If you are getting low open rate or response rate from your email marketing campaign, besides the reason of bad targeting or bad email copy, another thing you should test is your email deliverability.
Conversely you can have the best email copy and targeted leads, but if your email deliverability is bad, that means all your email are landed either to spam or junk box, or straight away blocked and discarded by antispam.
In this post I will show you a few tools I personally use to check my email deliverability and how to improve email deliverability, but first let’s understand what cause bad deliverability.
Why do your email have bad deliverability
Across all my client’s I have helped with email marketing, these are most of the common reasons I have found:
- Not warming up your sending email address properly
- Using top level domains with low reputation
- I suggest sticking to .com, .net
- Avoid spammy ones listed on Spamhaus Most Abused Top Level Domains
- Using registrars with low reputation or used by many malicious spammer
- Again, avoid the one from Spamhaus Most Abused Registrars
- Not having proper DKIM, DMARC, SPF record setup
How to check email deliverability and improve it
These are a few tool I’ve personally used and recommended, some of them does more than just for the purpose of checking email deliverability.
1. Instantly – Check deliverability + Improve + Warmup
Is there any better way to check deliverability then to send it like you normally would? Instantly warmup features let users to warmup unlimited amount of email address, and it will send email between users that using the warmup features to build up sending volume.
The best part? If your email got into spam it will show on the statistics, PLUS it will save your email from spam box by manually move them out from the spam box, that way it can teach mail server algorithm to learn that your email is not spam!
You can click here to get 14 days Instantly free trial upon signing up.
Not only that, Instantly being a complete cold email solution will also help you to check if you have proper record setup for DKIM, DMARC & SPF.
Many of my clients have been using Instantly to launch their cold email campaign sending emails to thousands of new prospect and book new meetings every day. If you are interested I also have a guide on how to set it up with Instantly.
2. Gmass Deliverability Tester
This is a quick and simple tool that you can use to test your email deliverability, all you have to do is simply go into your mailbox, compose any email you would normally send via cold email campaign, and send it to their test inbox.
It will show you if your email is landed into their primary mailbox or filtered by antispam.
3. Glockapps – Check Deliverability Across Multiple Email Providers
This is similar to Gmass deliverability checker, but instead of checking only the deliverability to Gmail and Google Workspace email, they also let you check on more email providers such as AOL, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.
However it is a freemium service and the free plan only comes with 3 check, that means it is only good for if you have small amount of email address to check, if you want to check more the starting plan starts from $45, which I would rather recommend just using Instantly.
This is a how a typical Glockapps spam report looks like.
4. Mail-tester
This is more like a email content spam checker as it doesn’t tell you the real world deliverability against the major email providers out there, but it is a free tool, so you can still use it as a quick test anyway.
