How do you improve email deliverability by adding live text, sending printables, and focusing on engaged users?

Key findings

• User Engagement Focus: Prioritizing emails to highly engaged recipients (those who open and click) is crucial for demonstrating positive sender behavior to mailbox providers. This builds a foundation of trust that benefits overall deliverability.
• Content Optimization: Including more live text in emails, as opposed to relying heavily on images, can improve how emails are perceived by spam filters and make them more accessible to users. Additionally, providing content that recipients genuinely value, such as printables, significantly boosts engagement.
• Gradual Ramp-Up: When recovering from deliverability issues or warming up a new IP or domain, a slow and steady increase in sending volume, focusing on the most engaged users first, is vital. This helps mailbox providers gradually trust your sending patterns.
• Consistent Volume: Maintaining a steady email sending volume once deliverability is restored helps stabilize sender reputation and prevents sudden flags by ISPs.

Key considerations

• Content Relevance: Ensure the content you send is always relevant and desired by your subscribers. This directly translates to higher engagement and lower complaint rates, which are critical for good deliverability.
• List Segmentation: Segmenting your email list based on engagement levels allows for targeted sending, protecting your sender reputation when dealing with less engaged or inactive subscribers. Learn more about how email segmentation can improve deliverability in our guide.
• Email Format: While visually appealing emails are important, consider the balance of images versus live text. Emails with a higher proportion of live text can be more robust against spam filters. Our article on plain text versions offers further insights. Read about how a plain text version can affect deliverability.
• Monitoring Engagement: Regularly monitor your open rates, click-through rates, and complaint rates. These metrics are direct indicators of your audience's engagement and your sender health. For a comprehensive overview, see this guide from Twilio on email deliverability best practices.

Key opinions

• Back to Basics: Many marketers find that reverting to fundamental email marketing principles, such as sending desired content and focusing on engaged users, is often the most effective path to deliverability recovery.
• Value-Driven Content: Providing genuine value, like exclusive printables for families, significantly boosts recipient engagement and positive interactions, which are signals for good sender reputation.
• Slow and Steady Growth: A cautious approach to ramping up email volume, especially after reputation issues, is critical. Marketers recommend starting with the most engaged segments and gradually expanding.
• Consistency is Key: Once deliverability improves, maintaining consistent sending practices and volume reinforces a positive sender profile.

Key considerations

• Audience Segmentation: Segmenting your audience to target the most engaged users first is a common strategy among marketers to rebuild sender reputation and improve inbox placement. This is especially vital when re-engaging inactive email subscribers. Our guide explains how to manage deliverability when re-engaging inactive email subscribers.
• Content Readability: Marketers recognize that email content with a good balance of live text and images tends to perform better and is less likely to trigger spam filters. This enhances the overall user experience.
• Deliverability as a Marathon: Achieving and maintaining good deliverability is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort and attention to sender reputation, not just a one-time fix.
• Measuring Success: Continuously track your email performance metrics. As Mailgun points out, understanding these numbers helps identify areas for improvement and confirms the effectiveness of your strategies.

Key opinions

• Unsolvable is a Myth: Experts believe that every deliverability issue can be resolved with the right amount of time and dedicated effort, reinforcing the idea that persistence pays off.
• Engagement is Paramount: High user engagement is consistently cited as the single most important factor for good inbox placement. ISPs prioritize senders whose emails are actively opened and clicked by recipients.
• Content Quality Matters: Beyond just text, the perceived value and relevance of the content itself significantly influence user interaction and, by extension, deliverability.
• Domain Reputation: Experts highlight that strong domain reputation, built on consistent positive sending behavior, is critical for email success. This includes proper authentication and avoiding spam traps.

Key considerations

• Technical Foundations: Ensure all email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly implemented. These are non-negotiable for proving your legitimacy to mailbox providers. For more details, refer to our guide on DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.
• List Hygiene: Regularly clean your email lists to remove unengaged subscribers, hard bounces, and known spam traps. This proactive approach prevents negative signals that can harm your sender reputation. If you have a large, unengaged list, explore our strategies for improvement in this article.
• IP and Domain Warm-up: When using new IPs or domains, a disciplined warm-up process is crucial to establish trust with ISPs. Starting small and gradually increasing volume is advised.
• Feedback Loops: Sign up for ISP feedback loops to quickly identify and remove users who mark your emails as spam. This proactive measure prevents further damage to your sender reputation. Neil Patel discusses priming your IP for success, which includes these types of practices, in his guide to improving email deliverability.

Key findings

• Engagement Metrics: Documentation often correlates high open rates, click-through rates, and low complaint rates with improved sender reputation and deliverability.
• Content Quality: Mailbox providers' guidelines frequently recommend diverse and engaging content, including a healthy text-to-image ratio, to ensure emails are not flagged as promotional or spammy.
• Authentication Standards: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are fundamental technical requirements for proving sender legitimacy and preventing spoofing, as outlined in official email specifications.
• List Management: Regular list hygiene, removing inactive users and bounces, is a widely documented best practice to maintain a healthy sending list and avoid spam traps.

Key considerations

• Sender Reputation: Official guidelines from ISPs (Internet Service Providers) detail how sender reputation is calculated, largely based on user interactions. Maintaining a positive reputation is key to avoiding blacklists and blocklists. Our guide covers what happens when your domain is on an email blacklist.
• HTML vs. Plain Text: While HTML emails are common, ensuring a robust plain text alternative is crucial for accessibility and deliverability, as some clients or spam filters may prefer it. The RFC 5322 standard provides guidance on email formatting. You can read more about what RFC 5322 says versus what actually works.
• User Preferences: Allowing users to control their subscription preferences (e.g., frequency, content types) as per documented best practices improves satisfaction and reduces spam complaints.
• Content Filtering: Mailbox provider documentation often details content filtering rules, advising against overly promotional language, excessive images, or suspicious links to avoid triggering spam filters. Klaviyo emphasizes that a sending schedule based on customer engagement is key to achieving strong open rates and maintaining a positive relationship with your subscribers, as detailed in their help center documentation.