Email Deliverability Checklist

As an ecommerce brand, email marketing is an important channel to share brand stories, promote new products, and capture repeat sales from past customers. But even with the right tactics, many brands fail to turn their emails into a revenue channel. In fact, sometimes, it doesn’t even reach recipients’ primary inboxes.

Poor deliverability can cost you leads, conversions, and credibility. Email Service Providers (ESPs) are stricter than ever, and without the right approach, your emails might never be seen.

But by following the right practices, you can fix it. This blog breaks down everything you need to know about email deliverability, along with a checklist to improve it, from technical best practices to engagement tactics. 

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to the rate at which your sent emails reach your recipients’ primary inbox instead of being filtered into spam or promotional folders. It determines whether your emails are seen, read, and acted on.

Email deliverability vs. email delivery

Many people confuse email deliverability with email delivery, but they are different:

Why high email deliverability is a must for marketers

When emails don’t make it to the inbox, it affects more than just open rates. Here’s what poor deliverability can lead to:

• Lost revenue: If potential customers don’t open your emails, you miss out on converting them and capturing sales.
• Low engagement: Emails that don’t land in inboxes are less likely to be opened, reducing clicks and conversions.
• Damaged sender reputation: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) track how recipients interact with your emails. If too many emails are ignored, bounced, or marked as spam, your future emails are more likely to be filtered out of inboxes.
• Ineffective campaigns: No matter how well-designed or targeted your emails are, they won’t work if they aren’t seen.

What is considered a good email deliverability rate?

A good email deliverability rate means that your emails consistently reach your recipients' primary inboxes instead of spam or promotions folders. While the ideal rate varies by industry and audience, most businesses aim for 85% to 95% deliverability to maximize engagement and conversions.

Industry benchmarks for Email Deliverability

Your email’s performance impacts future deliverability. 

Open rates signal sender reputation, with low opens causing your emails to land in the spam folder. Better engagement rates can show ESPs that your messages are relevant, keeping your emails in the inbox. High unsubscribe and spam complaint rates have an obvious impact on deliverability, too.

According to Klaviyo, here are the average email engagement rates for ecommerce to help you benchmark your performance:

• Open Rate: 37.93%
• Click-Through Rate: 1.29%
• Unsubscribe Rate: Less than 0.3%

If your metrics fall below these averages, there may be issues with inbox placement, content relevance, or sender reputation.

Factors that influence deliverability rates

Several factors impact your email deliverability, including:

• Spam complaints: High complaint rates reduce your sender reputation.
• High unsubscribe rate: This signals that recipients are disengaged, harming deliverability.
• High bounce rates: Frequent hard bounces indicate poor list quality.
• Email content: Poorly formatted or overly promotional emails may trigger spam filters.
• Sending volume & frequency: Sending too many emails at once can flag your domain as suspicious.
• Infrastructure & authentication protocols: Proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings are essential for building sender trust.

By monitoring these aspects and continuously optimizing your strategy, you can maintain high deliverability and improve the overall success of your email marketing campaigns.

Improving your current email marketing deliverability

If you've been running email campaigns for some time, conduct an audit to assess the state of your deliverability performance.

Conduct an email deliverability audit

Here are some tips to help you conduct an email deliverability audit:

• Verify authentication: Make sure that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly set up using tools like DNS Checker and Google Postmaster Tools.
• Track your sender score: Klaviyo’s deliverability tab lets you check your deliverability score. 
• Test inbox placement: Glockapps lets you see whether your emails land in the inbox, promotions, or spam. 
• Understand your domain and IP reputation: Google Postmaster Tools gives you results on domain reputation, IP reputation, and spam rates.
• Analyze engagement rates: Track open rates, click-through rates, and response rates to measure audience interest.
• Compare with industry benchmarks: Measure your performance against standards relevant to your industry.
• Monitor bounce and complaint rates: A high bounce rate (above 1%) or spam complaints can signal deliverability issues.
• Review your email content: Check if you’re triggering spam filters with excessive punctuation, multiple links, large images, all caps, or misleading subject lines.
• Assess your sending patterns: Make sure that you have a consistent sending schedule without sudden spikes.

Want a comprehensive assessment of your email deliverability and the next steps you need to take to improve it? Book a free audit with Tie now. 

What to do if your deliverability is low

After the audit, if you find that your deliverability is low, follow the checklist to maintain best practices, build trust, and increase your reach. Most importantly, clean your email list, avoid over-sending, and send out high-quality content. 

Email deliverability checklist for better inbox placement

Following best practices prevents deliverability problems and domain blacklisting, ensuring that you don’t miss out on opportunities to capture sales. Here’s a checklist you can follow to keep your email outreach effective and reliable.

Set up proper email authentication

Proper authentication avoids spoofing and phishing and ensures that your emails are not rejected or marked as spam. To improve email delivery, always set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your domains. If you use an email service provider (ESP), they are likely to set up authentication for you. 

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Confirms which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain.
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Uses a digital signature to verify that the domain owner sent the message. 
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): It tells receiving servers what to do with your messages if they don't follow SPF and DKIM protocols. 

Understand all about email authentication and how it works here.

Maintain a high-quality and updated email list 

Your email list plays a huge role in your deliverability. Sending to outdated or unverified email accounts increases bounce rates, signaling to ESPs that your list is outdated and risking your email being filtered or blocked. If you send your campaigns to emails that have previously unsubscribed, you can be reported for spam, negatively impacting your deliverability score. 

