Email Deliverability: Technical Optimisation Checklist

Introduction

Email deliverability refers to whether the emails you send actually reach your recipient’s inbox.

This is a crucial aspect of every e-commerce store’s email marketing strategy. Ideally, you want your promotions and newsletters to avoid the spam folder—otherwise, your open rate could plummet.

I – Understanding

1 – The Journey of an Email

Every email—whether transactional, marketing, or personal—goes through at least four stages before it lands in the inbox:

1. It is sent from an Email Service Provider to the recipient’s email provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Orange, etc.).
2. The email provider performs an initial filter by rejecting certain emails, such as those sent to full inboxes. These emails, which don’t reach their destination, are called “bounces”.
3. Delivered emails are then subjected to an anti-spam filter to assess their trustworthiness and relevance for each recipient. For example, if a recipient has previously marked one of your emails as spam, future messages are very likely to be sent directly to their spam folder.
4. Depending on the results of these anti-spam filters, the recipient receives the email in either their inbox or their spam folder.

This process all happens within seconds or minutes depending on server locations.

ShopiMind uses servers in France as well as worldwide to guarantee minimal delivery times.

2 – Delivered Email Rate

Deliverability rate is often mistakenly confused with delivered email rate, but these are two very different statistics.

Delivered email rate is calculated as the total sent emails minus the number of bounced emails.

This includes both soft and hard bounces.

These figures are automatically calculated based on bounce feedback from email providers. They do not include emails redirected to the spam folder.

A good delivered email rate is above 95%.

3 – Deliverability Rate

By contrast, the deliverability rate is impossible to calculate precisely, as the number of emails sent to spam is not provided by email providers.

However, you can make an estimate using the open rate by email provider.

For example: an open rate of 30% with Orange and 2% with Gmail for the same campaign is a sign of a deliverability issue with Gmail. It means the provider is flagging your emails as spam.

Email providers base their anti-spam filtering on multiple factors, which can be grouped into four main categories: sending infrastructure, database (recipient addresses), marketing strategy, and the reputation of your domain and IP.

II – Improving Your Infrastructure

For your email campaigns, it’s essential to use secure servers optimised for mass mailing with dedicated or shared IPs.

These servers automate the management of SPF and DKIM authentication standards. These tools help email providers fight against identity theft. Any mass mailing that doesn’t follow these protocols won’t pass the anti-spam filters.

Finally, make sure to standardise your domains for sending, return, and link redirection.

ShopiMind has made it easy to set up DKIM authentication for your domain. You can also align your sending and return domains and configure link redirections so your domain always appears.

When it comes to IP addresses, their management is handled by the Deliverability team, who allocate senders based on various criteria.

If your domain has a strong reputation and consistently high sending volumes, you may be given a dedicated IP address.

If your domain doesn’t yet have a reputation or only sends small volumes—not enough to build up its own reputation—you’ll be assigned to a shared server.

The better you look after your deliverability, the better your IP reputations will be.

Every ShopiMind IP is monitored daily. The Deliverability team also manages any delisting requests and will contact you if you’re responsible for a blacklist entry.

Our servers are optimised for email sending and regularly updated to maintain a top-quality infrastructure.

For each of your sends, the infrastructure automatically adjusts routing speed, ensuring fast delivery.

III – Taking Care of Your Database

Having healthy contact lists is the foundation of effective communication.

There are two main ways to collect your customers’ email addresses:

1. Opt-In: This is where you gain explicit consent from a customer or visitor to send them messages. It’s usually a checkbox on a registration form.
2. Double Opt-In: Here, registration is confirmed by an automated email asking the prospect to validate their address. This ensures the address is active and that the client genuinely wants your emails. This also helps you avoid being marked as spam and increases your open and engagement rates.

Note that opt-in is a legal requirement under GDPR, while double opt-in is recommended but optional.

Once you’ve built your contact list, you need to maintain it with processes for bounce handling, complaints, and unsubscribes.

We strongly recommend removing inactive contacts—those who have not interacted with your campaigns or site for several months—from your sends.

To make harmful address management easier, ShopiMind automatically quarantines problem addresses. This includes hard bounces, recipients who have made complaints, and identified spamtraps.

The quarantine is a list of addresses that negatively impact your deliverability. For example, if a recipient marks your emails as spam several times, their address will be quarantined to avoid their provider considering all your messages as spam.

Via your client account, you can monitor a range of statistics, including those for deliverability: bounce rate, complaints, unsubscribes, and open rates.

IV – Improving Your Marketing Strategy and Reputation

Marketing strategy is a key pillar of deliverability—especially segmenting your mailing lists.

Segmentation means considering the differences within your audience. A new newsletter subscriber and a customer who orders three times a month have very different expectations.

Better targeting your database with tailored content helps you boost engagement (open rates, clicks, conversions) and reduce the risk of complaints.

So, segmentation has a major impact on your reputation.With your segmentation in place, you can easily adjust the volume and frequency of your sends to maintain consistency.

These adjustments should be based on your returned statistics: delivered rate, bounce rate, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate (spam reports).

There’s a difference between emails landing directly in the spam folder and those that reach the inbox but are manually moved to spam or reported by recipients.

The first are invisible, but the latter can be tracked. You can check this data in your client account under the “Statistics” tab labelled “Spams”.

Note: Emails which comply with design and content guidelines are more likely to pass spam filters, and are more likely to be read and trusted by recipients. ShopiMind is preparing a dedicated article on optimising email marketing content—coming soon.

Every sender can adapt their marketing strategy to suit their audience. However, ShopiMind also offers an audit service to check your strategy’s effectiveness. The main criteria (content testing, targeting, and segmentation) can be reviewed in depth to provide you with tailored recommendations.

Additionally, the Deliverability team uses a full suite of reputation tracking tools. They can therefore alert you quickly if any unusual patterns appear.

Conclusion

You now have all the tools you need to optimise your deliverability. By carefully managing your emails and monitoring your performance, you’ll steadily increase your open rates.

As the open rate directly impacts your click rate, it’s easy to see that deliverability is closely linked to your return on investment.

Over to you!

The Author

Deliverability Manager at ShopiMind, Béranger has a background in web technology. He began as an email developer and quickly specialised in deliverability.

For 8 years now, he’s developed his expertise and deepened his understanding of email marketing filtering rules.

His two main roles are guiding you on email marketing best practices and optimising technical infrastructure to ensure the best possible deliverability.

Glossary

Deliverability: Deliverability means the email has landed in the recipient’s inbox.

Domain Name: A unique name that identifies a person or organisation online, so you don’t need to remember a long IP address. It’s like a physical postal address, but on the web.

IP: An identification number for each device connected to a network using the Internet protocol. In this article, it refers to the sending IP for your newsletters and mailings.

Email Provider: A type of email host who provides servers so users can send, receive, accept, and store email from other organisations or users.

Bounces: These are emails that do not reach the recipient’s inbox, either because the address doesn’t exist or the inbox is full.