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Never Go to Spam Again: How to Improve your Sales Email Deliverability

Businesses spend a lot of time, money, and resources on building out sales email campaigns. But if your emails aren’t landing in your prospects’ inboxes, what’s the point? No matter how perfect your templates are, beautiful emails can go to waste when they wind up in spam.

It’s not email marketings fault. In fact, email marketing is the most direct way to engage with prospects and it will only continue to grow. By 2024, 4.5B people will be using email. If you want your future customers to connect with what your company has to offer, it’s imperative to improve your email deliverability.

So, what gives?

Here are the top three reasons why emails end up in spam folders, our best tips on what not to do, how you can improve your deliverability today–and the tools to do it.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to the percentage of your emails that end up in recipients’ spam folders. Email service providers (ESPs) use algorithms and filters to protect their users from scams, junk mail, and malicious third parties. Typically, filters will flag an email as spam if it’s generic, not personalized, and provides little meaningful value.

You can avoid this fate by always doing your research before sending an email, making sure that your email list is up-to-date, that you’re contacting the right people, and writing content that is thoughtful and helpful. It’s important to note that you must always give your recipients an easy way to opt-out of future communications.

Email deliverability matters because it is a crucial part of most modern marketing strategies. Thirty-one percent of B2B marketers state that email newsletters are the best way to nurture their leads and rank email as the most effective way to reach their ideal buyers. A poor email deliverability score will cut your company off from direct communication with prospects.

Luckily, today’s sales reps and marketers have access to email marketing software that can help keep track of your email reputation, and automate away some of the mistakes that can negatively affect your email deliverability rate.

Top 3 reasons why emails go to spam

Thoughtful and relevant emails are always the best way to avoid spam filters—but sometimes even your best-written emails go to spam. Here are the three most common reasons why your emails won’t make it to a prospect’s inbox.

Your email recipient reports your email as spam

If this happens, it will have an immediate negative effect on your email deliverability reputation. Make sure that you’re sending emails to the right people (i.e. ideal customers) who understand your offering. Clearly show how they can opt-out of receiving more messages and definitely don’t add them back into your email list down the road.

You have low engagement rates

ESPs will pay attention to how many of your emails are opened, read, and deleted. If your rates are low, you’re at risk of being flagged as spam. To fix this, you need to increase your email engagement. Make sure that your content is relevant to your audience and that you’re following sales email best practices.

Your email lists aren’t updated or verified

If you have a poor bounce rate and open rate, you probably need to clean up your email lists. First, get rid of any email addresses that are inactive or illegitimate. These will only negatively affect your email deliverability and reputation.

Second, regularly clean and update your email lists. One of the most accurate sources for contact details is LinkedIn. With Wiza, you can easily build and segment lead lists and download them directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Email deliverability: What not to do

You can’t always avoid spam filters but you can definitely reduce your risk of being flagged. Here are four things to avoid when creating your outbound sales email campaigns.

Too many images

ESPs will flag emails with too many images, especially if they’re larger files. Some company email servers won’t allow images to be displayed in emails at all. When building out your templates, only use high quality images and use them sparingly.

Low domain score or not a trusted source

People avoid opening emails from someone they aren’t familiar with. They also engage less with emails when the sender is a business, instead of a person. To avoid this, don’t send an email that lists “Wiza” as the sender, for example. Instead, a more effective email should include a name and business in the sender field, like “Stephen Hakami, Wiza.”

Your email is not verified

It’s very easy to spoof email domains. ESPs will use email authentication to verify that a message is actually from the name listed in the “from” field. This protects their users from phishing attacks. Authentication helps catch these malicious emails and captures them in spam filters. You can authenticate your email domain by verifying with Google, a DNS lookup, or pinging your server.

Too many bounced emails

When your emails have too many bounces, the internet service provider (ISP) will take note and stop your emails from reaching the intended inbox. That’s why it’s so important to keep your email lists updated, otherwise your email reputation can be damaged due to invalid or nonexistent email addresses.

How to improve your sales deliverability (and the tools to do it!)

If your email deliverability score is low, don’t worry—you can fix it! By following best practices, you can improve your email score and reach your buyers. Here are a few ways to improve your score, plus the tools that can help.

Check your email score at mail-tester.com

Not sure where to start? Your first step should be to test your email score using mail-tester.com. This site can also help you track your domain’s reputation over time so you can come up with a strategy to improve your email deliverability.

Here’s how to use this tool:

Mail-tester will provide you with a randomly generated email address. Using your email software, send a message to this address.
Click on the “check your score” button and mail-tester will give you a spam score after analyzing your message, mail server, and IP address.
The goal is to score a 10/10. That means that your email reputation and systems are configured correctly.

Review your domain reputation

Your domain reputation hinges on appearing as a legitimate sender. Here are the three most important variables that can affect your reputation.

Spam rate: the percentage of your emails that were caught by spam filters.
Bounce rate: the percentage of emails that were rejected by a recipient’s email server.
Spam report: The times a recipient actively marks your message as spam.

Protect your main domain

A popular way to ensure that your domain name has a good reputation is to use a secondary domain for email communications. Treat it as a warm-up domain, especially if you’re a new business. ESPs don’t like receiving emails from a domain that has little to no engagement history.

To warm up your domain, send emails using your typical patterns to a designated group of recipients who will interact with the message. Name your secondary domain something similar to your main domain. For example, if our main domain is Wiza.co we could use wiza-mail.co just for email communication.

Avoid sending to bounced emails

Keep track of your bounce rate. If this percentage gets too high you risk being blacklisted by ESPs. Since bounce rates happen when an email address is fake, no longer used, or out-of-date, the best way to avoid this problem is to have fresh contact details in your lead lists.

LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for professionals and since a person’s LinkedIn page moves with them as they change jobs over time, the contact details are always up-to-date. Wiza offers a LinkedIn extension to easily download verified and scrubbed lead lists.

Validate your emails with Wiza

Wiza can help in other ways, too. We have a powerful email verification tool that you can start using today to clean all of your email lists at the same time, in bulk, and for a low cost. You can even download specific segments of your lead lists with email validation levels like “risky” and “unknown.”

Build better email lists

The best way to improve your email deliverability score is to start with high quality lead lists. The number one tool to download and segment the most up-to-date email lists is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can learn more about how Wiza works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator in our blog post Can You Export Leads from Sales Navigator?