7 Common Deliverability Myths That Could Be Holding You Back

Deliverability remains one of the most difficult aspects of email marketing to master. It’s a borderline mythical craft dependent on your infrastructure, subscriber behavior, and whether or not you mixed mugwort and eye of newt at the last full moon. 🫠

The worst part? Poor deliverability means all of the hard work it takes to get an email out the door goes to waste. And we know you work hard. In fact, 62% of email marketing teams take two weeks or more to send an email, with 44% of marketers telling us they build two or three versions of each send.

With algorithms and filters constantly changing, it’s hard to figure out what to do to stay in the inbox. Validity found that inbox placement rates decreased to 83.5% over the last year, and much of that was because of Apple Mail’s new filtering changes. But you don’t have to shake a magic eight-ball and hope for the best with deliverability. Consider these seven common deliverability myths busted.

Table of Contents:

• Myth #1: marketers and subscribers define spam the same way
• Myth #2: unsubscribes are the worst thing that can happen to your sender reputation
• Myth #3: new IPs fix everything
• Myth #4: you only need to follow your own country’s spam laws
• Myth #5: avoid words like “free” or punctuation in your subject lines
• Myth #6: the problem must be the inbox service provider
• Myth #7: the problem must be your email service provider
• Deliverability myths—busted

Myth #1: marketers and subscribers define spam the same way

When it comes to spam, marketers and subscribers often feel differently. When you’ve put so much hard work into an email, the last thing you want is to be labelled a spammer.

Your subscribers likely define spam as any kind of unwanted or irrelevant email. 78% of the participants in a recent Zerobounce survey said they mark an email as spam if the email “looks like spam.” Your subscribers field hundreds of emails in their inbox in a given day. If they don’t recognize your brand—or they roll their eyes because of the volume of emails you’ve sent over the last 48 hours—then you’ve lost them.

It can be hard to swallow, but there’s a high probability that your subscribers don’t love or want to see every single email you send. What matters for deliverability is your subscriber engagement rate. If you’re sending too many emails that don’t matter to your subscribers, they’re going to tune you out at best (passively harming your deliverability) and give you a spam complaint at worst (actively harming your deliverability.)

“We’re hearing from a number of senders who are investing considerable time and resources into CDP migrations and integrations, which are allowing, finally, for the reality of hyper-personalized behavior-based marketing. Mailbox providers are also leaning into the subscriber experience by offering more user-focused controls to categorize, summarize and manage email,” says Laura Christensen, Validity’s Sr. Director of Professional Services.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to send relevant, personal emails that best reflect the 1:1 nature of email. That means:

• Using segmentation to divvy up your email list between subscriber engagement and interest so you’re tailoring your message to where they are in their customer journey (and making sure you have good email list hygiene, removing invalid email addresses or those with high bounce rates)
• Adding dynamic content like product recommendations, exclusive offers, or seasonal messaging that gives a “wow” factor
• Including interactive elements in your emails, like polls or surveys, to collect more first-party data that help you further infuse personality into your email marketing strategy

To comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s sender requirements (including deliverability rules), for example, you must maintain a spam complaint rate of 0.3%, or no more than three spam reports for every 1,000 messages. Personalization aligns your messaging with your subscriber’s expectations, boosting engagement and making it impossible for your email to “look like spam.”

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Myth #2: unsubscribes are the worst thing that can happen to your sender reputation

Let’s dispel this myth once and for all. Unsubscribes and unsubscribe rates via the direct unsubscribe link in your email have no known effect on your email sender reputation or deliverability.

It can actually be a good thing because your list is now cleaner and more targeted toward the people that do want to receive your emails. According to our friends at Optimove, 70% have unsubscribed from at least three brands in the last three months due to email overload, and 36% have quit six or more brands. It’s time to let them go!

“If subscribers continually ignore your messages, then they need to be suppressed for good,” says Laura. “When you identify that lapsed engagement point for your brand, you want to implement a win back email strategy. These strategies typically reinforce the benefits of being subscribed to your program. They may even offer an incentive to come back. But if those subscribers still fail to engage, then it’s time to say goodbye.”

Marketers often focus on pleasing everyone, when we actually make the most impact building a community of people who love what we do. A clean and engaged email list is essential for successful campaigns because it can lead to increased open rates, click rates, and other measures of success, as well as a decrease in bounces. If you’re sending to subscribers who want to opt-out from your emails, but can’t find the unsubscribe button, then you could see an increase in spam complaints (not ideal!).

For that reason, it’s a good idea to make it easy for subscribers to opt-out by including clear and simple unsubscribe links at the bottom of your email. Also…it’s illegal under privacy laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM to “forget” to unsubscribe someone from your list. And to comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s deliverability guidelines, you need a one-click unsubscribe button.

