How to improve deliverability and engagement in email marketing
There are two key metrics in email marketing: deliverability and engagement.
Deliverability in email marketing means what percentage of the emails you send will actually reach your subscribers mailbox (including both the inbox and spam/junk folders).
Of course, the ultimate objective in email marketing is to reach the inbox. Depending on several factors in some cases this may take time and effort.
Engagement refers to how much your subscribers interact with your newsletter and it is measured by various clicks & views metrics.
Newsletter engagement depends on the following,
- Relevancy to your subscribers' interests: send the right content to the right lists with a clear email subject.
- Aesthetics -visual design: choice of fonts and colors, overall attractiveness, readability, responsiveness to various email clients.
- Newsletter structure and layout: enticing first few words, content blocks that stand-out, clear call to action.
Improving deliverability and engagement involves some technical things to implement once and for good and some best practices to follow consistently.
Be yourself and respect your audience
- Be honest about who you are and what you send.
- Use a consistent, honest and accurate From-email and From-name.
- Send only to those who are interested in hearing from you.
Improve your newsletters
- Use personalization in the subject, preheader and body.
- Use a subject line that along with the preheader attract interest.
- Focus on your newsletter design. Use responsive and readable designs. Avoid complicated designs that include JavaScript, forms, iframe, flash etc. Such designs will be blocked by spam filters.
- Avoid spam-triggering phrases such as "Free", "Hot" and similar in your subject line and content.
- Send multipart newsletters since these are treated better by spam filters. Here is an interesting tip.
- Send complete newsletters. Having sufficient text content in the newsletter improves deliverability. A newsletter that only has an image in it (may look nice especially as an e-card) but this is a practice that spammers do as well.
- Don't send emails with large attachments. If you need to do so upload them at your server and link to them.
- Use content spinning. This simple technique randomly varies parts of a newsletter. See how simple and fun it is and how our email marketing software does it.
Nurture your mailing lists
- Use double opt-in when collecting subscriber emails and building your mailing lists.
- Keep your mailing lists clean and healthy
- Remove email accounts that bounce.
- Remove dormant subscribers; those who never click nor open (yet they never bounce). nuevoMailer has a special utility for that. There is no point to keep sending to uninterested subscribers.
- Segment your mailing lists so you can send more targeted email campaigns. More about mailing list segmentation.
- Examine the bounces you receive when they say that your newsletter was rejected as spam. Many times you can find valuable information which also points to a corrective course of action. For example you may discover that your domain or IP is blacklisted and find instructions about how to white-list it.
- Provide clear opt-out instructions (and links).
- Ask for an opt-out reason. This will give you extremely valuable insights. It's simple to do this with nuevoMailer.
- Honor and respect opt-outs. Don't send again to those who opted out. nuevoMailer can prevent you from accidentally re-importing subscribers who have opted-out or complained.
- Optimize email sending frequency: find a balance between staying top-of-mind and overwhelming your subscribers. Tip: instead of a direct opt-out link try the Snooze option.
Organize your campaigns and sending patterns
Depending on your experience, objectives and your mailing lists maturity there are various alternative practises you can follow.
- If you are starting with a new server consider an IP warm-up first.
- Spread your campaigns in time (when possible). Send in batches - don't just blast.
Use a "daily campaign limit". Use send-rate limiting and throttling. nuevoMailer gives you these options.
- As you progress and collect more data try send-time optimization. The objective is to send a newsletter at the time a subscriber appears to engage most.
- Monitor your reports and analyze engagement data to determine possible weak points.
- Test and test again: open some free email accounts in major ESPs. Always send a test campaign to yourself before sending to your subscribers. See how.
- Perform A/B split tests to see what works best. See A/B split testing in the user's guide.
Technical tips for improving deliverability
Email authentication is a must-have today!!!
This involves setting up up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records. These help email providers verify that your messages are legitimate, improving trust and deliverability.
These are some technical things that you should perform once when setting up your mailer. All hosting companies have control panels where these features are easy to find and configure.
If you are using a 3rd party smtp or email delivery service (Amazon SES, MailGun, SendGrid etc) then such services will provide you the following records along with instructions for setting them up at your server.
- Have an SPF record for your domain. An SPF record is a type of DNS TXT record that indicates all the servers authorized to send emails from a particular domain.
- Sign emails with DKIM. This is a method of email authentication that ensures that the emails come from an authorized server. It helps prevent spammers and other malicious parties from impersonating a legitimate domain. See how you can also do this with nuevoMailer.
- Add a DMARC record. A DMARC record is a DNS record that specifies a domain’s policy for handling emails that fail authentication checks. It helps prevent email fraud by instructing recipient servers to either quarantine, reject, or allow the message based on authentication results.
- Having a "reverse DNS lookup" for your domain is favorable.
- Use an unique (and clean IP) for your mail server whenever possible.
- Since 2025 all major ESPs require you to have DKIM, SPF and DMARC records in order to deliver your emails.
From your news log:
- Microsoft's new requirements for bulk mail senders
- Gmail and Yahoo 2024 updates and what they mean for you
Interesting links to major ESPs
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