Our best tip if you want to get great email deliverability: don't send emails that will likely be marked as spam.

Seems obvious, but people violate this rule every day.

Want to go beyond that? Here are some tips. 👇

No single measure defines your email deliverability. Spam filters calculate an overall score based on a lot of factors.

This means for instance that if your email is not too spammy/promotional, you can probably get away with using a series of links in your email.

That being said, let's look into a series of different factors you can control to optimize the whole.

Use a business email address instead of a personal one. Use Google Workspace (or Microsoft Office 365) with a custom domain.

Warm up an email address before sending a larger amount of emails. Use something like Warmup Inbox to gradually build up your email volume.

Don't host your website on shared hosting. If another domain hosted on the same IP address gets blacklisted, you get blacklisted.

Set up an SPF and DKIM record for your mailbox. Set up the right DNS records to ensure that you authenticate securely as a sender. Learn how to do this for Google Workspace and for Microsoft Office 365.

Review, adapt or turn off low performance email workflows (low open and low reply rate). If your open rate is below 20-30% and your reply rate is below 5-10%, try improving your email workflow. You can adjust: subject line, copy, offer, and personalization. Make sure it's an email you'd enjoy receiving.

Include an unsubscribe link to avoid that your emails get marked as spam. If you're emailing your own customers to invite them to a non-promotional event, you likely don't need an unsubscribe link. If you go beyond that, it's best practice to use one, even if the law wouldn't require it. It gives people the possibility to opt out without flagging you.

Avoid putting too many links. Try to have them on the same domain as your email address. Spammers often try to get you to click on fishy links (pun intended). Spam filters calculate this into their scores.

Personalize your emails as much as possible with merge fields. Cold emails that look like mass emails won't land well with the recipient. Be as personal as possible. Use fallbacks on your merge fields to avoid awkward situations with failed personalization.

Avoid inline images in the first email if possible. It doesn't have a huge impact, but, again, it's a small thing that can help. And *definitely* don't send an email that is largely image and little text.

Send at a lower rate than the hourly and daily quota of your mailbox. Salesflare is set to send emails at the capacity of your mailbox, so it only limits you as far as it needs. If you want to optimize your email deliverability however, less is more.

To do that, you only have to go to Settings > Emails settings > Set quota, and define the lower rate.

Validate email addresses before sending to them to keep the bounce rate low. The most obvious tell that you're spamming is that you're sending an email to a lot of invalid email addresses. Run your list through a tool like EmailListVerify to remove email addresses that will bounce anyway.

Don't send again to contacts whose emails bounce or who unsubscribe. If you're using Salesflare, it will take care of this for you. If an email hard bounces or a contact unsubscribes, this is automatically stored on the contact so they will never be emailed again. These fields are hidden by default, so head to Settings > Customize fields > Contacts if you want to show them.