This guide will help you boost email deliverability, with tips and best practices for all teams to ensure your emails always reach your audience inboxes.
Every time your emails land in spam instead of inboxes, you lose potential revenue, risk email account penalties, and waste valuable time on messaging that never reaches its intended audience. For B2B sales and marketing teams, email deliverability isn't just a technical metric, it's the foundation of successful outreach and a direct driver of pipeline generation.
With nearly half (45%) of all global email traffic categorized as spam according to Statista, email deliverability challenges cost businesses millions in lost opportunities every year, yet many teams lack the tools and knowledge needed to navigate increasingly complex filtering systems that determine whether their carefully crafted messages reach prospects or disappear into spam folders.
This comprehensive guide will explore what email deliverability is, why it matters for your business outcomes, the factors that influence it, and proven strategies to improve your inbox placement rates. You'll also discover how Allegrow's specialized B2B deliverability tools can help you overcome common challenges and maximize the return on your email outreach efforts.
Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to successfully reach recipients' inboxes rather than being filtered to spam folders or blocked entirely. While many confuse this with simply getting an email delivered to a server, true deliverability focuses specifically on inbox placement, whether your message appears where recipients will actually see it.
This distinction is critical because emails that technically "deliver" but land in spam folders have significantly reduced visibility. Industry data suggests that many recipients check spam folders only a few times a year or not at all, severely limiting your ability to connect with these contacts once your messages are filtered away from the primary inbox.
Understanding and optimizing for true inbox placement, rather than just delivery confirmations, gives you visibility into where your emails actually land across different email providers and B2B environments, a critical first step toward improving your overall email performance.
When your email deliverability suffers, every aspect of your outreach strategy is undermined. Low open rates often have less to do with ineffective subject lines and more to do with poor inbox placement; your messages simply aren't being seen.
For B2B sales teams, deliverability directly impacts pipeline generation and revenue opportunities. When prospects don't see your messages, you lose the chance to establish relationships, qualify leads, and move deals forward. This translates directly to longer sales cycles, reduced team productivity, and diminished campaign ROI.
When deliverability issues go unaddressed, teams often waste resources creating "better" content or changing strategies when the root problem is that their messages aren't reaching inboxes in the first place. By focusing on deliverability as a foundation, you ensure that your other optimization efforts have the opportunity to make an impact.
Understanding the distinction between delivery and deliverability is essential for diagnosing and solving email performance issues.
Email delivery simply refers to the successful transmission of your email to the recipients' mail server. When an email is "delivered," it means the message wasn't immediately rejected, the server accepted it for processing. However, this tells you nothing about where that email ended up after processing.
Email deliverability, by contrast, refers to the successful placement of your email in the recipient's inbox (not spam or promotions folders) where it's likely to be seen and opened. This is the true measure of whether your message has a chance of reaching your audience.
Traditional email tools typically only track and report on delivery metrics, giving you a false sense of security. You might see a 99% delivery rate while half your emails are actually landing in spam folders. That’s why tools such as Allegrow are needed, so you can accurately measure real inbox placement across B2B environments, showing you exactly where your emails are landing and why.
Email deliverability rate measures the percentage of your emails that successfully reach recipients' primary inboxes rather than landing in spam folders or being blocked entirely. This differs from bounce rates, which only indicate whether emails were rejected by receiving servers.
For optimal email campaign performance, you should aim for a deliverability rate of 90% or higher, meaning at least 90% of your sent emails should reach the primary inbox.
However, deliverability benchmarks vary by industry and email type:
Marketing Emails/Newsletters:
Source: Email Tool Tester
Cold Outreach/Sales Emails:
When deliverability issues become severe, they can affect not just prospecting emails but critical business communications with existing customers. This creates significant business risk, potentially delaying deals or damaging customer relationships. Spring Labs solved this problem by implementing proper domain separation and deliverability monitoring, achieving a consistent 95% sender reputation compared to their previous low 80% score.
Read the full deliverability case study here.
Another reliable indicator of good email deliverability is maintaining a low bounce rate, ideally under 1% for most campaigns and absolutely below 2.8%. According to Outreach this is the threshold where most email providers begin to flag senders for spam filtering.
