The Ultimate Email

Deliverability Guide for 2023

Jack Epner
·
Dec 19, 2022

The Ultimate Email Deliverability Guide for 2023

Email marketing is one of the most popular ways to engage with

prospects today. Not only popular, though, it‘s effective, as in
2022, revenue generated from email marketing amounted to $9.62
billion. This number is only expected to grow (and quite a lot) over
the coming decade. With email marketing such a cornerstone of
business growth, how can marketers ensure their emails are
making it to the inbox? The average bounce rate across all
industries is near 10%, which is not ideal. On any particular
campaign, you don‘t want to see a bounce rate over even 2%.
Clearly, open rates are hardly a consideration if so many emails
aren‘t even reaching the inbox in the first place. How can we
increase our deliverability?
Email Deliverability Best Practices

With the new year approaching, it‘s a good time to put ―improve
email deliverability‖ on your to-do-list for next quarter. Let‘s start
at the start, though.

What is email deliverability?

In a nutshell, it‘s just as it sounds. Email deliverability is simply the

ability to get an email delivered. The reason this is a concern for
modern businesses is that ISPs, email providers, corporate
intranets, and general spam filters have all advanced to the point
where a lot of your email may never even reach a mailbox. How
many times has a colleague‘s email been missed because, oops, it
went to spam? Or finding important emails regarding finances or
an election ballot that wind up being filtered by an over-zealous
spam guard. If it can happen to legitimate senders, it can happen at
alarming rates for marketers if you don‘t know a thing or two about
what factors into whether or not an email is delivered as from a
trusted sender.

What is sender reputation?

Again, no surprise here, it‘s your reputation as an email sender in

the eyes of a receiving server. Imagine you have two friends that
both like to send you gifts, but one always sends gag gifts, and it‘s
been getting annoying lately (the last one resulted in glitter that
you still haven‘t managed to remove from your couch). If you
decide to start filtering unwanted BS out of your life, you might
look at the reputation of each as gift givers, and decide you‘ll
happily accept from one friend, but the other is simply going to get
the packages dumped before opening. This is how spam filters
work in a very basic sense. Receiving servers are looking at the
address and IP of the sender, and deciding very quickly if you‘re
likely to be sending something that will be appreciated, or if you‘re
going to figuratively glitter bomb someone‘s inbox.

Because this is happening at such scale, and sometimes more than

once per second, the system of checks must be simple, yet effective.
This means often erring on the side of caution, and especially with
new email accounts, it means your reputation needs to be rather
sterling to ensure deliverability. So how do we build a good
reputation for ourselves?

Email Warmup

To build a good reputation with a new email account, it‘s a good

idea to ‗warm it up.‘ This means starting to send emails that will be
certainly opened and read. While you might have hundreds of
willing friends to rope in, there are also services that provide
warmup services. QuickMail is just one of many options, should
you want to look into this further. The point here is that recipient
servers will be impressed that you‘ve had hundreds of emails
opened and read previously, with nothing marked as spam, and are
more likely to ‗wave you through‘ to the inbox. There are
differences of opinions in how long you should spend warming up
a new email account for marketing purposes. Some say six months
is a good length, others say a few weeks should be sufficient. You
can use your own judgement, but doing something is certainly
better than doing nothing.

Opt-In / Opt-Out

When it‘s time to start your campaign, you want to begin with your
prospect list. What we‘re going to write can wait, for now. First, we
need to decide who this is being sent to, so we can ensure our
content is relevant (more on that later). The best way to form an
email marketing list is from people who have willingly given you
their email addresses. Most people accomplish this through
landing pages, or some sort of freebie offer. Maybe you have a
newsletter they can subscribe to. Ideally you have something that
will allow people to freely give an email address with permission to
contact them. A double opt-in process is even better, where they
may have to click a link in an email to verify the sign-up. You can
also include an unsubscribe link in every email, which reduces the
likelihood they‘ll mark it spam. But what if you are just starting
out?

