Email deliverability
checklist (including
proven tools)
It doesn't matter how good your template is or how personal your
emails are, if your emails are destined to the SPAM folder.
At the end of the day, reaching the prospect's inbox is key.
Follow this checklist to make friends with SPAM filters and ensure
top deliverability for your outreach emails.
Compliance
CAN-SPAM Act (USA)
GDPR (EU)
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (UK)
Canada's anti-spam legislation (Canada)
Spam Act (Australia)
Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail (Japan)
Spam Control Act (Singapore)
Technical setup 2
Ensure proper technical infrastructure and
authentication, including: Authentication
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
1 DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
Domain-Based Message
Secondary domain for outreach Authentication, Reporting, &
Conformance (DMARC)
To protect your main domain from any
risk, create a secondary domain for Pointer (PTR)
cold outreach. Mail Exchange (MX) and Address (A)
It can be similar to your main one, e.g.
reply.io —> reply.app, replymail.io, Note: To manage those records, you’ll
getreply.io, reply.com, replyteam.io, etc. need access to your domain settings
(GSuite users will also need access to
Note: For better deliverability, have a admin console there to generate DKIM).
balance between cold and warm traffic. These procedures, however, might
That’s why if you select a secondary differ depending on your domain
domain, you may need to maintain the hosting provider, so check in with them
warm traffic artificially, while sending for official instructions.
from your main domain balances your
traffic naturally. Read more: How to improve your
Email Deliverability Score
Domain and IP reputation Note: Some of the popular ESPs, e.g.
GSuite/Office365, already manage the
If your domain or IP address are
IP reputation for you.
blacklisted, it is better to contact each
specific blacklist directly and find out Suggested tools:
how to remove yourself from it.
Sender
reputation
When using a new domain or IP The whole process typically takes 2-3
address, build up a positive sender weeks.
reputation first of all. The process is
You can also automate the whole
typically referred to as email warm-up.
warm-up process using dedicated
Start with sending emails to “warm”
tools.
contacts - friends, family, colleagues -
and have them open and respond to Once you complete the basic warm-up,
your messages (or take them out of you should start sending your cold
SPAM and mark them as Important if emails with caution. For example, you
they don’t get into the inbox). can use the framework below.
Days # of emails per day Delay between the emails
1-3 15 450 sec
4-7 25 400 sec
8-10 40 250-300 sec
11-14 70 200 sec
15-20 150 100 sec
21-30 200-250 > 67 sec
Note: You can take a similar approach Suggested tools:
to restore your sender reputation in
case it’s been compromised.
Contact list
Maintain high quality of the contacts on your list. To do that, consider the following:
1 2
List building Email verification
Use business email addresses only Check if the email addresses are
valid - active and used by real
Exclude group
people
(
[email protected]) and personal
(
[email protected]) email addresses
from your list
Steer clear of purchased, rented, or
scraped email lists - most of them
will consist of invalid, outdated
emails or spam traps and can only
harm your reputation
List hygiene
Weed out bounced contacts to keep
your bounce rate as low as possible,
optimally - below 5%
Suggested tools:
Consider removing unengaged
contacts (the ones that don’t
open/reply to your emails) from your
email list. You can try to reach them
via phone or social media instead
Email content
Pay attention to the following aspects of your email copy to steer clear of SPAM filters:
1 4
SPAM trigger words HTML
You can find the exhaustive list of these Avoid using unnecessary code and
words here. tags in the email template
Do not copy and paste content from
text editors such as Microsoft Word
as it may contain code and trigger
2 anti-spam systems
Links
Never use short link services
(bit.ly etc.) 5
Avoid including broken links or
linking to blacklisted domains Sentiment
All-caps emails or the ones that
contain too many exclamations are
more likely to be flagged as SPAM
3 The same goes to bold font in your
emails
Images
Maintain a healthy text to image ratio
(80:20 or higher)
Suggested tools:
Remove the tracking pixel if possible
(although you won’t be able to
detect opens). You can also
customize your tracking.
Sending schedule
Plan your sending activity with caution to
avoid raising any red flags: Note: At Reply, we set the default email
throttling limit to 400 to ensure top
deliverability and keep your account
1 safe.
Email throttling
This refers to the email volume which 2
you can send from your email account
per day/minute, depending on your ISP: Sending delay
For Outlook 365 the limit is 30
We recommend at least a 30-second
emails per minute per Office tenant
(optimally - a 60-second) delay
(subscription)
between each email sent to avoid your
For GSuite, it’s 2,000 emails per account being blocked for SPAM
24 hours activity.
Seed list testing Engagement
Verify your inbox placement by sending
your emails to a seed list of test addresses. Keep an eye on how your recipients
engage with your emails, including the
percentage of messages delivered,
Suggested tools:
opened, and replied emails as well as
the quantity of bounced emails.
bounce rate should be lower than 10%
open rate should be higher than 20%
reply rate should be at least 2-5%
Hungry for more?
Visit Reply’s Resource Library - a gold-mine of data-backed
sales engagement tactics and our first-hand knowledge.