The worst thing to happen to your sender reputation? Failing to keep your email list clean can land you on a blocklist or a spam trap. And failing to pay attention to your subscriber engagement can lead to issues with your deliverability, too. Tracking metrics like opens, click-through rate, and conversions with Litmus Analytics can help you spot disengagement trends early, so you can pivot your personalization strategy or nudge them out the door with a re-engagement campaign before you get an unsubscribe or a spam complaint.

Myth #3: new IPs fix everything

A common misconception is that, by using a large amount of IP addresses to send email, you can fly under the radar at the ISP to achieve better deliverability. An IP address is a number that uniquely identifies any device connected to the internet, and your IP reputation (alongside your domain reputation) are two key elements of your overall sender reputation.

But changing your IP address or domain in an attempt to work around being blocked or blocklisted won’t necessarily solve your problems, either. With the adoption of domain-based reputation and other fingerprinting techniques, ISPs can spot these tricks easily. Without fixing your root problem, you’ll be right back to square one. In addition, most email service providers (ESPs) won’t provide you with additional IP addresses without a clear business justification.

There are a few legitimate reasons to change your IP address or add more, however, such as acquiring a new company, changing ESP providers, rebranding, or sending a completely new type of email, like transactional emails. If you’re not using an ESP but are sending on your own, you can technically do whatever you want, but it’s still not a recommended practice.

To fix your email deliverability issues, start by diagnosing the problem with Litmus Spam Testing. See if you can figure out why major filters flag your emails. Otherwise, your new IP addresses will quickly become as sullied as your old ones did. Then hop over to Validity Everest to solve those deliverability woes.

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Myth #4: you only need to follow your country’s spam laws

No matter where your business is based, you must follow any international laws that apply to your subscribers. This means that if you have subscribers in Canada, Germany, and the U.S., for example, you must follow CASL, GDPR, and CAN-SPAM, since those laws govern each of those countries. These laws aren’t new, and they’re not negotiable. Your business practices must comply with these regulations or you risk major fines—not to mention crushing your brand reputation.

If you use Litmus Analytics, you can see where in the world your subscribers open your emails, which can serve as a guideline for which laws you must follow. But if we’re being totally honest, following only some of these privacy and data permission laws and not others can get you into hot water pretty quickly. That’s because these laws protect your subscribers from scammers—and trying to put together a segmentation rule for your California-based subscribers under CCPA just so you can get away with messing with your subscriber data just feels kind of icky, right?

Instead, these best practices will help you comply with most major spam laws:

• Require permission before sending email (either through single opt-in or double opt-in, though regulations vary on that as well).
• Include a clear unsubscribe link that works, and honor your unsubscribe promptly.
• Identify your email as promotional, and don’t use deceptive subject lines or preview text.
• Include a physical address of where you’re sending the email from.

This also includes laws related to AI-generated emails, which are quickly gaining steam in the U.S. and elsewhere. “The rise of AI has made it even easier, unfortunately, for scammers to dupe unsuspecting consumers. Marketers are going to need to move quickly to ensure compliance with a patchwork of local, state, federal and international legislation,” says Laura.

Now, we’re not lawyers, but by making sure you have permission and staying honest about your intentions when it comes to email will go a long way not just toward complying with the law, but with sending better email, too.

Myth #5: avoid words like ‘free’, all caps, emojis, or punctuation in subject lines

This myth applies to a myriad of spam filter “trigger words” that simply don’t exist. Though content does play a role in determining what is marked as spam, that doesn’t mean you can’t use exclamation marks or certain words. Copy like “Make money fast!” and “Work from home” can trigger a spam filter, but only if you have previous poor sending practices. It’s all about context.

Trigger words may have been an issue a decade ago, but spam filters have become so sophisticated that you no longer need to worry about them—unless you’ve already had a deliverability issue.

And go ahead and use all the emojis you want 🎉🥳🎊. Just make sure you’re not replacing words with them entirely, as that can impact your email accessibility.

In general, the content of your email matters more in how you engage your subscribers and less in making sure you’re avoiding specific words or phrases. It’s not that you can’t advertise your pricing and offerings—you can. But the more your emails add value for your subscribers rather than selling to them, the more likely they’ll open and click on the next email, making it more likely you’ll land in the inbox in the future.

That’s the reason you have to be careful with AI, too. Using ChatGPT or Claude to help write your email is fine, but if it’s vague, boring, or meh copy, it’s not going to do any favors for your deliverability.

“Email content influences spam complaints and subscriber engagement,” says Laura. “It’s no longer nice-to-have to use engaging subject lines that are aligned with the message content. And be aware of who you’re mailing to and when. I saw so many examples during California’s wildfire season of senders failing to suppress subscribers in these areas and using a fire emoji to promote their latest deal. That includes your triggered messages as well.”