Here’s how you can improve your list hygiene:

• Remove invalid or inactive email addresses regularly. 
• Ensure that addresses that have unsubscribed are kept out of your list before you send your emails.
• Avoid disengaged recipients who haven’t opened a single email, haven't been active on-site, and haven't placed an order in the last 90 days—at the very minimum, once a year (in the last 365 days).
• Set up a sunset flow to try to re-engage this subscriber segment, offering them an incentive to stay subscribed and take action. 

Warm up your email domain before sending at scale

New or inactive domains don’t have a sending history. Sudden spikes in sending can make it more likely to be flagged as spam. You can avoid this with domain warming, a process of gradually increasing the number of emails sent from your domain over several weeks to build trust with email service providers. 

Tie helps brands enhance their email deliverability with a strategic email warming service. By sending and positively engaging with emails from a subdomain of the brand’s primary email domain, Tie strengthens overall domain authority. This results in increased email-sending capacity and ensures messages consistently land in inboxes. Here’s what Tie’s different domain warming tiers look like: 

Keep these in mind during your email warm-up process:

• Begin with highly engaged contacts to build positive sender signals.
• Increase sending volume by 15–20% per day while closely monitoring open rates and spam complaints.
• Use separate IPs for transactional and marketing emails to prevent them from affecting each other.

Optimize email content to avoid spam filters

Even if your domain is authenticated, poor content can still trigger spam filters. To improve inbox placement:

• Avoid spam trigger words like “free money”, “urgent”, or “guaranteed”.
• Limit the use of images and large attachments. Image-heavy emails are often flagged as promotional or spam. Large attachments and risky file types (like .exe and .zip) could trigger security filters.
• Write clear, catchy, and relevant subject lines to increase open rates.
• Personalize email copy instead of using generic, mass-blasted content to guarantee better open rates.

Send relevant, personalized emails for better engagement

Low engagement signals that your emails aren’t valuable, making it likely for them to be filtered into other folders. To increase open and response rates, prioritize personalization:

• Segment based on user behavior to send targeted emails tailored to what different subscriber segments would appeal to.
• Customize messaging and recommendations based on purchase history, browsing behavior, or past replies.
• A/B test subject lines, tactics, and copy to understand what works best for your audience.

For help, check out how Tie empowers email personalization for e-commerce brands.

Manage your sending frequency and volume

Sending too many emails, especially if they’re irrelevant, can increase the risk of unsubscribes and spam complaints.  Follow these guidelines on the number of emails you should send to your subscribers:

• With customers engaged for 180 days or less, start by slowly increasing your sending cadence to 2-3 emails per week.
  
  • Adjust your frequency based on audience preferences, relevancy of content, and past engagement levels. 
  • If deliverability declines, narrow your audience to those engaged within 30 days and slowly expand to 60-day and 90-day engaged segments over a few weeks to rebuild reputation and inbox placement.
    
    
• For low-engagement subscribers, send 1-2 emails per month focusing on re-engagement strategies.
• Avoid cold emailing unless you’re reaching out for wholesale or bulk orders or building partnerships with influencers and affiliates.
• Use a campaign content calendar to plan and maintain consistency.

Monitor blacklists and spam complaints

Getting blacklisted impacts your deliverability significantly. Keep track of your reputation using:

• Check blacklists with tools like MXToolBox or Google Postmaster Tools to track if your domain or IP address is flagged.
• Keep track of spam complaints through your email service provider and take corrective actions.
• Ensure that your email marketing tool automatically excludes invalid addresses that cause hard bounces.

If blacklisted, pause sending, identify the issue (like spam complaints, spam traps, sudden volume spikes), and correct it. Request removal from the blacklist (if possible) before resuming campaigns.

Make the unsubscribe process effortless

If your unsubscribe process is difficult, people are more likely to block your emails or report you to spam, harming your deliverability. Always follow these best practices:

• Include a universal unsubscribe content footer in all flows and campaigns, displaying a highly visible blue unsubscribe link across all your emails.
• Allow subscribers to adjust their preferences (e.g., reduce frequency instead of full opt-out). Don’t make this a required step before unsubscribing.
• Immediately remove unsubscribers from your email list to avoid repeat complaints.
• Make sure unsubscribe links don’t get cut off in long emails. ESPs will ding you.

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Set up dedicated sending domains for marketing and transactional emails

ESP reputation is domain-specific, mixing marketing and transactional emails can impact deliverability.

• Use separate subdomains (e.g., order.yourdomain.com for receipts, offers.yourdomain.com for promotions).
• Set up dedicated IPs for high-volume marketing campaigns to prevent throttling.
• Use return-path data to identify where and how emails bounce and resolve domain-specific problems that come up.

Pass email engagement data to ad platforms

Syncing email open and click data with different ad platforms allows you to retarget your customers, expand your reach to similar audiences, and improve conversion rates:

• Google Ads and Facebook Custom Audiences to re-engage cart abandoners or recipients who opened or clicked your emails but didn’t make a purchase.
• Leverage Lookalike Audiences to target potential customers similar to your highly engaged recipients.

Improve your email campaigns and avoid spam using Tie

By following email deliverability best practices, you can reach prospects’ inboxes, avoid coming across as spammy, and increase opens, reply rates, and conversions. 

Tie's email deliverability platform has multiple features that improve your email deliverability score and drive conversions from your email strategy:

• Prospect filtering identifies ideal customers who are active and high-intent, ensuring that your marketing spend is maximized
• Domain warming is the process of sending and positively engaging with emails from a subdomain of your brand’s primary email domain to increase domain authority and ensure messages consistently land in inboxes.

Book a demo now to increase your deliverability rate and improve your email marketing efforts.