Deliverability for newsletters and email marketing

Do you want more of your sends to actually reach the recipient's inbox? Here you get a practical guide to deliverability for newsletters and email marketing, with concrete advice on domain settings, subject lines, list hygiene, content and measurement.

If you work with newsletters for businesses, deliverability is one of the most important factors for your sends to get results. Even strong content, good offers and attractive design lose value if the emails end up in the spam folder or are blocked before they reach the recipient.

If you want to work in a more structured way with strategy, content and automation, you can also read our guide to email marketing. This page focuses specifically on how to improve deliverability in newsletters and email sends.

What is deliverability?
Why is deliverability important?
How to secure your deliverability – checklist
Test and measure deliverability
Frequently asked questions

What is deliverability?

Deliverability describes how large a share of your email messages actually reaches the recipient's inbox instead of ending up in spam, being blocked or bouncing back. For you who work with newsletters and email sends, it is a basic requirement for campaigns, reminders and automated flows to work as intended.

Deliverability is affected by several things at the same time: your domain's reputation, technical authentication settings, how recipients interact with your emails, what your mailing lists look like and how the content itself is designed.

Why is deliverability important?

When deliverability is low, you lose impact across all of your email marketing. Open rates, clicks and conversions get worse, and you risk misreading the campaign results, since the real problem is that the sends do not get through.

This applies to recurring newsletters, larger campaign sends and automated flows alike. That is why deliverability is not just a technical question, but a central part of all your work with email marketing.

It depends on your domain reputation

Your domain reputation determines how likely it is that your email messages reach the recipient's inbox. A good reputation increases the chances that your emails are delivered correctly, while a weaker reputation can lead to the emails being blocked or ending up in the spam folder.

Email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook use their own algorithms to assess this. The reputation is affected by, among other things, how recipients open, click, ignore or report your emails as spam.

When an email server receives a message from your domain, it assesses, among other things:

• the sender domain and return-path domain
• the DKIM signing domain
• authentication through SPF, DKIM and DMARC
• links, images and code structure in the send
• subject line, content and recipient engagement

Shared responsibility between platform and sender

A newsletter tool can help you a lot, but it does not solve everything. The provider needs a stable infrastructure and good routines, but you as a sender also need to work the right way with your domain, your content, your lists and your frequency.

That is why deliverability is always an interplay between technology and ways of working. If you want to create and send newsletters with good results, both parts need to work.

How to secure your deliverability – checklist

Which domain settings you have, how you handle consent and mailing lists, and how you design your sends directly affect deliverability. Here is a practical checklist for improving your newsletters and campaign sends.

Set up domain settings for a trustworthy sender identity
Reduce the risk of your sends being classified as spam
Avoid complaints about your send
Write a good subject line
Make sure the HTML code is tidy
Balance text and images
Clean hard and soft bounces from your mailing list
Ask to be added to the recipient's address book
Avoid volume limits

Set up domain settings for a trustworthy sender identity

SPF, DKIM, DMARC and a bounce domain are central to showing that your sends are legitimate. They help receiving email servers understand that the email really comes from your organization and not from an unauthorized sender.

SPF and DKIM

When you activate SPF and DKIM, you confirm that sends with you as the sender may be sent through the platform you use. That reduces the risk of spoofing and improves the chances that your newsletters are delivered correctly.

Bounce domain

When you set up a bounce domain, you make sure that the recipient address for bounces and the sender address match better. That strengthens the credibility of your send with some receiving servers.

DMARC

DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM and works as an extra layer of security. With DMARC, you show that sends with your domain as the sender are legitimate and that receiving servers can trust your emails more.

If you use Paloma, you will find instructions here in our Help Center (in Swedish)!

Reduce the risk of your sends being classified as spam

Spam filters use many different signals. If your email is seen as suspicious, it can be because of the content, the subject line, the sender, the IP address or how recipients have reacted to your sends before.

Common causes are:

• exaggerated or spam-like wording
• an unclear or incorrect sender
• suspicious attachments or links
• blacklisting or a poor domain reputation
• weak personalization and overly generic content

To reduce the risk, you need to work seriously with text, technology and consent. Feel free to use personalization and segmentation where it is relevant. That makes your sends more targeted and less likely to be seen as spam.

Avoid complaints about your send

The complaint rate, that is, how many people mark your email as spam, is an important signal for your deliverability. If recipients find the content irrelevant or the frequency too high, you risk both complaints and a worse domain reputation.

Only send relevant information

What the recipient sees as uninteresting is often seen as spam. That is why the content needs to be relevant, requested and adapted to the recipient's expectations. Segmentation helps a lot here.