Personal email users might experience bounce rates of 5-8% without consequences, while commercial senders face much stricter standards. The difference exists because of volume and impact; when thousands of messages bounce rather than a handful, email systems detect potential list quality issues that could indicate spam activity.
Poor deliverability creates an invisible drain on your revenue pipeline that many businesses fail to recognize until significant damage has been done.
Consider this scenario: If your sales team sends 2,000 prospecting emails daily with a target conversion rate of 1%, but 40% of those emails land in spam folders, you're potentially losing 8 qualified opportunities daily. For a team with an average deal size of $1,000, that represents $8,000 in potential pipeline loss every day, or over $240,000 monthly.
Even more concerning, this loss typically goes undiagnosed. Teams attribute poor performance to market conditions, messaging quality, or list selection, while the true cause, deliverability, remains unaddressed. This creates a cycle of changing strategies and messaging without addressing the core issue preventing emails from reaching recipients.
Beyond immediate revenue loss, poor email practices harm your brand reputation with both email providers and potential customers:
Each spam complaint contributes to this downward spiral, with research from the DMA showing that 49% of consumers will not open marketing emails from an unrecognised sender, and 50% will mark unrecognised messages as spam.
For this, Allegrow developed the Safety Net feature that proactively protects your domain reputation by automatically preventing emails to risky contacts that are likely to harm your sender reputation dramatically reducing both bounces and potential spam complaints while preserving your deliverability and brand standing.
Understanding the factors that influence email deliverability is essential for developing effective strategies to improve inbox placement. Let's examine the most critical elements that determine whether your emails reach the inbox or get filtered to spam.
Your sender reputation is a score that email providers assign to your domain based on your sending practices and recipient engagement. This reputation follows your domain and largely determines whether your emails reach inboxes or get filtered to spam.
Key factors that influence sender reputation include:
It’s also important to note that domain reputation has become significantly more important than IP reputation in modern email delivery, particularly for B2B senders. We go deeper into this topic on our content about how domain and IP reputation affect your deliverability.
With this in mind, Allegrow continuously monitors your domain reputation across major email providers, alerting you to changes before they impact your campaign performance and providing guidance on improving your standing.
The content of your emails plays a significant role in deliverability, with spam filters analyzing numerous elements to determine whether messages should reach the inbox.
Common Spam Triggers:
B2B emails face particular scrutiny, as corporate filters often apply stricter standards than consumer email providers. Many organizations employ multiple layers of filtering, including both third-party and proprietary systems, creating a more complex deliverability landscape.
Testing different variations of your email content can significantly improve deliverability. A/B testing email messages allows you to identify which elements of your message might be triggering spam filters and adjust accordingly. Small changes in wording, formatting, or link placement can dramatically affect inbox placement rates.
To streamline this process, Allegrow created the Content Placement Analysis feature to evaluate your messages before sending, identifying elements likely to trigger spam filters and allowing you to refine content for better inbox placement without the trial and error of manual testing.
How recipients interact with your emails has become one of the most influential factors in deliverability. Gmail, Microsoft and other modern email providers closely monitor engagement signals to determine whether future messages should reach the inbox:
Positive engagement signals include:
Negative engagement signals include:
These engagement patterns create a feedback loop: better engagement leads to better deliverability, which leads to more engagement. Conversely, poor engagement can trigger a downward spiral that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
Email deliverability tools help maintain positive engagement by identifying which messages and senders generate the strongest positive signals, then helping you replicate those patterns across your outreach strategy.
The technical foundation of your email sending plays a crucial role in deliverability success. Proper set up of authentication protocols are essential, providing email providers with verification that you are who you claim to be. Allegrow tests all three key protocols hourly in its authentication dashboard, ensuring your technical foundation remains solid.
SPF is an email authentication method that verifies whether a sending server is authorized to send email on behalf of your domain. It works by creating a DNS record that lists all servers permitted to send email from your domain.
Without proper SPF configuration, email providers may suspect spoofing attempts and filter your messages to spam. According to AutoSPF, emails failing SPF checks have a 30% higher chance of landing in spam folders.
