The Ultimate Email Deliverability Checklist to Keep Your Messages in Inboxes

If you’re reading this, you’re probably struggling with poor email deliverability! 

You are putting in time and effort to craft the perfect cold email, following all the best practices, but still, your emails are not able to make it to your prospect’s inbox!

And now, you are left wondering how to fix it. 

Well, don’t worry! I can help you. 

In this blog, I’ll walk you through a simple email deliverability checklist that you should follow to maximize your deliverability and maintain an optimal deliverability score. 

Let’s get into it!

Improve Email Deliverability With this Checklist

In this section, I’m going to share a 10-point checklist that I’ve followed over the years to increase my inbox placement and email deliverability rate.

Grab your notepad and pen to start taking notes!

1. Authenticate Your Email Account

The very first point on the email deliverability checklist is that you need to take a look at your authentication records.

This is because, in 2024, Google, Yahoo, and other reputed email service providers introduced revised policy guidelines for email senders, especially bulk email senders.

The guidelines specify that any bulk email sender must have their SPF, DKIM and DMARC records authenticated.

So, if you’re having trouble with email deliverability, I highly recommend checking and verifying whether your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are set up.

2. Use Secondary Domains for Outreach Emails

Most of us use a primary domain like <name@company.com> for official and enterprise communication. 

However, if you want to send cold emails for sales or marketing, I recommend switching to secondary domains dedicated to this purpose.

For instance, your secondary domain could be <sales.name@company.com>.

This will ensure that your primary domain’s sender reputation doesn’t suffer because of your outreach campaigns.

Moreover, you can scale efficiently while complying with cold emailing best practices.

And don’t forget to warm up your secondary domains!

3. Track Your Sender, Domain, and IP Reputation

One thing I always do before launching a cold email campaign is make a record of my sender, domain and IP reputation.

I do this for two main reasons:

• First, it helps me understand the deliverability rate I should expect
• Second, it allows me to measure the impact of my cold email campaign on my email infrastructure.

I recommend you do the same. 

After all, your sender, domain, and IP reputation play a critical role in email deliverability.

Think of them like the credit scores of your email account: if your score is too low, the bank will not give you a loan.

Similarly, if your sender, domain, and IP reputations are too low, the ESP will likely send your emails to the spam folder!

But what should you do if you discover that your sender, domain, and IP reputations are low?

• First, I suggest you use an automated email warm-up tool to boost your sender and domain reputation.
• Second, I recommend that you switch to a dedicated IP address rather than a shared (default) IP address.

This will protect your email infrastructure from being compromised by malicious acts of others using the same IP address!

4. Warm-up Your Email Account

Email warm-up is the most important point on this checklist.

There’s a very simple reason behind this: email warm-up will help you slowly but surely improve your email deliverability rate. 

Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to authenticate your email account.
• Step 2: Start sending a consistent but small number of personalized emails to accounts with a high sender reputation.
• Step 3: Maintain conversation threads with your recipients during the warm-up phase.
• Step 4: Gradually increase the number of warm-up emails you’re sending every day. The recommended upper limit is 50 emails/day.
• Step 5: Monitor your sender reputation and other deliverability metrics through platforms like Google Postmaster Tools.

Now, this may look like a simple process, but doing it manually will be a task!

Therefore, I suggest that you use automated email warm up services to automate the whole process for as many accounts as you need!

5. Verify and Clean Your Email Lists

One of the major issues that cause email deliverability problems is hard bounces!

And they occur due to an unverified or outdated email list.

Therefore to avoid these mistakes, you should →

• First, double-check the email addresses you’re typing out manually. 
• Second, only buy email lists from trusted B2B data providers that offer real-time email verification.

6. Check the Policies of Your ESP

As we’ve seen in the first point, ESPs like Google and Yahoo have introduced several new policies for email senders to protect their users against malicious email communication.

For instance, every ESP imposes a daily sending limit.

This means you can’t send more than X number of emails within a 24-hour period. If you overshoot this limit, your deliverability rate might suffer!

To fix this specific problem, I suggest you follow this:

• Set up multiple secondary domains so you can send more emails without violating the ESP’s sending limits.
• Select an ESP that offers higher sending volumes.
• Thoroughly warm up your secondary domains so that you can send the maximum number of emails permissible by the ESP without landing in spam.

7. Avoid Using Spammy Words

Have you ever wondered how exactly your ESP knows which emails are spam and which are important?

Here’s how it works: the ESP’s algorithm looks for spammy words or phrases like “Deal,” “You’re a Winner,” “Discount,” “Earn,” and “Act Fast.”

And if they discover a consistent pattern of emails containing these words or phrases from specific accounts, they’ll send such emails straight to spam.

So, if you want to avoid the spam folder, you must thoroughly check your email copy and remove all spammy words. 

8. Personalize Your Outreach Emails

One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that you should always personalize your outreach emails, regardless of how many emails you send.

This is because of two reasons. 

• First, your recipients are more likely to mark your emails as spam if they believe you’re sending mass emails.
• Second, your recipients may ignore your emails, causing ESPs to assume you’re sending irrelevant content.

Hence, if you don’t personalize your emails, you’re very likely to see a drop in your email deliverability. 

9. Avoid Excessive Links, Attachments or Scripts

If you’ve ever opened a spam email out of curiosity (which I highly recommend you don’t!), you must have noticed that most of them want you to click on a link. 

You might also notice that some of them might be vividly designed emails.

In other words, spammers use links, attachments or scripts in their emails to make their emails look more lucrative.

Therefore, if you want to ensure that your emails don’t land in spam, I suggest that you avoid including links, attachments or HTML scripts. 

Once you’ve established an email thread with your recipient, you can include all the links and attachments you want. But till then, keep your emails simple, clean, and plain!

10. Add an Unsubscribe Link

The last point on my email deliverability checklist is to add an unsubscribe link to all your emails. 

Adding an unsubscribe link to your outreach emails improves email deliverability by reducing spam complaints, as recipients can opt-out easily instead of marking your email as spam.

Now It Is Time to Put the Checklist to Work!

Sending emails is one thing…but ensuring that they reach the inbox is a much more difficult task.

However, I’m confident that if you follow the email deliverability checklist, you’re very likely to enhance your email deliverability.

Make sure you tick all the boxes before sending cold emails if you want to make the most of your time and money. 

Email Deliverability Checklist: FAQs

1. What is a good email deliverability rate for emails?

Well, the average deliverability rate is around 83%. Anything higher than that is usually a good deliverability rate. However, we ensure that our clients usually enjoy more than a 95% deliverability rate for their emails.

2. What is the difference between delivery rate and deliverability?

Delivery rate refers to the percentage of emails that make it to the recipient’s server (they can then be routed to any folder from inbox to spam). On the other hand, the deliverability rate is the percentage of emails that land directly in the inboxes of your recipients. 

3. How can I send bulk emails without being rejected as spam?

In my opinion, you should follow this checklist to send bulk emails without being rejected as spam:

• Set up email authentication records.
• Warm up your email account.
• Personalize outreach and cold emails.
• Periodically monitor your IP, domain, and sender reputation.
• Clean your email list to eliminate unverified or outdated email addresses.
• Avoid using spammy words.
• Don’t include links, attachments, or HTML scripts in your emails.

4. Which ESP or cold emailing software has the best deliverability rate?

From all the different ESPs and cold emailing software I’ve tried and tested, Saleshandy has a deliverability rate of 98% on grade-A emails. So, if you’re looking for cold email software that guarantees a high deliverability rate, I recommend using Saleshandy!