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How To Improve Your Deliverability Health Score
It's critical for the health of your inbox to have the highest health score possible. Lets explore some effective ways to boost it.
Your email deliverability score is the lifeblood of your inbox. The lower your score is, the less likely it will be that your outgoing emails will reach their desired destination, lowering your overall chance at making beneficial and lucrative connections with those on the receiving end. It is extremely critical that you maintain the highest possible score possible. In this article, we will provide some insight on why your score might be low and how you can begin reversing and raising your score.
What Exactly Does This Score Mean?
Your deliverability score is a numerical representation of how healthy your inbox is. The higher this value is the higher your inbox reputation is, which in turn means that your overall deliverability rates are higher.
This score is generated from a combination of Warmup Inbox’s own in house technology combined with some open source methods of verifying the integrity of an inbox/mail server. Some of the considerations when generating this value are analyzing the mail server/sender IP of your inbox and verifying that certain DNS protocols are implemented and analyzing the metadata contained within the header and body of outgoing messages to check if it contains anything that may affect your deliverability.
What Do I Do If My Score Is Low?
If your health score is under an 8.5/10, this can indicate that your inbox/mail server is not fully configured with the proper DNS settings or potentially listed on a black list/spam list. These are some of the more common reasons that would cause your score to be low, but there are many other situations that could result in this score being less than ideal. Let’s explore some good practices to engage in to boost your score.
1. Configuring Your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
If you haven’t already properly configured these security measures under your domain/mail server, this would be the most likely cause for why your score is lower than expected. To learn more about what these settings are and why they are important, please refer to our glossary entries for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Configuring these settings are straight forward for the most part, but differ greatly in how you implement them depending on how/where your domain is hosted and what email service you have configured under it. For this reason we cannot supply proper instructions but below are some helpful resources for getting these settings configured.
To Configure Your SPF:
To Configure Your DKIM
To Configure Your DMARC
2. Avoiding Negative Keywords
One of the factors that is taken into consideration when email filters are attempting to identify spam mail is the composition of the message itself. The use of certain keywords can affect how often your mail gets blocked/bounced due to certain language being found commonly in junk/spam mail. These keywords are typically referred to as “negative keywords” in that they will negatively impact the overall health of your inbox if they are used, increasing the likelihood of your domain being added to a blacklist of some sort. Being on a blacklist in turn, will directly affect your health score on Warmup Inbox.
An easy way to begin raising your health score is to avoid the use of these negative keywords as much as possible in order not to raise any unnecessary suspicion. Our master list of negative keywords to avoid can be found here in our glossary section, but it is important to note that this list does not cover every single negative keyword that can potentially trigger a spam filter. For each industry and situation in which you are performing outreach, there are particular words related to your business that are typically seen being associated with spam, so we advise that you perform some research within your own field in order to be sure that you are actively avoiding the use of negative keywords.
3. Include Single/Double Opt-In Links Within Your Emails
When sending out large amounts of emails, not including an option for recipients to stop receiving your messages will slowly damage your overall domain/inbox reputation, in turn affecting your health score. Single opt-in’s and double opt-ins are the processes in which recipients of your email can choose whether or not they would like to continue receiving emails from you.
A single opt-in refers to giving the recipient a single step process to remove themselves from a mailing list, typically with a link in the footer of a signature that will remove them from any type of list their email is on. This is most common during outreach campaigns as you do not need to confirm if the recipient wishes to receive your mail before making first contact with them
Double opt-in is essentially the same as single opt-in except the recipient needs to make the first move in order to begin receiving emails, such as entering their email address into a section of a website to receive a newsletter or some sort of information via email. You also need to include a link to unsubscribe from said correspondence in the same manner as a single opt-in for this.
Including options for users to unsubscribe will slowly help to increase your health score as mail servers and ISPs want to see these links included as its an indicator that either the recipient voluntarily signed on to receive this email and that there is an option to stop these emails from being received if they choose to do so.
4. Avoid Email Bounces Through Consistent Email Verification
Mail servers and ISPs do not like to see inboxes that frequently bounce emails, leading to a lower health score overall as your domain reputation will reflect the amount of email bounces occurring under your domain. The most easy and effective way to avoid bouncing too many emails is to simply run all email addresses you intend to make contact with through a verification service such as EmailListVerify to weed out any bad emails.
In regards to users with inboxes that have a low health score, we strongly recommend avoiding “Catch-All” emails. A Catch-All email refers to email addresses with web servers configured in such a way that they will accept any piece of mail that gets sent to them. On the surface this doesn’t sound like much of a problem, but due to the nature of this configuration you can never be sure if the email address in question actually exists or not if you have never made contact with it before. Reaching out to these types of email addresses can be very risky, leading to more bounces and in turn, a worse health score.
If you are attempting to resurrect your inbox’s health score, we strong recommend only making contact with fully validated email addresses.
5. Always Be Warming Your Inbox
The most consistent and reliable way to improve your overall health score is to maintain a steady rate at which you are warming up your inbox. We have already written an article revolving around this topic, but to put it briefly; Consistently sending, receiving, and engaging with positive engagement will drastically boost your overall health score. The reason for this is that ISPs, email services, as well as receiving email servers rely on seeing a history of this positive engagement in order determine the validity of an incoming message. Inbox warming is a consistent and reliable way to build a history of these positive engagements.
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