📩 Troubleshooting Deliverability: How to Fix It

Struggling with poor deliverability? You’re not alone. Since the 2024 Google and Yahoo updates, inbox placement has become more challenging. Many senders are struggling—but the good news is, there are proven ways to improve your results.

📌 Understanding the Key Issue

Just because an email is successfully delivered to a recipient’s mail server doesn’t guarantee it will land in their inbox. Several factors influence whether your email makes it through or gets caught in spam filters. These include:

• Hard and Soft Bounces: High bounce rates, especially from invalid email addresses, harm your sender reputation and can push you to the spam folder.

• Spam Filters: Keywords, content structure, and sending patterns trigger spam filters, even if your content is legitimate.

• Sender Reputation: Inbox providers monitor your sending behavior, and frequent spikes in volume or poor engagement can result in filtering.

• Engagement Rates: Low open and click rates signal to inbox providers that your emails may not be wanted, decreasing deliverability over time.

🚀 How to Fix It

✅ Engage with active subscribers only – Ensure your list contains only engaged recipients to help maintain a good sender reputation and avoid bouncing. Remove inactive addresses from your list every 30 days. Regularly clean your list and make sure to only send to engaged recipients from the past 3-6 months.

How to? 

• List cleaning: First suppress invalid email addresses by creating a segment of all hard bounced email addresses and then suppressing them. Next, create a segment of soft bounced email addresses which you don’t need to remove addresses that are soft-bounced immediately. Instead, make a protocol for cleaning them. Create a segment for people who report you as spam and exclude them from sending or suppress them?

• How to make sure you only sending to engaged recipients: Create three segments and exclude/delete/suppress those:

  • Never Active Segment – Suppress or delete these contacts. Use the following criteria to filter them:

    • Marketing Status: Person can receive email marketing

    • Engagement: Person has received at least 5 emails in the last 180 days

    • Open Activity: Person has opened 0 emails over all time

    • Click Activity: Person has clicked 0 emails over all time

    • Purchase Activity: Person has placed 0 orders over all time

  • Unengaged, Never Purchased – Send a "sunset" email. If no action is taken, suppress or delete them. Use the following criteria to filter them:

    • Open Activity: Person has opened at least once emails over all time BUT no email opened in the last 180 days

    • Click Activity: Person has clicked at least once emails over all time

    • Purchase Activity: Person has placed 0 orders over all time

  • Unengaged, Purchased (last 180 days) – Send a re-engagement campaign (could include direct mail). If no response, send a final "sunset" email. If still no action, delete or suppress these contacts. Use the following criteria to filter them:

    • Open Activity: Person has opened at least once emails over all time BUT no email opened in the last 180 days

    • Click Activity: Person has clicked at least once emails over all time

    • Purchase Activity: Person has placed order at least once over all time

✅ Send consistently – Establish a predictable sending schedule by mapping out your monthly email campaigns, segments, and their respective sizes in a calendar to avoid sudden spikes in email volume.

How to? Plan your monthly campaigns in advance by identifying the content, target segments, and the expected size of each segment. Use a calendar to track this information and monitor engagement. Ensure that as your email volume increases, it is done gradually and in line with the segment sizes to avoid overwhelming recipients and triggering spam filters. This approach ensures a steady send rate, improving deliverability and maintaining engagement.

✅ Optimize email content – Balance your text and images, avoid using trigger words like “free” or “urgent,” and keep your CTAs clear and actionable to help with deliverability.

How to?  Aim for a 60-70% text-to-image ratio to prevent being flagged by spam filters. Remove high-risk words and phrases that might trigger spam filters, and use direct, clear CTAs to guide your readers.

✅ Authenticate your emails – Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC ensures inbox providers recognize you as a trusted sender, improving deliverability and protecting your brand from spoofing.

How to? 

• Add SPF and DKIM records to your domain’s DNS settings to verify sending servers.

• Implement a DMARC policy (p=none, p=quarantine, or p=reject) to control how unauthenticated emails are handled.

• Use DMARC reporting tools like EasyDMARC or Dmarcian to monitor unauthorized senders and adjust your settings for maximum security.

✅ Warm up sending infrastructure – If you’re using a new domain or haven’t sent emails in a while, gradually increase your email volume to build a positive sender reputation.

How to? Start with 5,000 emails per day, sending to highly engaged segments. Gradually increase volume by 10-20% every few days while monitoring deliverability rates. Aim for at least a 97% deliverability rate before scaling up to 10,000 emails per day or more. Keeping a consistent sending schedule helps maintain inbox placement and avoid triggering spam filters.

Got questions? Hit reply and let us know! Our inbox is buzzing, but we’ll get back to you ASAP.

Written by Judith Prugger

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