The goal of any email is to reach the inbox – not the spam folder! We take a closer look at how to improve your email deliverability with common best practices and the Email for Trello Power-Up.

Email deliverability is all about making sure your messages land in people’s inboxes, not their spam folders! From maintaining a healthy sender reputation to creating engaging content, and ensuring your recipient lists are clean and active, this guide covers essential tips for boosting email deliverability.

Plus, we show you how SendBoard’s Email for Trello Power-Up supports common email best practices to help you optimize your email campaigns for maximum impact.

How to improve email deliverability

Maintain a healthy sender reputation

Sender reputation is a measure of how trustworthy you are as a sender. It’s a score that’s tied to your email domain and built up over time. Ultimately, a good sender reputation contributes to making sure your emails land in your customer’s inbox, and not in their spam folder.

Keep in mind that your sender reputation is based on a few things: it’s not just about how many people unsubscribe or mark your emails as spam, but also includes the security measures you have in place, email content that you share, and the health of the email lists that you keep. We’ll discuss each of these aspects further below, but here are a few good tips to start with.

• Use an IP with a good reputation. If you use the Email for Trello Power-Up, you’re already off to a good start! We use Postmark for sending and receiving emails. All Postmark IPs maintain a high reputation, which in turn can improve your domain reputation (provided you follow other best practices for sending email).

• Set up a reply-to email address. Being able to reply to marketing emails is a better experience for your contacts and is also less likely to be punished by spam filters. Learn more about how to set up a custom reply-to address in Email for Trello.

• Avoid sending tactics used by spammers. Don’t flood people’s inboxes, don’t buy email lists, and always use a familiar sender name. Spammers often change their details frequently to avoid detection by spam filters, so it’s a good idea to include your business details in your emails as you’re less likely to be filtered out as spam.

Stay on top of authentication and security

It’s important to keep up to date with the latest authentication protocols, so that you can make sure your domain is secure. If you’re using the Email for Trello Power-Up, we take care of the most important of these for you:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework), which prevents spammers from impersonating your domain and damaging your reputation as a sender.

• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), which confirms the identity of the sender and makes sure your emails can’t be intercepted.

It’s also useful and recommended to set up DMARC, which helps you monitor who’s using your email domain and generates a report of all the different people (that you may not even be aware of!) that are sending from your domain. Visit our help center to find out more about email authentication.

Create relevant and engaging content

Low-quality email content can lead to spam issues. To further improve your email deliverability, it’s useful to keep the following points in mind:

• Avoid spammy words. Certain words (like ‘Urgent’, ‘Act Now!’ or ‘Free Money’) are a red flag for spam filters. The same goes for using ALL CAPS and too many exclamation points!!! Use your judgment and don’t make wild claims or unrealistic promises. If it sounds too pushy, desperate or spammy – it probably is.

• Test your emails before you send. There are lots of free tools out there (like mail-tester.com, mailtrap.io and mxtoolbox.com) to help you determine the spamminess of your emails – before you press send!

• Link to your own content. Wherever possible, try to link to high-quality content on your own website. Sending recipients to external links with a low reputation can have a negative knock-on effect on your reputation. While you’re at it, avoid using URL shorteners too as they are also known to impact deliverability.

• Personalize your messages. Tailoring the text of the email to your recipient (i.e. ‘Hi {%recipientFirstname%}’) is a great customer engagement strategy – and also helps you boost email deliverability. Learn how to include variables and Custom Fields in your emails or subject lines in the Email for Trello help center.

Send emails to clean and engaged recipient lists

Keeping your mailing list clean is also an important part of email deliverability. Here’s how to practice good list hygiene, so that you can keep up your deliverability and engagement rates:

• Only send emails people want. Unsolicited email is a big no-no and one of the main contributors to high spam complaints. Only send emails to people who want and expect to receive them.

• Remove faulty email addresses. Periodically review your lists for any inaccurate or fraudulent email addresses. This helps to reduce your bounce rate (and a high bounce rate can reduce the likelihood of your emails making it to the inboxes of valid contacts).

• Always honor unsubscribe requests. We realize it can be disheartening, but sometimes contacts do unsubscribe or stop engaging with emails. It’s better to keep sending to a smaller, engaged list, rather than a large list of disinterested recipients who drag down your engagement metrics and impact on your reputation.

Boost your email deliverability

By focusing on sender reputation, authentication, content quality and list hygiene, you can significantly boost your email deliverability, improve your engagement rates, and achieve more with your email marketing campaigns.