Email Deliverability

What Affects Deliverability

Deliverability is determined by a combination of factors. Understanding them helps you address problems before they affect your campaigns.

1. Domain reputation — Your sending domain builds a reputation based on how recipients interact with your emails. High opens and clicks = good. High spam reports and bounces = bad.
2. Spam trigger words — Words and phrases like "FREE!!!", "Click here now", "You've been selected", and excessive caps can trip spam filters before the email even reaches a human.
3. List quality — Sending to invalid email addresses causes hard bounces, which damage your sender score. Sending to unengaged contacts (people who never open) also drags down your reputation.
4. Volume spikes — Sending 10 emails one week and 5,000 the next looks suspicious to email providers. Consistent, predictable sending volume performs better.
5. Missing authentication — Without SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, your emails fail authentication checks and are more likely to be rejected or sent to spam before anyone sees them.

Clean Your Contact List

A smaller, engaged list outperforms a large, unengaged one every time. Regular list hygiene is one of the highest-impact deliverability improvements you can make.

1. Identify unengaged contacts using Smart Lists — In Jtek, create a Smart List filtered by: "Last Email Opened is more than 90 days ago" (or "never"). This shows you who's not engaging.
2. Run a re-engagement campaign first — Before removing contacts, send them a single re-engagement email: "Are you still interested in hearing from us?" Give them a chance to opt back in.
3. Remove contacts who don't respond to re-engagement — If they don't open or click your re-engagement email, unsubscribe or archive them. They're hurting your score by sitting on your list.
4. Remove hard bounces immediately — Jtek automatically marks contacts with hard bounces (permanent delivery failures). Remove these from your active lists right away — sending to them again damages your reputation.
5. Clean your list before every major campaign — Run a quick review of your audience's last email engagement before sending to a large list. Quality over quantity every time.

Write Emails That Don't Trigger Spam

Spam filters analyze the content of your email before it's delivered. Writing like a human — not a marketer — is the simplest way to avoid them.

1. Avoid all-caps and excessive punctuation — "AMAZING DEAL!!!" is a spam filter magnet. Write in normal sentence case, and use punctuation sparingly and purposefully.
2. Don't use classic spam trigger phrases — "Click here now", "Congratulations, you've been selected", "Act immediately", "This is not spam", and "FREE" in large quantities are common triggers.
3. Don't send image-only emails — An email with one large image and no text looks suspicious to spam filters (and is inaccessible to people who have images disabled). Always include real text content.
4. Keep a healthy text-to-image ratio — Aim for at least 60% text, 40% images or less. Too many images with little text is a pattern associated with spam.
5. Include a plain-text version — Jtek's builder generates a plain-text version automatically when you build with the editor. Make sure it's enabled — spam filters expect both HTML and plain-text parts in legitimate email.

Monitor Your Reputation

Your domain reputation is measurable. Check it regularly so you can catch and fix problems before they affect your campaign results.

1. Use Google Postmaster Tools (free) — Go to postmaster.google.com and add your sending domain. Google will show you your domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, and authentication pass rate for emails delivered to Gmail users.
2. Aim for a "Good" domain reputation — Google rates domains as Good, Medium, Low, or Bad. A Good score means your emails are landing in the primary inbox. Medium means some filtering. Low or Bad means most emails are being blocked.
3. Monitor your campaign stats in Jtek — Open rate below 15%? Bounce rate above 2%? Unsubscribe rate above 0.5%? These are signals that deliverability is degrading. Investigate before sending more.
4. Check bounce reasons after every campaign — In your Jtek campaign report, click into the bounce count to see whether they were hard bounces (invalid addresses) or soft bounces (temporary failures like a full inbox).
5. Take action quickly if reputation drops — Pause sending, clean your list, review your content, and re-authenticate your domain. Don't continue sending at volume while your reputation is damaged — it compounds the problem.

Warm Up a New Domain

A brand new domain has no sending history and no reputation. Email providers treat it with suspicion. Warming it up gradually builds the trust you need for inbox placement.

1. Start with your most engaged contacts — For the first two weeks, send only to contacts who know you and are most likely to open. High early engagement signals trust to email providers.
2. Ramp volume gradually — Week 1: up to 50/day. Week 2: up to 200/day. Week 3: up to 500/day. Week 4 onward: scale based on engagement rates. Never jump from 50 to 5,000 overnight.
3. Send content worth opening during warmup — Your warmup emails set your reputation baseline. Send your best, most relevant content — not promotional blasts. High open rates during warmup accelerate reputation building.
4. Monitor closely during warmup — Check Google Postmaster Tools weekly. If your reputation starts as Low, that's normal — it should move to Medium and then Good within 4–6 weeks of consistent, engaged sending.
5. Don't rush the warmup — Sending 10,000 emails in week one almost guarantees spam folder placement and could permanently damage your new domain's reputation before it has a chance to build.