This guide will help you understand what causes emails to land in spam folders, how your sender reputation is affected, and what steps you can take to improve it.
Email deliverability could be characterized as the email’s ability to avoid spam filters and reach the Inbox folder.
It is determined by three main aspects:
- Sender reputation: it’s assigned to your sender domain/IP address and scored by positive interactions with your emails (opens, clicks, replies) and the level of spam complaints.
- Email content: emails without spam words and relevant content will more likely reach the Inbox.
- Email sending system: domains with complete DNS records and warmed-up email accounts have higher deliverability scores.
High deliverability means:
- More of your emails are seen and more get engagement;
- You get more replies, close more deals, and grow your sales.
Low deliverability means:
- More of your emails land in spam;
- Your emails don't get opened and replies;
- Your time and resources are wasted and selling opportunities are lost.
What helps to avoid spam filters
Email providers use metrics like domain health, open and reply rates, sending practices, recipient engagement, etc., to score your sender's reputation.
The higher your sender reputation, the higher the deliverability score is, and the more your emails will land in the inbox and bring more positive replies.
With a poor sender reputation, email providers are likely to block or send your emails to the spam folder.
Now, let’s overview what you need to build up and maintain a strong sender reputation long-term.
Healthy sender domains and email accounts
As a foundation, you need a solid outreach system – powered by a healthy domain with complete DNS settings and warmed-up email accounts.
DNS health is a common factor used by email service providers to assign a sender reputation.
Make sure to set up all DNS records, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, that are used for email authentication.
Emails that fail authentication checks may be blocked by spam filters.
Having a strong technical framework will improve your deliverability and help comply with sender requirements that providers enforce.
Read a comprehensive guide on how to prepare your outreach setup →
A clear sender identity
Having a clear sender identity helps you build trust with your recipients & with email providers.
This also increases your chances of getting replies and prevents spam complaints.
Use your full name + brand name in the “From” name field in your email account settings.
The domain in the “From email” field is recommended to match the domain you are sending from.
Avoid using aliases in “From email” in cold email campaigns. If an Email Service Provider (ESP) notices an email sent from an alias, it might trigger a warning, because it looks like you're hiding your real identity.
Tracking disabled unless necessary
Tracking helps monitor statistics but also can harm deliverability and reputation. Don’t use open/link tracking just for the sake of numbers.
Presence of tracking can slightly increase the chance of your emails being sent to spam.
If your sequences use conditional triggers and rely on tracking options, add a custom tracking domain to minimize the risks.
Set up a custom tracking domain for your email account
Reply rate as a key engagement metric
A high reply rate, ideally between 5-10%, not only improves your conversions but also serves as a positive signal for your sender reputation.
This indicates to Email Service Providers (ESPs) that your emails are wanted.
Read tips and strategies on how to get more replies →
Reasonable sending volume
Don't overestimate your daily sending capacity, even after warming up your account.
Send no more than 50-100 emails per day from one email account - sending more than that can be seen as spamming activity by email providers.
If you want to increase your daily sending limit, distribute it across multiple email accounts with Mailbox rotation.
Note: To increase sending volume, Snov.io allows you to connect multiple email accounts with mailbox rotation.
If you don’t get many opens and replies, don’t try to compensate for it by emailing more recipients. Instead, focus on improving your email content and lead targeting.
Targeted recipients
Focus on leads who are likely interested in what you're offering and might become your customers.
When recipients open, share, or reply to your emails, it's good for your reputation. But, emailing a lot of leads who just ignore or delete your emails can hurt your reputation.
Figure out who your perfect customer is, create your ICPs and use that info when finding leads with Snov.io tools.
Focus on one or two decision-makers in the company. If you email more than 10 people from the same company – it might be considered as spam and affect your reputation.
Read a guide on how to create your customer profile →
Value-driven and personalized emails
By personalizing your subject lines and email content using prospect fields, you'll demonstrate to spam filters that you're sending targeted campaigns rather than generic spam emails.
In the Snov.io email editor, you can insert variables that will be populated with data from prospect fields when the email is sent.
The emails you send should be relevant to your audience and convey the value you offer.
Your emails should solve a pain point, and your audience should have the option to opt-out if they don’t want to receive them.
Persona prevents spam complaints and boosts your sender reputation.
Read guide on how to powerful emails that are focused on your lead →
Text-only emails
Spam filters check every component in the email, such as the email text, subject line, links, attachments, HTML code, and the number of images.
Avoid adding multiple images and links
If you want to show something or make your email more interesting, try not to include more than one picture, graphic, or video. This will help with your email loading speed.
Overall, if your email seems normal in formatting, grammar, and structure, it will help with the email score.
Don’t add heavy attachments
Spam filters may block your email if they consider the attached file dangerous or if it doesn't meet file size or type restrictions.
To send a specific file to your recipient, consider using services like Google Drive or Dropbox and insert a link to download the file.
Low bounce rates
Handling bounced emails timely is important to maintain a good sender reputation.
Snov.io automatically detects bounced emails and stops sending further emails in the sequence for that recipient to avoid getting more bounces.
Snov.io’s Email drip campaigns also have a “reputation protection” feature that automatically pauses campaigns that reach the dangerous 15% bounce rate threshold.
You should aim to have a bounce rate below 5%.
Lower your bounce rate using this guide →
How to improve your sender reputation and deliverability
Here are the steps you should take to troubleshoot your email sending framework:
Step 1: Check domain DNS health, email placement and email content
First, you can check if there are any issues with your account that may affect your deliverability.
Using Snov.io’s Deliverability checker, you can test your domain’s DNS health and email placement before actually sending campaigns.
You'll get a deliverability score based on where your test emails are landing.
It’ll help you identify the issues domain settings and email content so you can take necessary steps to fix them.
Step 2: Check your sender reputation
Positive sender reputation is crucial for high deliverability.
Check the reputation of your domain name and sender IP address using tools like Sender Score, Microsoft SNDS, Google Postmaster.
If you see any negative reputation scores, the best way to restore it is use Snov.io’s Email warm-up.
Step 3: Warm-up your email accounts
Email warm-up helps you restore and build a stronger sender reputation and boost your deliverability through automated positive interactions.
If you suddenly start sending hundreds of emails per day without a proper warm-up period, you are more likely to get blocked by spam filters.
With a progressive warm-up strategy, it helps in gradually building up your email account’s capacity to send more emails while improving deliverability score.
You can set the daily warm-up goal that corresponds to the desired sending volumes of your real campaigns.
Warm up accounts the right way:
Read tips on how to use Email Warm-up feature for best effect
If you have a question that we haven't covered, feel free to reach out to our Customer Care team. You can contact us at help@snov.io or through live chat. We're here to assist you!
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