Email Deliverability

Close uses your email server for email delivery, but we get a lot of questions from customers on how they can ensure their emails get delivered to their prospects and aren't caught by a spam filter.

Your email deliverability will be hugely impacted by a few factors. Most notably, these include your domain reputation, the type of content you are putting out, how many people mark your emails as Spam and if a lot of your emails are getting bounced.

While this is a topic that is constantly changing, here are some common things you can do to help avoid being flagged as spam:

Inside Close

• Make sure the template you're using doesn't have any crazy formatting and doesn't use things like all caps or a lot of exclamation points, especially in the subject line. Your subject line should be intriguinging without being pushy or desperate.
• Include an unsubscribe link in your emails. This can be set automatically in your Settings.
• Most email servers these days do analytics on the contents of incoming emails before deciding if they should be considered spam, land on the main Inbox or a secondary inbox (like Promotions or Updates). The change of your target actually seeing the message drops dramatically if the message ends up anywhere other than the main Inbox, so make sure your content avoids "spamm-y" words, too many images, links or high-pressure sales tactics.
• Sometimes more is less when it comes to email marketing. If you buy lists that have lots of fake addresses or people that are utterly uninterested in your product or service and are likely to mark your emails as Spam, you risk compromising your domain reputation and making it harder for your emails to reach the inboxes of people that might actually be interested.
• Keep your list clean. If you receive permanent bounce messages or unsubcribe requests, make sure you don't keep sending emails to these addresses.
• You should warm-up any new domain before sending large numbers of marketing emails. Give it at least 4 weeks of warm up time and ramp up your volume in that period each week.
• Be consistent. Avoid making huge changes to sending volume all of a sudden. If you need to do a marketing push in a given date, try ramping up to it for at least a couple of weeks beforehand.

Technical Aspects

• Do an SPF record + IP reputation checkup. If you are using a 3rd party sending service like SendGrid or Mailgun, make sure to account for that in your SPF records. You can use Google's MX Record checker for that.
• Make sure your domain has DKIM enabled. Google also has a good guide on how to do this, which you can find here.
• While not as vital as having proper SPF and DKIM records, setting up a DMARC policy is also a good idea. Check out this article to see more info on DMARC.
• Avoid using novelty domain extensions. Stick to trusted ones like .com, .co, .io, .org, net, etc.
• If you are still getting issues, try disabling the Close application open tracking pixel and see if that makes a difference. Some email servers identify hidden pixel images and prevent those emails from being delivered.

While most service these days will automatically create SPF and DKIM records for you, it's important to always check if this is correctly set up for your domain. Messages without proper SPF and DKIM records stand a very high chance of being blocked, marked as Spam or coming with scary warning labels attached to them.

What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records allow domain owners to publish a list of IP addresses or subnets that are authorized to send email on their behalf. The goal is to reduce the amount of spam and fraud by making it much harder for malicious senders to disguise their identity.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard is an email authentication technology that verifies a message was sent from a legitimate user of an email address. It’s a way to additionally sign your emails in a way that will allow the recipient’s server check if the sender was really you or not.

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is an email authentication method that allows you to protect your email domain from spoofing.