How to Increase Email Delivery Rate and Avoid Spam Traps

Before you worry about open rates and click through rates, consider your delivery rate.

I remember the frightful day that Pardot confronted me and told me that I was on their warning list. Our email bounce rate was too high and Pardot threatened to suspend my license if I didn’t try to improve it. Since then, to increase email deliverability has been one of my highest priorities.

This was an awful day in my career. I was hired for my crm and automation knowledge, yet I had no solution to the problem at hand and felt my control slipping through my finders. What I didn’t know was the lesson the situation taught me, the importance of keeping a good email send reputation. At that time I was so focused and getting emails out, I didn’t think about the method of delivery, but the method is important. For example, if I’m going to spend hours preparing a gift and decorating the box, I wouldn’t just casually ship it, I would bring it to a reliable carrier and pay a premium to track the package. The same logic applies to email delivery. After spending time on the copy, the header image,and the subject line, we need to get the email to the Inbox.

In this post, I’ll cover the following to help you increase your email deliverability:

What is an email send reputation
How to keep a good send reputation
What are spam traps
How do your emails avoid the spam folder

What is an email send reputation

An email send reputation is the relationship that your sending domain (@forexample.com) and IP address has with the receiving email provider (Outlook/Gmail). Usually, this number is out of 100. Sometimes this is also called your sender score. Think about it like this: your email send reputation is to your email delivery as your credit score is to your chance of getting good loans.

All of the following determine your send reputation:

Mailing to unknown users (delivery rate)
Mailing to spam traps (mentioned later)
Spam complaints
Subscriber engagement
Blacklists (hopefully you’re not on any)
Whitelists

How to keep a good send reputation

I solved my problem by running my database of emails through BriteVerify every year. I also ran all new emails through BriteVerify. BriteVerify pings the emails and breaks the emails into four categorizes: Valids, Accept All, Unknown, and Invalid. For $0.01 per email ping, BriteVerify wood tell me which of my emails were definitely safe to send to, which appeared fine but may be risky, which were definitely risks, and which were bad apples. Through a mathematical formula, I realized that I could email to all valids and about 1/3 of the accept alls and still protect a good email send reputation by and keeping a low bounce rate.By consistently running all emails through BriteVerify, my email sends always had above a 90% delivery rate and last I checked my email send reputation was a 97%.

I also checked my hard and softbounces. A hardbounce occurs if an email is invalid or if it was marked as spam. A softbounce occurs if a mailbox is temporarily unavailable or full. Pardot automatically suspends an email if it hardbounces once or softbounces five time. Marketo does not automatically suspend emails, rather you need to set up your own rules.

What are spam traps

Spam traps are previously existing or fake email addresses that email servers have turned into traps. If you send often to spam traps, because you bought your email lists, these traps can blacklist you and take away your delivery rights. By using validation systems like BriteVerify, you can catch these spam traps and dump them before your email sends.

How do your emails avoid the spam folder

In addition to making sure your emails get delivered, you can take the additional step to make sure that they hit the Inbox and not just the spam folder. Here are some additional tips that have helped me:

You can capitalize every first letter of your subject line or keep them all lowercase, but don’t capitalize all the letters, have random capitalization or use a string of exclamation marks
Email header images make the email appear more exciting, but make sure that you have more text than image on your page
If you opt to copy over text from a Word document rather than type it out, paste it into the html or use the strip formating function ( the cleaner code your emails has, the better
Avoid using spammy words like free.. in the body of the email.
A few colors is fine, but your email is not a painting. Too much color in an email looks suspicious