Email deliverability is a hot topic lately. What is it all about, why should you care, and how do you improve it? Let’s discuss!
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is the ability to successfully deliver emails to recipients’ inboxes. Think about when you send an email to a client or co-worker. Do you intend for that email to reach their inbox, or would you prefer it bounce back to you? Obviously, we expect it to be delivered! But is that guaranteed?
Because spam is everywhere, emails pass through several checkpoints on their way to a recipient’s inbox. Compare it to an airport: various security checkpoints make sure only authorized flyers board the plane. Likewise, emails are checked by spam-fighting technology before they “board” the recipient’s inbox.
That’s where an email deliverability service helps. Think of it as a postman whose goal is to deliver each parcel successfully into the recipient’s mailbox.
How does email deliverability benefit your website?
On a website, an email deliverability service makes sure transactional emails are delivered, such as:
- eCommerce order notifications (new order, refunded order, cancelled order, order shipped)
- Administration emails (password changed, new user created, plugin updated)
- Contact form submissions
Those emails are valuable! The contact form is one of the most important elements of a website, and if you miss a submission, you could lose valuable business. (Related: why is my contact form not working?)
How do you improve email deliverability?
The answer is two-fold: domain DNS records and third-party deliverability services.
First, several DNS (Domain Name System) records, small bits of information added to your domain name, improve deliverability:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework) helps protect your domain against spoofing and helps keep your outgoing messages from being marked as spam.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a signature that helps prevent spoofing on outgoing messages sent from your domain.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is a standard authentication method that helps mail administrators stop attackers from spoofing their organization and domain.
In addition to those DNS records, there are several third-party services we can integrate with your website. Some are free, and some charge a minimal fee that grows with email volume:
- SendGrid is one of the industry-leading email deliverability services. Its dashboard shows analytics on every email along with its delivery status (opened, sent, bounced, unsubscribed and more).
- Elastic Email integrates with Cloudways at the server level and only needs a few DNS records to install. Clients on our high-performance cloud server already use this excellent service.
Do you need email deliverability?
Ultimately, everyone wants their emails delivered. At Pioneer Media, we set up all clients for optimal email deliverability. We recommend regularly testing your contact form. If a submission doesn’t arrive, let’s audit your email setup to see where deliverability can improve. Each client may need a personalized setup depending on their email provider (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, IONOS, Rackspace and others), since each has its own best practices.
Our goal is to make sure you receive every important website email so your business can succeed.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
