This question keeps a LOT of marketers up at night.
Wondering how they can avoid their emails from landing in Junk or Spam folders.
And, unfortunately there's no easy answer to it.
Plus, every single email sender in the world is affected by it when it comes to using emails for Marketing.
In fact, email deliverability is so complicated that an entire sub-industry exists of "Email Deliverability" experts that help solve this challenge for people.
Email deliverability is one of those things that is part art and part science.
And, in our experience troubleshooting 1,000's of email deliverability issues, the vast majority of the time the issue is related to something in your environment and completely outside of our control (and High-Level's).
So, this FAQ article runs through some of the core things you need to look out for to maintain high deliverability.
Of course, if there's something found in Growably / High-Level explicitly causing an email deliverability issue, we'll obviously investigate & escalate if necessary.
However outside of that email deliverability is your responsibility and an area that we strongly encourage you to skill yourself up in.
It's not only helpful for your own business, it's also very helpful for troubleshooting your clients deliverability issues.
DNS RECORDS
To help you have the best chance of high deliverability, the very first thing to do is double-confirm that your SPF and DKIM records are setup correctly and that you have a DMARC policy setup.
You can use tools like MX Toolbox or similar for this.
For DMARC policies, we recommend you set your policy to reject, however make sure you know what the ramifications of that are before you do it.
(luckily you're in the MSP / Tech industry so either you or someone on your team will already know all about SPF, DKIM & DMARC as you should be managing all of these for all of your clients)
MAIL TESTING SERVICES
If your DNS records are all definitely correct, then our next recommendation is to use a tool like Mail Genius or Mail Tester to test the exact emails you are sending for other common causes they might be landing in Junk / Spam folders.
This video runs through a quick overview of how to use those tools:
We recommend you aim to get to a minimum of 90% and ideally target for above 95%
(although that's not always possible and in all my years of email marketing and personally sending many millions of emails, I've never seen someone reach 100% on their marketing emails)
BEST PRACTISES
After that's all done, here's some of the highest ROI things you can do to help get high deliverability:
- Send from a human (not info@ etc). Use a real name and a real email. None of this no-reply@ garbage.
- If you are sending from a brand new domain or sub-domain, you should consider performing some email domain warmup before sending any emails to your real list. Mailgun has a great overview here & you can find a bunch of tools here to help. Keep in mind that sub-domains are treated separately to your primary domain so if you've chosen a sub-domain to send through with Growably, platforms like Microsoft & Google will see this as a brand new domain.
- Make sure Unsubscribe is managed properly. Here's one way to handle it in Growably.
- Very few or ideally no images in emails (we've tested this repeatedly, even with a simple image like a profile photo in the email signature and plain text emails win 100% of the time)
- As little HTML as possible (as mentioned, plain text typically delivers best)
- The more you can get people to reply to your emails, the better for the algorithms (especially on the first email they receive from you, this is why so many marketers ask for a reply in their first email)
- The more you can get people to click links, the better for the algorithms (not as good as replies typically, but it still counts)
- Typically only include a single link per email if you need a CTA (although this is not always true, we get 76% open rates from emails that have multiple links in them due to the nature of that email - it's transactional).
- Finally (and this is where the art part comes in), make your emails are super valuable / highly entertaining so that the platforms see long term engagement from your readers. Platforms like Microsoft and Google don't like it when someone ignores every email from you for a long period of time (i.e. no opens / clicks) as this typically means the emails weren't valuable and so the receiver is either ignoring opening them or has created a rule to put them to a sub-folder and again ignoring them. Sending quality, entertaining, helpful emails to the right people to help dramatically helps train the algorithms increasing your email deliverability.
CONTINUED TESTING
We also recommend regularly (quarterly at the least) to continue testing legit emails from using both Mail Genius and Mail Tester (or your preferred alternative) to find any new issues that might have popped up and fix them (again, you'll likely never get to 100% - but aim for 90%+, ideally 95%).
EMAIL DELIVERABILITY EXPERTS
The vast majority of email deliverability issues that get reported to us end up being something in the clients world being the cause, and not something from High-Level / Growably.
The most common causes are low domain reputation, poor list hygiene, poor sending practises and even misconfigured DNS setup
[yep, you'd be SHOCKED how many MSPs have setup their DNS incorrectly]
So, whilst our support team is happy to help out for any issues directly related the High-Level / Growably infrastructure, most of the time Email Deliverability issues aren't something from our side and so we can't help out anyway.
In those cases, we recommend you engage an Email Deliverability Expert if you don't have the internal skills and knowledge to properly troubleshoot email deliverability issues.
One of the experts we've used successfully in the past is Matt Ratliff from Funnel Techie.
He not only understands the nuances of Email Deliverability very well, he also has deep knowledge of the High-Level / Growably platform.
You can find his website here.
(we don't earn any commission from Matt - we simply send people his way because he is good at what he does)
DEEPER INFO
There is a huge amount of information available online that dives into understanding both the art and science of Email Deliverability even deeper - here's a few Blog Articles to start your journey: