Get your email
into the inbox.

Delivered is not the same as seen. An email can be accepted by the receiving server and still land in the spam folder, or in a tab people rarely open. Mailbox providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo decide where each message goes.

They look at three things above all: whether you are who you say you are, how your past email was received, and how people react to it now.

• Identity: is the email authenticated for the domain it claims to come from?
• Reputation: does this domain have a history of email that people wanted?
• Engagement: do recipients open, reply and move your email out of spam, or delete it and report it?
• Content matters too, but it rarely rescues a sender with a poor reputation.

Authentication proves to mailbox providers that you are allowed to send email for your domain. It is set up once, with a few records in your domain's DNS, and it is one of the most important steps for reaching the inbox.

Each record does a different job, and they work best together.

• SPF lists the servers that may send email for your domain.
• DKIM adds a digital signature to every message, so the receiver can check that it really comes from your domain and was not changed on the way.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when a message fails those checks, and where to send reports about it.
• Send from your own domain, such as news@yourcompany.com, rather than a free address like Gmail or Yahoo.

Sending to addresses that do not exist, or to people who do not want your email, tells mailbox providers that you are not careful about who you email. Over time that hurts delivery for everyone on your list, including your most loyal readers.

A clean list is smaller than a neglected one, and it performs better.

• Remove addresses that bounce, especially hard bounces that will never deliver.
• Stop emailing people who report your email as spam.
• Honour every unsubscribe straight away, and make the unsubscribe link easy to find.
• Use double opt-in, so mistyped and fake addresses never join your list.
• Never buy, rent or scrape lists.

Mailbox providers watch patterns. A sender who emails a steady, engaged audience at a predictable pace looks trustworthy. A sender who is quiet for months and then suddenly emails a large, old list looks like a problem, even with good intentions.

Be consistent, and send people what they signed up for.

• Keep a regular schedule that matches what you promised at signup.
• Raise your volume gradually when you start on a new domain, IP or server.
• Re-engage or remove subscribers who have not opened for a long time.
• Send each segment the emails that are relevant to it, instead of everything to everyone.
• Keep marketing and transactional email apart, so order and password emails are never held up by a campaign.

Content alone rarely decides whether an email reaches the inbox, but some habits make filters and readers suspicious. Write the way you would to a customer you know, and make it obvious who the email is from.

• A recognizable sender name and a subject line that matches the content.
• A healthy balance of text and images; avoid emails that are a single large image.
• Links to your own website, not to link shorteners that hide where they go.
• A plain-text version alongside the HTML.
• A clear unsubscribe link and your contact details in every marketing email.

A few minutes before you press send can save a campaign. Go through the same list every time.

• The sending domain is verified with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
• The list or segment is the right one, and it only includes people who signed up.
• The sender name, subject line and preheader are clear and honest.
• Every link works, and the unsubscribe link is there.
• A test email looks right on a phone and on a computer.
• The spam score check shows no problems.
• After sending, watch bounces and spam reports in the report.