How to improve your email deliverability

Deliverability is how often your emails land in the main inbox instead of spam. For you, it decides whether a tired parent sees your email at all.

Many things affect it: your sender address (your own authenticated domain with a good reputation), how clean your list is, the reputation of the sending servers, your spam and bounce rates, and spammy words. Three habits make the biggest difference.

1. Only email parents who said yes

This is the foundation. Importing contacts who did not agree to hear from you is not allowed, including bought or scraped lists. Without permission, your emails are far more likely to be marked as spam.

2. Keep your open rate above 20%

A big list is lovely, but if many contacts stop opening, your deliverability suffers. Remove inactive contacts regularly, for example every week or two, removing anyone who has not engaged in the last 3 months. A filter on your contacts page finds them. See How to manually clean your email list.

3. Authenticate your domain

Receiving servers tend to reject or file as spam emails which are not authenticated. See How to authenticate your domain name for email sending.

Ready for more? See Good practices for email deliverability.