Getting into the inbox just so you can have the chance to engage with your customers often isn't as easy as pressing "send." Get customized advice from our team of email experts on how to optimize your email strategy.
Below are some email deliverability tips and tricks from leading industry experts.
While some of these are optional, they all come highly recommended from SendGrid for satisfying any current or potential issues with email deliverability such as spam folder delivery or being added to a deny list.
Before sending any email campaigns, we advise you to review the section on Affirmative Consent. Twilio SendGrid's Affirmative Consent requirement was introduced in February 2023 and is required for all non-transactional emails.
First and foremost, ask yourself this question:
Am I sending the right message to the right person at the right time with the right frequency?
Overall email deliverability is influenced by how your recipients interact with your messages. If your messages are opened in a timely manner, images are displayed and links are clicked, then mail providers will see you as a sender whose messages their recipients want to receive. If messages pile up, remain unopened or get marked as spam, mail providers won't be as comfortable placing your messages in the inbox or accepting them at all!
Getting into the inbox just so you can have the chance to engage with your customers often isn't as easy as pressing "send." Get customized advice from our team of email experts on how to optimize your email strategy.
The second biggest factor in inbox delivery is the actual content you send in your messages. It's very important to ensure your emails meet every CAN-SPAM requirement.
Some key takeaways from CAN-SPAM:
Read the full CAN-SPAM Act here! This is required reading for any aspiring email acolyte.
One of the most important parts of CAN-SPAM is this line:
"Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you."
All email providers look for an unsubscribe method (or links) in all emails. Even though it may not make sense for transactional mail, it can make the difference between messages arriving in the inbox or the spam folder. Subscription tracking automatically inserts an unsubscribe link into all your emails and maintains the Unsubscribe list.
Think of it this way: would you rather a recipient politely decline future emails from you or mark your messages as spam because they have no other option?
Maximum company visibility helps as well. Placing your company name in the subject line of your emails and including your physical mailing address and phone number in your email footers helps mail providers recognize you as a legitimate company and email sender. This also helps your recipients know that this message is indeed from you!
We've all ignored phone calls from numbers we don't recognize, the same goes for email!
CAN-SPAM requires you inform recipients of where you are located.
Ensuring successful email deliverability is crucial for effective communication with your audience. To achieve this, adhere to Twilio SendGrid's Affirmative Consent requirement introduced in February 2023.
Obtain explicit permission from recipients before sending non-transactional emails, making sure consent is freely given, informed, and unambiguous. Clearly state your identity and email content to recipients, and provide an easy way for them to withdraw consent. Retain proof of consent and remember it is non-transferable to affiliates.
By following these guidelines, you can improve your email deliverability, ensuring your messages reach the inbox and respecting recipients' preferences and privacy.
Keeping your mail streams separated can make a huge difference in the long run. Specifically, segmenting your marketing email from your transactional email is a great way to keep legitimate mail out of trouble.
Say, for example, you are sending your Daily Knitting Update emails on the same account and the same IP address as your receipts, invoices, and password resets.
The day then comes where one of your recipients simply can't take it anymore and marks every single Daily Knitting email they've ever received from you as spam. Knitting overload!
The potential fallback from this is that not only will that recipient no longer receive their important receipts, invoices, and password resets, but it then becomes possible that ALL recipients at the same domain or ISP may also run afoul of the same problem. Yikes!
Consider setting up a new Subuser account with an additional dedicated IP address specifically for your marketing email, for example:
This simple division will keep your important email in the clear, even if one stream runs into trouble. Remember, don't cross the streams!
With email, things don't happen overnight, and magic wands are few and far between. So for the most part, the actions of your recipients are the highest voice of authority.
Encouraging your recipients to do certain things can help bolster the trust ISPs have for you and your messages. Some examples can include:
If your business is adult in nature, we can send your mail to the same standards and deliverability as any of our other customers. However, We do not allow our users to send explicit content within emails. This applies primarily to images, but we reserve the right to refuse the sending of any type of content that we deem to be vulgar, pornographic, or otherwise explicit.
If you are unsure where your emails stand, please contact our support team at https://support.sendgrid.com
Our click tracking application can sometimes trip up spam filters. If you have click tracking enabled, we'll replace any links within HTML <a> tags with unique links that redirect through our service. As such, if you use the original link as the clickable link text in your <a> tag, when the click tracking link is replaced it creates irregularity between where the link appears to go and where it actually goes. For example the original link:
<a href="http://www.sendgrid.com">http://www.sendgrid.com</a>
Gets replaced with a much longer link with click tracking:
<a href="http://beertemp.sendgrid.net/wf/click?upn=a2quqXSHnxzJyDEtVGmF4w3cWg6voxuzvZ4oDr9WeNk-3D_4MHh">http://www.sendgrid.com</a>
This is may look very similar to phishing emails, placing these messages in the spam folder rather than the inbox. To get around this, use something descriptive for the link text rather than the link itself in your messages:
<a href="http://www.sendgrid.com">Click to visit SendGrid</a>
Also, consider how you include images and attachments in your messages. As it is impossible to know how a receiving server treats attachments, we recommend using the HTML <img> tag to include images in your messages and we also recommend linking to hosted files rather than including them as attachments. Images must be hosted on your own or on a public facing server to be included via the HTML <img> tag. Secure site logins or credentials can be used to track who is coming to your site to download files. This helps ensure that your message gets to the recipient regardless of any attachment restrictions on the receiving mail server.
Finally, there are some great 3rd party services you can use to get an idea of how mail providers analyze your emails:
You can send emails to a capture address at one of these services and they will reply with a breakdown of all the positive and negative factors of your emails. This helps you isolate and fix specific issues that may be sending your email to the Spam folder rather than the inbox. These services are HIGHLY recommended for troubleshooting spam folder delivery.
Senderscore is another great resource you can use to get a good idea of how the internet email community ranks the IP address you send mail from.
SendGrid has also released their 2023 Email Deliverability Guide highlighting these and more deliverability tips.