When it comes to email deliverability, there are no magic solutions to guarantee your team's emails will reach a prospect's inbox. However, there are steps and measures your team can take to greatly reduce the risk of an email being flagged as spam.
In this article, we will walk through some of the measures for your team, including:
The first step to positive email deliverability involves setting up the following email tools for your team:
- Ensure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup and passing email authentication.
- Best Practice Tip: Align all domains including SPF, DKIM, and tracking domain with your sending domain.
- Setup a Custom Tracking domain. Custom tracking domains ensure your links in the body of emails are wrapped with your tracking domain. This avoids 3rd party links, which can cause spam filters to flag your email.
- Utilize Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your sending reputation. While this is data is specific to Gmail, it gives you a good idea how your overall domain/IP reputation is doing.
- Things to Note: Google requires a certain threshold of volume from a domain/IP before they populate results, so you may not see any data.
Your Salesloft Team Email Settings provide another tool to maintain reliable email deliverability status. Here are some of the Salesloft settings we recommend:
- Keep email delay at least 60 seconds. This helps avoid mailbox providers from seeing your emails as automated bulk sends.
- Salesloft recommends setting the daily send limit to 250/day, however, larger teams may want to reduce that limit further.
- Set the default Domain Send limit to 5 emails per day. This will help avoid reps from sending too many emails to the same domain within a given period, which can cause spam and reputation flags for their email domain.
- Enable Click-Tracking in templates and signatures.
- Things to Note: Be sure to enable click tracking in templates and your signature, otherwise links will not be wrapped with your custom tracking domain.
- Use opt-out links . This prompts users to hit unsubscribe rather than mark your email as spam, which hurts your reputation and deliverability.
- Personalization is key – Salesloft recommends personalizing 20-25% of your email to help boost user engagement and avoid deliverability issues. You can keep an eye on your level of personalization using the Personalization Panel in Salesloft Analytics.
- Things to Note: Using very little or zero personalization can cause mailbox providers to flag your email traffic and potentially lock users out of their email account for spamming behavior.
Here are the general rules of thumb for email deliverability best practices you can share with your team:
- Maintain consistent volume of sends. Sudden spikes in volume are red flags to spam filters and can cause deliverability issues.
- Ensure you are sending to engaged and verified users. Even if you are only sending 100 emails/day, if the majority of those recipients mark your email as spam or result in a bounced email they can hurt your email reputation and deliverability.
- Purchased data poses a very high risk to deliverability, as they are not opt in users.
- List cleanse tools can help minimize risk of invalid addresses and spam traps, but this does not address the risk of user complaints (being marked as spam by a recipient).
- Use your marketing data so you are targeting people who are more likely to engage positively with your emails (open, click, reply, move to folder).
- Make sure there are no broken images or links within your email content.
- Always send personalized and relevant content to boost user engagement.
- Keep total email size under 100KB and attachments under 10MB. Attachments and oversized emails are common flags to spam filters, especially B2B domains.
- Keep bounce and complaint rates low.
- Under 5% bounce rate is acceptable
- Under 0.1% complaint rate is acceptable
- Immediately remove any complaints, verbal opt-outs, and bounced email addresses from future sends and Cadences. You can update their Contact Restriction to Restrict Emails to that Person.
- Things to Note: If a Person opts-out of an email using an opt-out link in Salesloft, they will automatically be added to the Do Not Contact list and removed from Cadences.
Email providers have instituted restrictions on high-volume, bulk email sending to their domains.
To learn more about how to comply with these providers, check out the Bulk Email Sender Requirements article.
