Optimize Email Deliverability: How to Get Your Newsletters in the Inbox, Not the Spam Folder

Why don't some newsletters get delivered, or end up in spam? We explain how you can make sure your emails aren't considered spam and get delivered to the right people with CleverReach.

In email marketing, there is nothing more frustrating than poor deliverability. This means your message ends up in the spam folder or doesn’t get delivered at all. The good news is that you can improve your email deliverability significantly by taking a few basic measures.

At CleverReach, our goal is to ensure that your emails end up exactly where they belong—directly in your recipients’ inboxes. That’s why our email marketing tool supports you in checking and optimizing your email deliverability. The deliverability dashboard allows you to monitor your sending reputation and provides specific recommendations for optimizing your deliverability.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the successful delivery of an email or newsletter to a recipient’s inbox, rather than having it rejected by mail providers or ending up in the spam folder. This process is significantly influenced by various criteria. Controlling these factors can optimize your email deliverability and increase the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Why Is Deliverability Such an Important Issue in Email Marketing?

With high deliverability, your emails end up exactly where you want them to be and where your target audience will see them: in their inbox. If your emails end up in the spam folder or are even rejected due to poor deliverability, even the best email marketing campaign won’t achieve anything. Furthermore, it naturally erodes recipients’ trust in your brand if your emails constantly end up in the spam folder and aren’t delivered reliably.

Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?

The delivery of your newsletter is primarily determined by the receiving server of the recipient. Spam scoring is used to evaluate your email newsletter based on various criteria and decide whether or not your newsletter should be delivered to the inbox. To protect recipients from unauthorized mass emails and harmful phishing messages, mailbox providers use spam filters and authentication methods. These messages are either recognized as spam or rejected outright.

Even legitimate emails sometimes end up in the spam folder. This is usually due to a combination of a lack of authentication, the content, and the behavior of your recipients.

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How Can I Measure the Deliverability of My Emails?

It’s not always easy for newsletter senders to keep track of their own reputation. CleverReach enables clear and regular monitoring of email deliverability with the deliverability dashboard.

• Deliverability score: Find out right away if your delivery quality is in the green zone or if you need to take action.
• KPI overview: Track relevant metrics such as delivery, bounce, and spam rates.
• Tips for optimization: Get some solid tips on making your emails stand out and get delivered.

The deliverability dashboard shows you exactly where you still have potential for optimization. This will allow you to establish long-term trust with mailbox providers and ensure your content reaches your intended recipients.

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Understanding and Classifying KPIs for Deliverability

What key performance indicators matter when it comes to deliverability in email marketing, and what can we learn from them?

• Delivery rate:This shows the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, which is the opposite of the bounce rate. It doesn’t show if the email ended up in the inbox or the spam folder. A good delivery rate is 98 to 100%.
• Bounce rate: This measures the percentage of emails that could not be delivered due to soft bounces or hard bounces. This is usually because the email address isn’t valid or doesn’t work. A low bounce rate is a sign that your email list is being taken care of. The bounce rate should be below 2%, and even better, below 1%.
• Spam complaint rate (spam flags): It shows how many people are marking your emails as spam. If you send a lot of emails, mailbox providers might mark your sender reputation as “unreliable.” So, the spam rate should always be below 0.1%.

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Optimize Your Email Deliverability in 5 Steps

CleverReach has everything you need to make sure your emails get delivered. With these five steps, you can make it more likely that your newsletters will arrive in your inbox on time:

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1. Technical Deliverability with SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Email authentication establishes you as a secure sender with mailbox providers. The most common methods are SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Using only one of the three methods will not reliably protect you against spam, phishing, or spoofing. Successful protection against misuse and significantly improved email deliverability are only ensured by the interaction of all three authentication mechanisms.

Authentications are set up once. After that, it is sufficient to regularly check whether the certificates are still valid.

What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

• SPF verifies that the IP address of the email sender is authorized to send the newsletter. If the IP address does not match, the receiving server may mark the email as spam or reject it.
• DKIM confirms the authenticity of an email and prevents it from being altered while in transit from the sender to the recipient. This process ensures that incoming emails actually come from the sending brand.
• DMARC prevents your brand from being misused for spam email. It requires either SPF or DKIM and provides instructions for what to do with emails that fail the check: delete them, reject them, or move them to the spam folder.

