Email Marketing: Improving the Deliverability of Your Campaign | Help Center

Email Marketing: Improving the Deliverability of Your Campaign

6 min read

In this article

What is email deliverability?
Factors that influence email deliverability
Tips to improve your email deliverability
Sending a sample mailing
FAQs

Make sure your campaign actually gets delivered to your recipients' inboxes. There are many factors that affect email deliverability, and following best practices give your campaign a better chance of reaching your contacts.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to the process of successfully allowing an email to reach the inbox of the intended recipient. It determines whether your email lands in someone's inbox, spam folder, or if it bounces back and never gets to the recipient.

There are a few reasons an email might not reach the intended inbox:

Hard bounce: The email address is invalid or does not exist.
Soft bounce: There was a technical issue when sending to the address.
Spam folder: Email filtered as spam.
Blocked: Blocked by an ISP or internet protocol.

Factors that influence email deliverability

When you send an email, there are protocols in place behind the scenes to ensure that your IP address, content, and more is trustworthy. To make sure your emails don't get blocked or marked as spam, understand the 3 main factors that influence your email deliverability:

Your email content: Following email marketing best practices gets you the best chance of email deliverability. Everything from your subject line, images, and content of the campaign need to be relevant, proofread, and formatted correctly.

Sender reputation: A sender reputation score signals to an internet service provider (ISP) how trustworthy you are. It is something you build over time, like online clout, and is boosted by positive subscriber actions (e.g. clicks on a campaign) and having a well-maintained email list. Learn more about improving your email sender reputation.

Your identification: Various online protocols run behind the scenes and work like a background check to make sure you are legitimate online. These include the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). If you purchase a business email through Wix or have connected your mailbox domain to the Wix name servers, then those records are connected too.

Note:

To assist with your campaign's deliverability and identification, Wix Email Marketing automatically adds 5 DNS records (3 sendgrid.net keys and 2 ascendbywix.com keys) once a campaign is sent. These keys work in the background to validate your campaign and are expected behavior when assigning a custom mailbox as a sender address.

Tips to improve your email deliverability

Here are some best practices that we recommend following in order to ensure your campaigns are getting to your subscribers' inboxes.

Click below to learn more.

Only email your subscribers (people who signed up to your mailing list)

Build your email list organically

Regularly maintain your email list

Write an informative and engaging subject line

Clearly identify yourself and your business

Keep your audience engaged

Gradually increase the number of emails you send

Sending a sample mailing

When you send an email campaign to a new list of contacts, Wix may first send a sample mailing. This means that a portion of your recipients receive your content before the email is distributed to all of the contacts on that list.

A sample mailing is sent to improve the deliverability of your campaign. If a list contains too many wrong addresses, or too many emails are bounced/rejected, your sending reputation can be damaged. A low sending reputation impacts the deliverability of your future mailings.

If a certain percentage of your emails are bounced or rejected, your email won't be sent to the rest of your contacts yet. In the event that your sample fails, two things occur:

This mailing is listed as "Not Sent to all" under My Email Campaigns.
The contacts that did not receive your email will be listed in the Statistics of that specific campaign, with the "Not Sent" label.

To make sure your sample is successful:

Make sure that your list contains only valid addresses. Once the emails are validated, make sure you're only adding valid contacts before you send out a new campaign. Any invalid contacts must be removed from your Contact list.
Tip: Additionally make sure you only send your emails to contacts who have given you their consent, using a subscribe form.
When your list is ready, try sending your email campaign again.