How to improve your email deliverability

In this article, we will provide you with fundamental tips to instantly improve the deliverability of your outbound emails. Securing a high inbox placement rate is critical to the success of your marketing operations.

Note: If you already understand these foundational basics and want to learn about IP pooling thresholds and advanced metric management, we recommend reading our dedicated guide: How to improve the deliverability of my emails (advanced tips).

What is email deliverability?

The deliverability of an email refers to its verified ability to securely reach its intended recipients directly in their main inbox, without being aggressively filtered or routed to a hidden spam folder by the receiving provider (like Gmail or Outlook). This metric is typically expressed as an overall inbox placement rate.

Many critical factors actively influence the deliverability of your emails:

• The quality of the sending email address (utilizing a personalized, fully authenticated domain name).
• The underlying hygiene of your contact list database.
• The accumulated reputation of the server IP addresses initiating the payload.
• Your historical rate of Spam complaints and hard Bounces.
• The presence of aggressive Spam words inside your email body copy.

To ensure elite deliverability, you must rigorously adhere to the following three foundational pillars.

1. Only send emails to people who have explicitly agreed to receive them

This is the absolute baseline requirement for ensuring your emails survive strict provider filters.

On SystemeScale, it is strictly forbidden to import a contact list containing email addresses of users who have not authorized you to contact them. You must only dispatch broadcasts to contacts from whom you have received undeniable, explicit consent.

2. Keep your open rate above 20%

While possessing a massive email list feels validating, keeping unengaged contacts actively harms your infrastructure. If a large segment of contacts continually ignores, deletes, or stops clicking on your emails, ISP algorithms will punish your overall deliverability, assuming your content is unwanted bulk mail.

It is heavily recommended that you aggressively aim to keep your baseline email open rate at a minimum of 20%.

3. Authenticate the domain name used to send emails

It is functionally impossible to achieve high deliverability rates if you are sending from an unverified or personal free email address (like @gmail.com). Modern receiving servers will instantly reject or route unauthenticated emails to the junk folder.

You must map cryptographic records to your domain to prove to receiving servers that you are the legitimate, authorized sender of the payload.