 

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2. List Hygiene for High Deliverability

If your list of recipients is up-to-date and active, mailbox providers will take you more seriously, and your recipients will be more engaged. CleverReach can help you with that:

• During recipient import, invalid (e.g. incomplete) email addresses are deleted and duplicate addresses are filtered out.
• Bounce management automatically excludes invalid addresses (soft and hard bounces) from sending.
• Unsubscribed recipients are automatically set to “inactive” and are not contacted.

However, you can also actively maintain and clean up your recipient list:

Only write to recipients with DOI

Double-opt-in is not only important for GDPR-compliant email marketing. It also makes sure that the people you’re sending emails to actually want to receive them and aren’t marking them as spam. Don’t ever send emails to purchased email addresses. That’s illegal and will mess up your deliverability.

Delete hard bounces

Bounces are automatically excluded from sending by CleverReach. To keep your list clean, you can regularly remove hard bounces from your recipient list.

Sending to active recipients

Use segmentation to target those recipients who actively interact with your newsletter. A high level of engagement sends positive signals about the quality and relevance of the newsletter to mailbox providers (more on this below).

Reactivate inactive recipients

Conversely, you can create a segment for recipients who have not clicked on or opened your newsletter for some time. Prepare a reactivation campaign to win these recipients back as active customers or interested parties. Anyone who no longer interacts at all should be excluded from regular newsletters in the long term.

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3. Your Own Subdomain with SSL Encryption

Using your own subdomain for sending emails is an easy way to improve your newsletter deliverability. We recommend using a separate subdomain for each type of newsletter or transactional mail and never your main domain. The reason for this is that each subdomain has its own spam filtering process and reputation. If you use your main domain for sending promotional newsletters, you could lose your reputation, which could hurt your business email traffic.

So, it’s better to create a subdomain for important transactional emails and at least one for promotional newsletters. It is also important that the main domain of the sender addresses and those of the subdomains match and that the domain is SSL-encrypted.

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4. Encourage the Engagement of Your Recipients

Relevant content ensures that emails are opened and clicked. And a high open and click rate signals to mailbox providers that recipients like the content you send and that it is not spam.

How can I improve the open rate?

The open rate is strongly related to the quality of your subject line. If the subject line is convincing, the email gets opened. Use A/B testing to optimize your subject lines and find out what particularly appeals to your recipients.

Best practices for successful subject lines:

• short and concise with 20 to 40 characters
• personalized address with name
• put the most important information at the beginning
• Avoid spam triggers such as “free” or “attention

How can I improve the click-through rate?

A high click-through rate indicates relevant content. When you send your recipients the content they expect and enjoy, they will interact with your newsletter and click on your links.

Best practices for relevant content and high click-through rates:

• Let your recipients choose which content they want to receive with our Preference Center.
• Segment your recipient list and tailor the content accordingly.
• Place your most important call-to-action (CTA) in the upper, visible area of the newsletter.

Send out regularly

Send out emails regularly – but in moderation! If you send emails too infrequently, you may be forgotten and the newsletter may end up in the recipient’s inbox, causing them to be surprised. On the other hand, your subscribers may find too many emails annoying. In both cases, it is important to avoid your emails being deleted unread or even reported as spam.

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5. Avoid Spam Signals

There are certain signals to which mailbox providers react negatively and which are typical of spam emails.

• Ensure a balanced text-to-image ratio of at least 60:40.
• Avoid spam keywords (especially in the subject line), capital letters and lots of special characters.
• Use descriptive link texts instead of written-out links in the body text.
• Provide a meaningful alternative text for each image that describes the image. This also supports the accessibility of your emails.

Spam test for your newsletter

Do you want to make sure that your message passes the spam filters of the various email clients before sending it? Then use the design and spam test in the CleverReach editor.

On the one hand, you can use it to check whether your newsletter design is displayed correctly by different mailbox providers and devices. You can also use the test to check whether your newsletter passes the spam check.

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High Email Deliverability with CleverReach

CleverReach is one of the newsletter tools with the best deliverability on the market: CleverReach regularly performs very well in the independent deliverability test of the EmailToolTester. In the last five tests, an average of 90% of the newsletters sent were delivered correctly to the email inbox.

We are constantly working on optimizing the positive reputation of our newsletter tool. CleverReach is CSA-certified and meets strict quality criteria for secure delivery. This ensures global allowlisting so that your newsletters are accepted by the most important email clients and reach your recipients safely.

More about deliverability with CleverReach

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