The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability: Make Sure Your Emails Hit the Inbox

You spend hours writing the perfect email, building a powerful funnel, and hitting 'send'. But what happens if your emails end up in your contacts' spam folder instead of their inbox? All your hard work was for nothing.

This is where email deliverability comes into play. The deliverability of an email is the extent to which your messages actually reach the primary inbox of your recipients, without being filtered or blocked by spam filters.

The deliverability of your email campaigns is the engine of your marketing operations. It translates directly into your overall open rates (inbox placement rate). But how do you ensure the algorithms of email providers (like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo) actually trust you?

In this article, we'll discuss exactly what factors affect your deliverability and, more importantly, the exact practices you need to implement to keep your metrics high.

From a technical standpoint, we always advise 3 golden rules:

Let's break down these and other best practices step by step.

Many receiving servers constantly scan and filter incoming emails using heavy anti-spam algorithms.

To prevent your email from immediately being marked as spam, it is mandatory to use an email address with a professional domain name (for example, name@yourcompany.com) instead of a free address like @gmail.com. Additionally, you must authenticate this domain in our systems (for example, using DKIM and CNAME records).

By doing this, you not only gain credibility with your readers, but you also technically prove to receiving servers that you are a legitimate sender with a strong domain reputation. Need help authenticating your domain? Check out our extensive documentation here or contact our support team.

Having a clean database is essential. Sending emails to non-existent recipients drastically lowers your deliverability and damages your domain's reputation.

Email providers analyze your campaign data and will brutally punish you if your emails are consistently un-opened or undelivered. There are two types of email addresses you need to remove immediately:

These are addresses that don't work (anymore). Think of:

Using the filters in your contact list, you can identify these contacts (which receive the "Bounced" status) with the click of a button and remove them instantly. Do this regularly.

Inactive contacts cause your open rates to plummet, which directly ruins your sender reputation. Why do people become inactive?

You can manage these inactive contacts by grouping them using TAGs. From that point, you have two options: start a specific re-engagement campaign to wake them up, or choose to delete them permanently. Don't be afraid to say goodbye to people who never read what you send anyway!

Email is a massive tool for staying top-of-mind with your audience, but you must handle it professionally.

Know who your audience is. Targeted emailing means sending emails to people who are actually interested in exactly that specific content or offer.

If you blast all your email campaigns to your entire list hoping someone bites (the so-called spray-and-pray method), you will get terrible open rates. Not every contact is interested in the same things. If you keep sending irrelevant emails, they will stop opening them or, even worse, mark you as spam. Therefore, use TAGs to segment your list based on their preferences and behavior.

IMPORTANT: Never send emails to people who haven't given you permission to do so. Purchased lists or importing contacts without opt-in consent will instantly ruin your metrics and are strictly forbidden on our platform.

The subject line is the storefront of your message. It’s the first impression and determines whether someone clicks or not. Some ground rules:

Your subject should convey value immediately. To stand out even more, you can include personalization elements (like the recipient's first name) in the subject line to boost the open rate.

Spam detection by artificial intelligence has evolved massively. It no longer just looks for a single "forbidden" word; it analyzes:

Avoid typical, loud spam terms (like Free Money, Buy Now!, etc.) because they will cause algorithms to quickly route your message to the 'Promotions' or 'Spam' folders.

This might sound painful if you're trying to grow your list, but it is a crucial concept to understand. If a user no longer wants to receive your emails, they have 3 options:

That last option is catastrophic. Too many spam complaints can land you completely on a blacklist, meaning even your most loyal buyers will never receive your emails again. An unsubscribe is therefore a friendly, harmless action. Make sure the "Unsubscribe" link or button is clearly visible and directly accessible in all your emails.

When it comes to deliverability, there is no "hack" or magic solution. Your success depends entirely on your operational habits and discipline. Be rigorous with your data, respect the core rules we discussed above, and remember that a clean, active list will always beat a massive list full of ghost addresses.