Probably not the best subject line, but it amused me :)

We're going to go on a quick detour today before we resume our journey into writing effective emails.

Because there's an area of email marketing that's massively overlooked yet has a huge impact.

Deliverability.

Us marketing types tend not to talk about deliverability much because it's not very glamorous. But the fact is that if your emails don't make it through to the inbox it doesn't matter how great they are, they won't have any impact.

And these days deliverability is getting increasingly tough. Email providers like Gmail and Outlook are determined to make sure that only the most important emails that their customers want get through to the primary inbox. And often commercial emails end up being filtered out.

Because of that, improving deliverability can often have a much bigger impact on your results than anything clever you can do with the content of your emails.

I don't claim to be the world's greatest expert on deliverability. But I've found 4 things that make a real difference:

1. Get the technical stuff right.
   Email systems use stuff like Sender ID and DKIM to authenticate that emails coming from your email marketing system are genuinely from you. If you don't have these set up correctly you can really damage deliverability. Your email marketing system provider will have details on how to do this in their help files.
   
2. Get your email address whitelisted.
   Getting your subscribers to add you to their address book and other steps to make sure your emails get through can definitely help and it's easy to do. My whitelisting instructions are here. They were created using Chris Lang's free whitelist generator.
   
   By the way – if you haven't done so already, adding my email address to your contacts list and dragging my emails to the primary tab if you're on gmail would be super helpful – thanks!)
   
3. Write Engaging Emails that get Opened, Read and Replied.
   Easier said than done of course, but the more your subscribers open, read and take action on your emails, the more email providers like gmail or yahoo think that your emails are worth sending to the inbox for everyone using their systems. And conversely, the more people ignore your emails the more likely they are to get sent to spam or just filtered out across the whole system.
   
4. Actively Manage Engagement.
   This is really the corollary to point 3. If you have subscribers who don't open your emails for a significant amount of time, then there's a good chance they're never going to open them and they're simply sending signals to the email providers that your emails should go into spam.
   
   Most email marketing systems have engagement management features or the ability to create automations that let you manage this.
   
   Of course it's not quite black and white. Some may spring back into life – especially if you have a long sales cycle. So my preference is to reduce the frequency of sending to them rather than delete them completely. But either way, you need to do something to prevent building up a big rump of unengaged subscribers who drag down your deliverability.

Hopefully that wasn't quite as boring as I made out :) And it's certainly something you should be looking at if you want to succeed with email marketing.