Send at the right frequency

There is no perfect frequency for everyone. If you send too often, you can cause irritation. If you send too rarely, the recipient may forget why they subscribe. Try different frequencies, follow unsubscribes and spam reports and adjust accordingly.

Write a good subject line

The subject line affects both the open rate and deliverability. Avoid special characters, excessive exclamation marks, capital letters and wording that looks like clickbait. Clear and serious subject lines usually work better.

If you want to improve that part further, you can read our guide on writing a good subject line for newsletters.

Make sure the HTML code is tidy

When you copy text from Word or web pages, invisible code often comes along and can make the send messier than it looks. Remove unnecessary tags and make sure the code is well structured. A clean HTML structure is better both for deliverability and for rendering in different inboxes.

Balance text and images

If your send consists almost entirely of images or has too little text, it can be seen as suspicious. Make sure there is a natural balance between text and images in your newsletter.

If you want to create attractive sends without overdoing the design, you can also use newsletter templates.

Clean hard and soft bounces from your mailing list

A dirty list with many invalid addresses affects both your deliverability and your reputation. Hard bounces mean that the address cannot be delivered to at all and should be removed as quickly as possible. Soft bounces are more temporary, but still need to be followed up.

Paloma's newsletter tool can help you handle hard bounces automatically.

Ask to be added to the recipient's address book

The safest way to get through is to be in the recipient's address book. That is why it is wise to ask the recipient to add your sender address to their address book already at sign-up or in a welcome email.

Avoid volume limits

Volume limits mean that receiving servers limit how many emails may be received from a certain sender domain or IP during a certain time. If you send large volumes in a short time, it can affect both deliverability and domain reputation.

To reduce the risk, you can:

• send in smaller and more even intervals
• clean the list regularly
• make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place
• work long term on a good domain reputation
• get help before large sends if needed

Test and measure deliverability – strengthen your reputation as a sender

A good reputation as a sender is built over time. That is why you need to follow the development, not just look at individual sends. Measurement helps you discover problems early and improve upcoming campaigns.

Check whether you are blacklisted
Check your own reputation through Sender Score
Check your domain reputation with different email providers
Measure deliverability – keep track of your key metrics
Avoid working with unreliable partners
Look at trend data for B2B

Check whether you are blacklisted

There are tools where you can check whether your IP address or domain is on known blocklists. Some examples are:

spamhaus.org
spamcop.net
trendmicro.com

Check your own reputation through Sender Score

You can also check your sender quality through senderscore.org. That gives you a better idea of how your domain or IP is perceived as a sender.

Check your domain reputation with different email providers

Different providers have their own postmaster tools. There you can see how your domain performs with, for example, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud.

Google Postmaster Tools
Google Postmaster Tools

Yahoo Postmaster
Yahoo Postmaster

Apple iCloud Postmaster
Apple iCloud Postmaster

Measure deliverability – keep track of your key metrics

Follow the delivery rate, bounces, spam complaints, unsubscribes, opens and clicks. Drastic changes in any of these key metrics can indicate that you need to adjust your lists, content or technology.

In Paloma, you can follow statistics for:

• overview
• delivery
• opened
• clicks
• unsubscribes and spam reports

See also the guide How do I interpret my email send statistics.

Avoid working with unreliable partners

If you link to domains with a poor reputation or use partners with weak sender quality, it can affect your deliverability negatively. That is why it is wise to review partner domains and providers before you connect them to your sends.

Look at trend data for B2B

In B2B, email filters can work differently than in a private inbox. That is why it is wise to look at the development over time instead of drawing conclusions from a single send. When you see clear negative trends, it is often a sign that the list needs to be reviewed.

Frequently asked questions about deliverability

What does deliverability mean in email?

Deliverability describes how large a share of your email sends actually reaches the recipient's inbox. If deliverability is low, the emails can instead end up in the spam folder or be blocked by the recipient's email server.

Why do newsletters end up in the spam folder?

Newsletters can end up in the spam folder if the domain lacks correct authentication, if many recipients mark the sends as spam, if the list contains invalid addresses or if the content is seen as suspicious.

How do you improve deliverability for newsletters?

You improve deliverability by using SPF, DKIM and DMARC, keeping your mailing list clean, sending relevant content, writing clear subject lines and using a serious newsletter tool.

What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

They are technical authentication methods that show that the email really is sent from your domain. Receiving servers use them to decide whether your send is legitimate.

How do you measure deliverability?

Deliverability is measured through, among other things, the delivery rate, bounce rate, spam complaints, open rate and unsubscribes. Together, they give a clearer picture of how well your sends work.