Verified Emails

An effective inbound landing page can help with your list, but let‘s
say we‘re only going to examine outbound for a moment. If using a
database or scraper of some sort to gain email addresses, you want
to do all you can to ensure these emails are verified. While there is
no silver bullet for this (even platforms with databases containing
emails marked ‗verified‘ does not always play out as so), a service
like NeverBounce can help with this. Clearly you won‘t know each
email address for certain, and the idea is to ensure it‘s not a
honeypot of some sort (an email address designed to simply collect
mass emails to identify spam and then exclude you from their
servers), but this will help you on your quest.

Segmenting Your Prospects

Segmentation is a great thing in marketing, and in this day and

age, personalization is incredibly important. There is too much
data others are already capitalizing on, so don‘t‘ be foolish enough
to send the same messaging to each and every contact you have. As
this email deliverability guide isn‘t focused on digital marketing as
a whole, a lot of what you can do with segmentation will not be
addressed here. However, it‘s good to note that one way marketers
may segment is by level of engagement. This can mean people who
haven‘t responded to an email in six months can go into a re-
engagement group for another campaign, those who have
responded to half the emails can be another group, and so on. You
can use demographics, as well, and are easier to quantify, but some
sort of behavioral segmentation is a boon.

Content

Okay, so we‘ve finally created a list of recipients we feel good

about. Now it‘s time to write that email! Content matters. We want
as good an open rate as possible, of course, because no one can
take action without first reading what we‘re offering. And what
shows up first? Well, your name and a subject line, of course.

Sender Name

This shouldn‘t really have to be said, but be sure you‘re putting an

appropriate name in the sender data. If you only setup a general
mailbox for your company, it‘s ill-advised to use this for marketing
purposes. A spam filter is much more likely to jump on an email
from General Information than Michael Smith. Be sure you have a
proper name in your sender data that will display in the inbox. And
of course, Ballsy McGee should never appear in the sender field
unless you have a very interesting birth certificate.

Subject Line

Subject line is a little tricker. There‘s no one-size-fits-all subject

line, as products and services being marketed will vary greatly, as
will recipient industries and titles. One perk of living in today‘s age,
though, is there‘s a study for nearly everything (including what
makes ‗legalese‘ so difficult, which as it turns out, is mostly due to
poor writing, not the actual document content). Someone
determined the highest open rates exist on emails with subject
lines of under 10 words. So, it‘s a consideration. The wording itself
is, of course, highly important. Spam filters aside, would you be
more likely to open an email with the subject line, ―Happy
Birthday, John‖ (if your name was John, of course), or ―OPEN
NOW TO BE RICHER THAN RICH FOR FREE!!!!!!‖ I think most
would pretty quickly determine the latter to be spam (unless you‘re
my grandma, who still thinks there‘s a Nigerian prince waiting for
her).

