

Follow Content Best Practices

It’s not just your contact list that can cause issues. Your content might be quietly shooting you in the foot, too.

There are a wide range of ways to scare spam filters with your content. It pays to be familiar with them – and how to avoid them.

Here’s a golden rule: if your email looks or reads like spam, it will get treated like spam.

So, for example, avoid using spammy words/phrases like “free” (even if your offer is free!), over-the-top punctuation like “Free!!!”, and caps-lock like “FREE!!!” You see how that looks more and more spammy already?

Avoid colored fonts, using multiple fonts, or big images that contain text. Spam filters can’t read text in images, so they automatically treat emails with a high image-to-text ratio (i.e. emails that have lots of or large images but little readable text) as more likely to be spam.

Watch for Blacklisting

Blacklists are, basically, lists of known spammers to avoid. If your sender reputation gets too low, you’ll land on a blacklist – and that’s a death sentence for your campaigns.

If you keep your deliverability high by maintaining a high sender score and following best practices, you won’t end up blacklisted. But it pays to be sure, so if you’re running into major deliverability issues, make certain you didn’t end up on a blacklist.

Make It Easy with the Right Software

Email isn’t quite as simple as it first appears, right? Particularly for cold campaigns, there’s a lot of moving parts and things to keep track of.

Clickback’s Email Lead Generation software is built for top-notch deliverability. It cleans bad data from your lists automatically, audits your content for spam trigger words, and even has its own sender score so yours remains unaffected.

And plenty more besides – we’ve only scratched the surface of how sender reputation works (and how Clickback protects yours).