The only way to know whether or not your subject line will work is to test it. Litmus Previews helps you view your subject line across multiple email clients and gives you a way to A/B test your subject lines to see what your audience likes and what they ignore.

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Myth #6: the problem must be the inbox service provider

If you’re having issues getting your emails delivered to the inbox, it’s easy to blame inbox providers, or ISPs. Your mailbox provider uses specific algorithms and spam filters that can impact where your message goes. As frustrating as it is to be relegated to Gmail’s “Promotions” tab, that’s actually where your message is supposed to go, and where subscribers expect it to be. Don’t blame your subscribers’ email provider for doing their job.

If you’re having deliverability issues and aren’t sure why, it’s probably not your ISP. Instead, it’s a good idea is to backtrack through your latest email sends and practices and do a deliverability audit:

• Did something specific change? Is my list criteria different, or have I changed my email frequency?
• Have I implemented a new policy or other framework?
• Have I been paying attention to my email list hygiene? Do I have a large group of inactive subscribers?
• Am I doing the same thing over and over again? And am I not targeting emails based on subscriber behavior, cleaned bounces from my list, or updated my opt-outs?
• Have I recently opted-in a large number of people through a sweepstakes or other giveaway that may have caused an increase in spam complaints?
• Have I recently purchased or rented an email list? (You should never, ever do that.)

There are so many factors that go into a positive sender reputation that it’s important to look at multiple elements, rather than chalk it up to a finicky ISP.

“Your reputation as a sender directly impacts your deliverability and your inbox placement. And there are many different metrics that make up your reputation,” says Laura. “It’s not just one metric, it’s a combination of factors, including spam traps, rejected rate, spam complaints, and unknown users.So it’s important to look at your reputation holistically.”

Problems usually come down to three areas: your sender behavior, your subscriber behavior, and your email authentication protocols. Validity can help you evaluate each one to determine what’s causing your deliverability issues and how you can make changes to fix them.

If you’re stuck after working on your deliverability and answering those questions, then (and only then!) you can also reach out to your ISP postmasters. A postmaster is the administrator of an email service. They deal with spam emails and sender reputation.

Once you’ve identified your problematic ISP, send them a report using these forms:

• Gmail
• Yahoo Mail
• Outlook

While outages and issues can occur, in most cases the reality is that the issue is with your permission practices and your marketing emails, not the ISP. Petitioning an ISP to remove blocks or calling their help desk won’t fix your problem, but it’s worth a shot if you’ve tried everything else.

Myth #7: the problem must be the email service provider

Similar to the ISP myth, it’s tempting when something’s gone wrong to have a knee-jerk reaction that “it’s not my problem.” While most reputable ESPs will work with you directly to interpret your deliverability issues based on available metrics, there are a few that perpetuate this myth by promoting that they guarantee high deliverability rates.

Issues can happen, but ultimately, deliverability issues come down to the quality and integrity of your mailing processes.

If you’re thinking that changing ESPs will help with deliverability rates, that’s not the case. If you’ve had deliverability problems before, they’re likely to follow to your next ESP. If you’ve recently changed ESPs and didn’t encounter issues before, it may be that you used to be on a shared infrastructure and are now on your own, or worse—the problems were there all along, but you didn’t have insight into the reporting.

Laura says, “ESPs will give you a delivery rate associated with your campaigns, but that’s not the same thing as deliverability. ESP reporting can tell you what percentage of messages are successfully sent, bounced, or rejected, but not necessarily whether your messages are delivered to the inbox or spam folder.. You’re going to want to track actual inbox placement over time, so you can easily identify and troubleshoot potential deliverability risks.”

Your ESP can’t wave a magic wand, but they can be your partner in identifying what the root cause of your issues are, and help you put a plan in place to fix them. While they will work on your behalf and will help you resolve some issues, the ultimate effort is on you.

Unfortunately, as much as we wish it to be true, there is no easy way out—though there can be some short-term band-aids, deliverability is a long-term endeavor. Only you have the power to change it.

Deliverability myths, busted

We originally wrote this post back in 2016 and many of these myths are still around a decade later. Of all the aspects of email marketing, deliverability feels the most shrouded in mystery—but much of it is in your control as an email marketer.

Creating personalized, relevant email campaigns, backing those campaigns up with the correct email authentication and compliance protocols, and prioritizing engagement as your success metric can help you work through your deliverability issues.

In summary:

Land in inboxes, not spam folders Reach more people, increase engagement, and protect your email performance with Validity Everest. BOOST DELIVERABILITY →

Kayla Voigt

Kayla Voigt is a B2B Freelance Writer.