Email Body

It‘s impossible to get too specific here as there are so many

different types of emails used in marketing today. A transactional
email well-coded in html may have different rules that apply from
a text-only email going to a CEO looking for a sales meeting. It‘s
safe to say you shouldn‘t use spammy words, though, and
ActiveCampaign was nice enough to create a list for everyone to
reference. It‘s also good to consider that using images can be a little
hit or miss, as some email clients may automatically block these
with strict view policies, or they may not render properly on
machines that allow them, without well-crafted code. Links can
also set off alarm bells to servers. Company domains generally
don‘t do this, but be careful using links with shortened URLs, or
any third-party pages you may connect, as this may result in an
aggressive filter giving you the cold shoulder. The length of the
message can also play a role. Again with these studies, it‘s been
shown that you generally want to aim for 50–150 words. That‘s not
a lot. Many emails go on and on about features you may not even
care about, and with a novella staring you in the face from a
stranger, most recipients won‘t think twice about deleting and
potentially marking it as spam. Keep it to the point, and provide
value. Putting it altogether, here is a look at an email created by
Jack Epner (jackepner.com) that resulted in a number of sales
meetings with global SVPs at multi-billion dollar banking
institutions (and had a 100% deliverability rate with a 65% open
rate).
There are no spammy words, no links, no images, and was to direct
in offering a value proposition and call to action. There is no
question about why someone would want to act — the business is
growing at a steady rate, and also creates opportunities for cross-
selling. As far as ‗how to act,‘ it‘s clear the ask is for a meeting, and
concrete days and times are offered. There is some debate over
whether calendar links work better with a CTA. I started email
marketing in the ‗old school days,‘ when we didn‘t have virtual
calendars anyone could access with a link. The theory behind the
offer of two distinct days and times (in this case the same day, but
different times) is to give the prospect a choice, but by limiting it to
two is more likely to result in action (simpler set of options, and
psychologically, ‗pick one of two‘ is more likely to get a response).
Sending a calendar link can avoid back and forth, but you are then
trusting them to click and book a time. Asking for direct
engagement, instead, means they aren‘t just going to forget to
schedule something, or put it on the calendar and forget why it‘s
there. Feel free to try both and see which works best for your ICP.

Personalization

What good would Google‘s data warehouse and cyberstalking be if

we didn‘t add some personalization to our emails?! The more
commonplace it is for companies to collect as much customer data
as possible, the more people would hope this is actually used for
something worthwhile, like saving them the trouble of dealing with
irrelevant spam. Know your audience, present a clear reason you‘re
addressing them, and provide content that matters to THAT
person. At scale, this can be achieved through segmentation with
different messaging, personalization snippets, and even rarely-read
personal information shared on social media or through
interviews.

How many emails should you send per day (and

when)?

There are companies out there sending thousands of emails per

day. This is ill-advised, especially if new to email marketing. Being
recognized for sending so many emails per day is, you guessed it,
going to trigger servers. Now, there are cases in B2C where it
wouldn‘t make sense any other way, depending on the size of your
business and contact list, but in those cases, you‘re best using a
platform designed for this to manage the technical aspects of the
campaigns. In theory, no more than about 500 cold emails sent per
day should be okay, but don‘t forget ramping up. Your warmup
period will probably send only a few a day, you can then start
maybe using 10, then 25, 50, 100, and so on. Your sender
reputation is important, as it‘s very difficult to salvage once
destroyed. You should also be spacing the sending appropriately so
a server isn‘t overloaded, or more importantly, an incoming server
doesn‘t see a large number of emails coming from you at once
(almost guaranteed you‘ll be blocked then). Usually even a few
seconds of gap is enough. Many platforms will have a setting where
this can be adjusted. Sequences should also be properly spaced so
that one recipient isn‘t receiving too many emails in a short
amount of time (unless properly engaging). Beyond that, studies
have been done (oh, the studies), over the years, to identify optimal
times to send based on when cold emails are most-often read.
While this doesn‘t affect deliverability directly, it may be worth
keeping in mind to run as effective an email marketing campaign
as possible. Different studies have shown different results,
meaning there does not seem to be a consistent set of rules for
measurement, but in general, Monday through Friday are the best
days (not surprisingly) with Tuesday often declared a peak day,
and best hours can be seen through a study from Omnisend.
Technical Setup for Everyone

Servers

Your host may offer you a choice between a dedicated server, or

shared server. Most people will opt for shared servers to keep costs
down, but what are the real considerations here when it comes to
email marketing services? There are really only two cases where a
dedicated IP is going to be worth it, as these can be more costly. If
your company and its email accounts are established and trusted
enough there is no concern over reputation — that‘s one. Second
would be if you are sending such high volumes of email on a
regular basis, you just can‘t function within the confines of a
shared deal. A shared server does mean sender reputations
effectively get lumped together. If another business on your server
is getting blacklisted left and right, they can then lower your own
sender reputation (and that of anyone else‘s on the server).
However, most services offering this ‗diversify‘ the servers with
enough accounts that no one account should have too much of an
affect on another. It‘s good to be mindful of this, though, and you
may even want to ask how many accounts are on a shared server
before paying for the hosting.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI

