Avoid attachments if possible… especially stuff that adds no value like images in your signature. Use linked images instead of embedded (attached) images
Make sure youe Email Service Provider (ESP) supports including a plain text version of your email along with the HTML version. If not, find a new ESP.
Use branding to make sure recipients know it’s really from you. You don’t want them accidentally marking it as spam.
Every campaign/appeal email you send should have a single addressee. DO NOT use the old “BCC 50 recipients trick” and think you won’t get marked as spam… because you definitely will
Clean up hard-bounces – if an email address hard-bounces, remove that from your mailing list ASAP. Repeated attempts to contact a non-existent email address will make you look sketchy to downstream email servers.
Use an appropriate Opt-In process … Don’t purchase lists of email addresses to populate your subscriber base
Are you using a custom Tracking Domain? (because you should be!)
Are you using tracking pixels in your emails? If you’re using a platform such as SalesLoft, then you absolutely are. These are tiny image links embedded in your emails that are invisible to recipients, but are followed by your email client to display the [invisible] image. Each email sent typically has a unique URL for these images which makes it possible to track email open rates on a person-by-person basis.
The problem arises when the domain of these links doesn’t match the domain of the email sender. For example, the email comes from “brian@smalltechstack.com”, but the tracking image URLs are something like https://tracking.salesloft.com/ufhwurh-fusrah-fysdhts.jpg.
When links inside an email (for images or for anything else) don’t match the domain of the email sender, your “spam score” goes up and increases the risk of your email ending up in the junk folder.
Most marketing platforms with tracking will allow you to set up a custom domain to use for these tracking links… Follow those instructions so that your tracking links look more like https://trk.smalltechstack.com/ufhwurh-fusrah-fysdhts.jpg
