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Deliverability best practices

Email deliverability is the ability to land your emails in the inbox rather than the spam or promotions folder. Even if your email is technically delivered, poor deliverability can mean it never gets seen by your recipients.

What is deliverability and why does it matter?

Deliverability is not just about emails being sent — it’s about where they land and how they perform. Poor deliverability leads to:

  • Low open and engagement rates
  • Higher bounce and complaint ratios
  • Domain or IP blocklisting

Good deliverability ensures that your audience receives, opens, and trusts your emails.

Pre-requisites to manage deliverability

Before optimizing deliverability, ensure the basics are in place:

These tools help track sender reputation, spam complaint rates, and inbox placement.

How MX18 helps with deliverability

MX18 offers a robust Deliverability Suite to give you visibility and control over your sender health. Our tools include:

  • Reputation Monitoring
  • Blocklist Detection & Management
  • Inbox Placement Reports
  • Feedback Loop & Complaint Handling
  • Spam Trap Intelligence
  • DMarc alignment reporting

Want to activate MX18 Deliverability Suite? Reach out to support@mx18.com or sign up

Best practices to maintain healthy deliverability

Following these guidelines can significantly improve your inbox rates:

Maintain a clean database

  • Only send to users who have explicitly subscribed
  • Remove invalid, bounced, and inactive emails regularly
  • Do not purchase or rent email lists

Use double opt-in

  • Confirm user interest with a verification email before adding them to your list
  • Reduces complaints and fake signups

Respect unsubscribes and suppressions

  • Honor opt-outs immediately
  • Remove suppressed users from active campaigns
  • Use suppression lists across all domains and campaigns

Monitor non-openers and update preferences

  • Remove users who haven’t engaged in 90+ days
  • Offer preference management (frequency, categories, pause options)

Send relevant and segmented content

  • Use behavior- or interest-based segmentation
  • Avoid batch-and-blast to your full list

More resources from major ISPs

Need help?

Need a deliverability audit or facing inbox issues?

  • Contact our team at support@mx18.com or sign up
  • We’ll walk you through fixing low engagement, spam complaints, and domain/IP reputation issues