Okay, there are a few acronyms you may have heard when it comes
to email setup, and those are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. All are
important pieces of effectively proving you are who you say you
are, so an incoming mail server can offer you more trust. These can
generally be setup with your host (if you have a private domain
with email, this would be your email host) through DNS records.
BIMI is the new gold standard, which involves having a logo of a
particular format, and a legal process in registering it.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

For this, you want to identify your sending IP. Check with your
email provider, but if you use an email client, you may be able to
check in the settings, as this is often entered when setting it up. In
the DNS settings of your email hosting, you‘re just going to add a
TXT record. It will begin with v=spf1, which declares the version of
SPF. Then you just list the IP addresses you want to be registered.
A record might look something like this: v=spf1 ip4:34.243.61.237
ip6:2a05:d018:e3:8c00:bb71:dea8:8b83:851e From there, you
just add any flags you want, a common one being the all flag. This
tells the server how to react if an IP other than the ones listed tries
to send. The options look like so:

 all (Fail) — Any server not included in the SPF record are
cannot send.

 ~all (Softfail) — If it‘s an unknown server, the email will send

but be marked.

 +all — This allows any server to send from your domain, and
is not generally advised.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)

DKIM acts as a signature to emails, and works through a pair of

keys given by your domain provider. There is a private key you‘ll
keep secret (hopefully better than that rumor about the girl from
6th grade), and a key the server uses. When they properly pair, the
email is deemed legitimate. To set this up, go to your DNS records
and simply add a new one. You‘ll see you can set the type, which
will be TXT. The key value will be what was provided to you by the
host.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting,

and Conformance)

DMARC, not to be confused with Markie Dee, is another DNS TXT

record to add.

It effectively allows you to suggest to a receiving server what to do

if an email fails its test. MxToolbox has a handy guide for setting
this up! At a glance, you are going to visit the DNS records with
your host again. This will once again be a new record as TXT. The
host value will likely be _DMARC with your domain appended.
The key value will start with the version, v=DMARC1, and then you
want to include a p flag with that. The flag can be set to none,
quarantine, or reject. It‘s recommended to start with none as this
will help identify any issues with SPF or DKIM, but you can set a
stricter policy from there. A rua flag will ensure you get reports of
any issues. The final value may look something like
this: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected]
BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)

BIMI is like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all having a romp on acid. It
leverages the protection from all three while adding an additional
layer of trust, and a visual component. Have you noticed that
sometimes in your inbox you‘ll see the logo of the sending company
on the left? That is about as trusted a sign of proof as you can find
that your email is coming from that business, and not an imposter.
To have that BIMI verification-level takes a bit of work and money,
along with the other security measures already added, but the
additional deliverability and brand marketing is invaluable. Like
the others, BIMI is really just a record that lives on the servers. For
it to properly work, though, you do need to have a logo in a
particular format, and a VMC (verified mark certificate), which will
requiring registering your logo as a trademark to establish. For
more detailed information about DNS values, logo specifications,
you can visit the BIMI Group‘s website.

Setting Up for Metrics

Tracking

You want metrics, or you‘re running a campaign blind. A/B testing

goes out the window, and you‘ll have no sense of ROI, among other
obstacles. So tracking your opens and clicks are a choice to be
made, but it‘s good to make informed decisions, so here is a little
more about how tracking works. Open tracking is generally done
by way of a single pixel embedded in each email. When the teeny
tiny itsy bitsy image is downloaded, the email is marked as read.
For 2023, it‘s worth keeping in mind MPP has become majorly
adopted amongst Apple users, and Gmail‘s prefetch is also in full
swing. If you‘re unfamiliar, Mail Privacy Protection is a feature on
Apple products that essentially downloads the content to Apple
servers first, then sends it on if you allow it. This means any
delivered email is marked as opened. Given the market share Apple
holds, it‘s safe to say open rates have become rather skewed, and so
are maybe not the top KPI anymore. It still may be better than
flying blind, however. Click tracking is another common email
marketing tool, to help you understand engagement with links in
your emails. If you are using links, you likely want to be using this
feature. While not impacted by MPP, it is even more intrusive than
the single pixel of open tracking, and this can affect deliverability.
It may be worth considering having an advanced analytics setup
that will help you determine source to various landing pages you
may be linking to, rather than asking your email server to do the
tracking for you.

