“Email deliverability” is a phrase many marketers might not have even really heard before. And we use email constantly.

Here’s how email works for most people: you type up an email, plug in your contacts, and hit send. After a little bit, your emails show up in your contacts’ inboxes. What happens in between is a mystery that we’re going to demystify.

What is Email Deliverability?

When you send a campaign, one of three things will happen: your email lands happily in its intended inbox, it gets shunted to a spam folder, or it doesn’t arrive at all.

Obviously, we want that first thing to happen. Email deliverability is the rate at which your campaigns are actually delivered to inboxes successfully. For marketers, it’s a critical metric.

When your deliverability is low, it means your campaigns are landing in spam folders. That’s a death sentence for email marketing (when was the last time you read something in your junk folder, let alone converted on it?)

Keeping Your Deliverability High

Here’s a golden rule for email campaigns: if your email looks like spam, it’ll be treated like spam – by spam filters as well as the humans reading your emails.

So, really, your goal is to avoid anything that makes your email look like spam. Here’s how to do that.

Measuring Your Reputation

ISPs (internet service providers) give your IPs and domains a score called a sender reputation. This is from 1-100, and the lower it is, the less trustworthy you are to them. Lower reputation scores means more of your campaigns get sentenced to the junk folder.

There are a number of third-party tools you can use to check your sender score, but the critical thing right now is to know that it exists and your goal is to keep it as high as possible.

Maintain a Healthy Contact List

Your campaigns are only as good as your contact list. Having a killer list is critical anyway, because if you’re not targeting the right audience, your marketing is going to flop.

But it goes beyond that. Your contact list itself impacts your deliverability. If it’s full of bad data, invalid emails, spam traps and otherwise unhelpful contacts, your sender score will take a hit.

To solve that, run your list through validation and verification checks regularly.

When you send to, say, 100k contacts, you’re bound to get a number of bounces. These come in two flavors: hard and soft.

A soft bounce is a temporary failure to deliver your message. This typically happens when the recipient’s inbox is full, for example. Once they clean it out, they’ll be able to receive messages again. If you get a couple soft bounces from a given contact, consider removing them from your list for a while.

Hard bounces, on the other hand, are permanent failures to deliver to that recipient. They can be directly detrimental to your sender score, because if you hit hard bounces repeatedly, it’s a sure sign that you’re not taking care of your email list.

This tells spam filters “I really don’t care who is on my list”, and that’s a red flag for them, so your sender score goes down.

The solution is simple, though: make sure you remove hard bounces immediately. As soon as an address comes back with a hard bounce, chop that contact off your list. It’s not like you can get messages to them anyway, so keeping them does nothing but harm your campaigns.

Follow Cold Email Best Practices (Even If You’re Not Sending Cold Campaigns)

Cold email best practices are largely intended to mitigate risk to your sender score. Following them will improve your deliverability in general, but if you’re looking to generate leads with cold email, they’re not optional.

In general, it’s a good idea to avoid spammy words, phrases and formatting. For example: “Free”, on its own, is okay. “Free!” is a bit more spammy, or at least aggressively salesy. “Free!!” gets overtly spammy, and adding all caps creates “FREE!!” – exactly the sort of thing spam filters will crack down on.

Maximize Deliverability with the Right Platform

When it comes to cold email deliverability, not all email platforms are created equal. In fact, most marketing automation solutions (like HubSpot) outright forbid large-scale campaigns and cold lists.

It makes sense. Remember how your IPs get a sender score? Well, so do theirs – and they share IPs across users. Picture this: If one user didn’t follow best practices and caused the IP address they sent from to take a huge reputation hit, the next user to send from that IP address would have terrible deliverability.

In order to send large-scale campaigns and still reach inboxes, you need an email lead generation platform designed for the task.