Delivering emails to your users' primary inbox is key to your app's success.

There are 4 key components that drive successful delivery:

1. Email Authentication
2. Sender Reputation
3. Sending Infrastructure
4. Email Content

Amply gives you the tools you need to stay on top of all of these factors. Let's dive in!

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🔖 Email Authentication

The first thing you need to do before sending email is to configure email authentication protocols. This is so that mailbox providers and recipients can confirm that you as a sender and that the emails you're sending are legitimate. The 3 email authentication methods you need to set up to maximize email deliverability are SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance).

Amply uses all 3 of these types of authentication. When you create an account with Amply, you'll see the appropriate records within your DNS registrar. You can see directly within your account when all of these records are verified and set up correctly.

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Check out the Authentication section within our Deliverability Guide to get more details on all 3 of these protocols.

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🏅Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation is a key component of email deliverability. Before placing an email in the inbox of a recipient, mailbox providers screen the email to make sure that it passes certain reputation checks. They primarily look at the sender’s reputation, the server/IP reputation used to route the email, the domain reputation of links in the content, and specific email engagement metrics such as bounce and spam complaint rates.

A sender reputation is the reputation of the email address you’re using to send emails from. The success of your emails is reliant on you having a positive sender reputation as it indicates that your IP address and sending domain are trustworthy to mailbox providers. In order to maintain a positive, healthy sender reputation, you must send messages to known users to avoid bounces, spam traps, and blacklists.

Bounces

You need to pay attention to bounces. A bounce is an email that has not been delivered to a user. There are 2 types of bounces – soft and hard.

Soft Bounces

A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure. Soft bounces happen when a mailbox is full, a mailbox has been disabled and is not accepting messages, the mail system is full, there is network congestion, etc. In the case of a soft bounce, the email address you sent to was valid and reached the recipient’s mail server, but the message could not be delivered.

Hard Bounces

The real problem lies with hard bounces. A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure. Typical hard bounces occur when an email address is invalid or expired, the user’s mailbox was not found, the recipient is not local to the server, etc. You want to avoid email addresses that hard bounce as it will negatively affect your sender reputation.

Spam Traps

Sending to known users will also help you avoid spam traps. A spam trap is a fake email address primarily used by internet service providers and email clients to lure in spammers. Sending email to spam traps will label you as a spammer and cause your deliverability to decline. Avoid purchasing lists with unknown or fake users so that you don’t get caught in a spam trap.

Spam Complaints

You want to avoid spam complaints as much as possible. Spam complaints occur when your recipients click on the “mark as spam” button that is located in each email. This happens much less with programmatic emails since they're typically requested messages by users, but they still occur. Pay attention to unengaged users and anyone who reports your emails as spam.

Unsubscribes

Make it easy for your users to unsubscribe from your emails by adding an unsubscribe link in each of your emails. Although this might sound counterintuitive, it’s much better if one of your users opts to unsubscribe from your emails than if they were to report your email to spam out of frustration instead. Providing your users with a clearly visible and obvious unsubscribe link in each email will drive down your complaint rate significantly.

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Amply's monitoring tool tracks all bounce, spam report, and unsubscribe events in real-time. You can customize different detection methods and thresholds to suit your needs. Check out our Monitors tool here to learn more.

Blocklists

Be conscious of being placed on a blocklist. Email blocklists include lists of IP addresses and sender domains that have been suspected or caught sending spam. If your IP gets blocklisted, your email delivery will take a massive hit.

Amply monitors your email reputation 24/7 and alerts you if we detect you on a blocklist.

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🏗️ Sending Infrastructure

The IP address or addresses you send from play a significant role in making sure your emails get delivered. when you're using a shared IP, you're sharing your reputation with other senders. With a dedicated IP, you have full control of your sending reputation. This requires you to be sending a signification enough volume to be able to see the best results as an isolated sender. We recommend getting a dedicated IP if you're sending minimum 25k emails/month.

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Amply provides you with unlimited, free dedicated IPs to ensure the best deliverability for your operation.

It can be difficult to know whether to start with a dedicated or shared IP to see the best results. That's why we automate the process for you with our Intelligent Routing feature, where we'll choose the best routing option for you based on your needs. Learn more about it here.

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Amply makes it easy to stay up to date with your infrastructure health within your DevOps Dashboard. Learn more about it here.

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🎞 Email Content

The content you display in your transactional emails is a major determining factor of whether your email gets placed in the recipient’s inbox or is marked as spam. To achieve excellent deliverability, it’s critical that you follow the practices outlined below.

Relevance

The most important thing to consider is that you’re sending relevant content to your recipients. Your content needs to be in line with what you do and should go over how you can benefit your users with your messaging. If your content isn’t relevant to your brand, you run the risk of dealing with unsubscribes, or even worse, being reported.

In addition to sending your contacts applicable content, it’s best to be consistent with how your design looks. Your email content is a significant aspect of your brand identity and should match the design aesthetic of your website or other marketing material to invoke a sense of trust and familiarity with your recipients.

Subject Line

When it comes to relevant content, the first thing that your recipients see before they read your email is your subject line. Recipients and spam filters will often report email as spam due to the subject line alone. Make sure that you’re not including any language that sounds spammy in your subject line, and try to avoid including spam-sounding keywords in your email content as well. A couple of examples of types of content that indicate spam are – capitalization of every word, too much punctuation, HTML mistakes, and specific words that trigger spam. See more here.

Professional Email Address

We highly advise against sending your transactional emails from a free, personal email address. Your brand identity is a very important part of your business and it’s imperative that your email initiatives reflect that. A personal email address such as an Outlook or Gmail account will be treated as spam by different filters in our infrastructure.

In addition, mailbox providers and internet service provider’s implementation of the email authentication protocol DMARC penalizes the practice of sending programmatic emails from personal accounts. That is why when you first set up an account with Amply, you’ll go through a quick verification process for either your email account or domain. The best thing you can do for your deliverability is to use a professional email address from a domain name that your recipients can trust.

Text-Image Ratio

When you’re putting together your email content, you need to make sure that you find the right balance between using images and text. The reason for this is because an email with a lot of images can look like spam. That being said, your contacts will prefer emails with some visual substance over pure plain-text content. We recommend using more text than images in your email content to ensure strong deliverability. Aim for a 60:40 text-to-image ratio.

In addition to properly displaying a text/image ratio in your email content, it’s a good idea to add a plain-text version along with your HTML emails. Email clients will show the most suitable email version to your recipients based on their preferred settings.

Mobile-Friendly

Since roughly 50% of emails are read on your users’ phones, it’s essential that you design your email content to be mobile-friendly. Formatting emails that are compatible across all mediums will help you avoid complaints and improve the efficacy of your email initiatives. With Amply, you can preview what your email content will look like for both desktop and mobile to ensure that the layout is properly displayed before sending them to your users.

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📋 Summary

1. Configure Authentication Protocols SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
2. Avoid bounces, spam complaints, and blocklists - use Amply's monitoring tool to track all of these events
3. Make sure you're sending from the right IP address - automate this process with Deliverability Strategies
4. Send from a professional email address, use relevant content that is mobile friendly, and avoid spammy subject lines and words. Use more text than images in your content.

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If you follow these best practices you'll see great results!