Opened

This is what we‘re all hoping for, right? Every email to be opened
and read. Open rates have been a great KPI for email marketing for
many years, but this may begin to shift. With Google‘s prefetching,
and the introduction of Apple‘s MPP in late 2021, there have
already been ripples that now make open rates less reliable. You
want a strong number here, but keep in mind there may be a lot of
‗false opens‘ recorded from Gmail and Apple users.
Bounced

There are two types of bounces we‘ll look at, though neither is
great. ―Soft bounces‖ are less severe than ―hard bounces,‖ as the
names may indicate, but let‘s examine both to get a fuller
understanding of deliverability. Soft Bounces A soft bounce
never reaches the recipient for reasons such as a full inbox, the
incoming server being offline, or other matters that still allow for
resending. Many outgoing servers will make a note of this and
automatically retry a little later. You will likely get a permanent
failure to deliver notice after about 72 hours if it still hasn‘t been
able to get through. Hard Bounces Hard bounces are more
serious, and will directly affect your sender reputation. They can
also be caused by a poor reputation, so lack of attention to this can
create a vicious cycle where you watch your bounce rate steadily
increase as your reputation steadily decreases. Hard bounces can
result from a bad email address, or being blocked by the incoming
server. If you‘re seeing a lot of these, most definitely check on the
technical data you can usually find in a failure to deliver notice.
Even non-tech people can likely identify the ‗plain English reason‘
if you look. You may even get an email back saying something as
simple as ―address not found,‖ but if you get some technical
information, take a closer look.

Organization

You want to use some sort of platform, tool, CRM, automation,

integration, you name it, just have a way to track and organize data
and responses from your campaigns, or you will lose a lot of
potential revenue. There are a lot of tools on the market, so
consider what you really need to get from them. Remembering
what we‘ve learned in this email deliverability guide, you likely
want ways to segment, personalize, and track. Segmentation is a
big help, and CRMs will greatly aid in accomplishing this. Pipeline
is a very well-liked CRM, not to be confused with its competitor
that may be a little more known, Pipedrive. For a better
comparison of the two, you can view the G2 reviews. EngageBay is
a lesser-known platform that ranks higher in most categories
than HubSpot. Many platforms also automatically remove bounced
addresses, and unsubscribed contacts from any sequence, which
can be quite helpful to avoid plummeting sender reputations. If
you don‘t have an auto tool of some sort, it‘s important to really
stay on top of these, and ensure you‘re removing bad emails from
your prospect list. It‘s also good to stop contacting anyone who
makes this request, whether through an unsubscribe link or
otherwise, to keep in line with privacy and spam laws in the
associated region, and just avoid annoying someone who isn‘t
going to be buying anyway. If they mark a future email as spam, it
isn‘t going to help your case, either.

Bringing it all together

That should hopefully cover about everything you could need to

know about ensuring your email marketing efforts are going to
good use. We discussed technical considerations, how to craft a
proper email and subject line, and how to ensure your campaign
doesn‘t trigger spam filters moving forward. Remember that it‘s
about more than just getting your business in front of people, you
want to present it in the best light, and show that you have value to
add to someone‘s life. Keep it relevant, personal, and always offer
something of value. Best wishes with your 2023 campaigns!

________________________

I have been working for several years with small and medium
sized businesses, including global organizations, to grow through
effective email outreach. If you have any questions, feel free to
message me.