Overview
Email Service Providers (ESPs) often have strict rules to protect users from unwanted or undesirable emails. To avoid these "spam blockers" you need to follow email best practices. If you do not, your emails may bounce and never reach your intended audience. This, in turn, puts your domain health at risk.
Read on to learn how to avoid spam filters and improve email deliverability when you send emails via a mailbox connected to Propensity.
Note: that the guidelines below are only best practices. They are not guaranteed to eliminate all bounces or instances of spam-blocked emails. Spam filtering is user-specific—if someone marks an email as spam, their email service provider's spam filtering will update itself to catch similar emails in the future. Two people can receive the same email and encounter different filtering behaviors. You can learn more about email bounces by visiting our Email Bounce Rate Overview.
Email Deliverability Best Practices
Feeling Overwhelmed and Not Sure Where to Start?
Staying clear of spam filters can be pretty daunting. If you want a quick summary, check out our email deliverability checklist and follow the best practices to improve your email deliverability rates.
At a high level, there are 2 primary causes for email bounces and ESPs marking emails as spam:
- Domain reputation
- Email content and formatting
Domain Reputation
For a better chance of avoiding spam filters, follow the steps below to configure your domain settings.
Set Up the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for Your Sending Domains
Welcome-listing your domain improves your deliverability and ISP reputation. You should configure the following domain attributes to help raise your spam score.
- Set Up SPF Records: An authorization method that specifies which email servers can send and receive emails on behalf of your organization.
- Set Up DKIM Policies: An authentication method that uses cryptography to securely encrypt and decrypt emails sent to and from your organization. It also prevents in-transit altering of sent or received messages.
- Set Up DMARC Policies: An authentication method that specifies how to handle emails that don't pass SPF and/or DKIM checks. DMARC also generates reports to prevent email spoofing.
Dive Into Workspace Admin Guides
Follow the Google guides below for further reading.
Publish an SPF record
Publish a DMARC policy
Authenticate Your Email With DKIM
For more general info on how to avoid getting spam blocked by Gmail, see the "Prevent mail to Gmail users from being blocked or sent to spam" article.
Master of Your Domain (Providers)
The information you need to configure SPF, DMARC, and DKIM is specifically related to your domain and is not related to Propensity. Propensity doesn't have email servers. All emails are sent directly from your email provider. Instructions to configure SPF, DMARC, and DKIM vary by domain provider. Contact your domain provider to obtain this information and receive any support you need.
When you have configured SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, consider implementing the following:
Set Up a New Domain
This domain should be different from your primary sending domain and you should only use it to send marketing emails. Additionally, this means you can create new mailboxes from this domain and add and replace them in Propensity. For more information on how to connect mailboxes to Propesnsity, click here. To read more on how to set up a new domain, subdomain, and mailbox for sending marketing outreach, click here.
Email Warming
When creating a new mailbox for use with Propensity, whether as part of an existing domain or subdomain, or a brand new one, the age of the mailbox matters for deliverability. Consider using an email warming tool to establish a positive reputation. Email warming tools use your email address to automatically start email conversations with high-reputation inboxes. The warm-up emails sent are natural and make sense to build trust. The ramp-up is automated and done gradually to maximize the efficiency of the email warm-up. Your warming emails get opened, replied to positively, marked as important, and removed from spam and categories. This positive email engagement increases your email reputation and deliverability. It teaches the inbox providers to send your emails to the main inbox and not to spam. Learn more about email warming here.
Email Content and Formatting
- Remove Links from the Body of Your Email: Spam filters look for links, especially in first-contact emails. Ensure you've removed links from your signature and in the body of your emails.
- Remove Images from the Body of Your Email: Images or attachments, especially in automated or first-contact emails, can activate spam blockers and cause bounces. Remove these assets and stick to text. Save your images and attachments for step 3 or later in sequences once you've sent a few other emails. As with links, even images in your signature can cause issues.
- Don't Apply Special Formatting to Your Text: Spam blockers scan for formatted text. Avoid using different colors, fonts, bolding, italicization, and underlining.
- Keep Your Paragraphs Concise: Lengthy content can activate spam blockers or cause bounces. Keep your wording simple and to the point.
- Avoid Words that Trigger Spam Filters: Spam filters are constantly evolving. As a result, there isn't a shortlist of words to avoid. Try to communicate in a professional, personable way. Avoid words and phrases that sound suspicious, urgent, or needy. As a best practice, ask yourself if the email you intend to send is one you would want to receive yourself.
- Test Your Messaging: Always test your messaging to see what works best. You can try multiple versions of a message. If one version has a higher bounce rate, compare the differences to understand the cause.