DKIM adds a digital signature to your emails that verifies they haven't been altered in transit. This cryptographic authentication helps prevent email tampering and spoofing while building trust with receiving mail servers.
DKIM implementation involves adding a digital signature to your email headers and publishing the corresponding public key in your DNS records. Email providers check this signature to verify the email's authenticity and integrity. While slightly more complex to set up than SPF, this protocol provides crucial protection against tampering and forgery.
DMARC builds upon SPF and DKIM to create a comprehensive authentication framework. It allows domain owners to specify how email providers should handle messages that fail authentication checks, providing instructions to reject, quarantine, or allow such messages.
DMARC also enables reporting, giving you visibility into authentication failures and potential abuse of your domain. According to Agari, implementing DMARC can improve email conversion rates by up to 10% while significantly reducing the risk of domain spoofing.
The technical infrastructure supporting your email program becomes increasingly important as you scale your sending volume. As your volume grows, your infrastructure must maintain consistent performance without triggering spam filters or delivery failures.
At the foundation, your choice of email service provider forms the backbone of your sending infrastructure, with its most common options:
IP allocation decisions also become more complex as volume increases. You'll need to evaluate whether dedicated IPs might be necessary versus shared IPs. While dedicated IPs offer more control, they require careful management and consistent volume to maintain good standing.
PRO TIP: If you’d like to dive deeper, we’ve a full guide that explains how domain and IP reputation influence inbox placement.
It’s also important to consider warm-up protocols when increasing scale. By gradually ramping up sending rather than launching at full volume, you establish reputation with email providers and avoid the sudden spikes that resemble spammer behavior.
As your program scales, feedback loops and monitoring systems become critical components to process bounces and complaints while maintaining real-time visibility into deliverability metrics. These systems allow you to address issues before they compound into major problems.
For B2B sales teams using platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, or Close CRM, understanding how these tools interact with your underlying email infrastructure is essential for maintaining deliverability at scale. Each platform has specific configuration requirements and limitations that must be considered in your overall sending strategy.
With Allegrow's native integrations with these leading platforms, you get automated monitoring and protection within your existing workflow. This enables seamless implementation of deliverability best practices without disruption, helping you maintain consistent inbox placement as you scale your outreach efforts.
Implementing proven deliverability strategies can significantly improve your inbox placement and ensure your messages reach your intended audience. The following best practices address the key factors that influence email deliverability and provide a framework for sustainable success.
Maintaining clean email lists is perhaps the single most important factor in preserving good deliverability. According to a HubSpot research, email lists naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year as contacts change jobs, abandon email addresses, or simply disengage.
Proper list hygiene involves regularly removing hard bounces and invalid addresses from your database, as these harm your sender reputation when you continue attempting to contact them. Identifying and removing spam traps and honeypot addresses is equally critical, as hitting these monitoring addresses can trigger immediate blacklisting.
Additionally, segment inactive subscribers who haven't engaged in 90+ days for re-engagement campaigns or removal. The source of your contacts also matters tremendously, never purchase email lists, as they typically contain invalid addresses, spam traps, and disengaged users that damage reputation.
These practices, while essential, can be time-consuming and technically challenging to implement consistently amid the pressures of meeting outreach quotas. Most teams face a dilemma: proper list hygiene is required for deliverability, but manual processes are often too burdensome to maintain.
Advanced deliverability platforms like Allegrow solve this by automating list hygiene, automatically detecting and removing dangerous addresses including dead emails, known spam reporters, and harmful contacts. This proactive approach helps maintain pristine lists without the manual effort that often leads teams to neglect proper list hygiene.
Email warm-up is the process of gradually increasing your sending volume to establish a positive reputation with email providers. This is particularly important for new domains or when significantly increasing your sending volume.
A proper warm-up follows these principles:
Read more on our post on how to properly warm up your email domain to ensure strong inbox placement from the start.
While authentication and list hygiene create the foundation for good deliverability, content optimization helps ensure your messages resonate with both recipients and filtering algorithms.
Subject Line Best Practices:
Content Structure:
The challenge is identifying content issues before sending, as problems aren't obvious until deliverability has already suffered. Content testing tools like Allegrow's Content Placement Analysis help identify potential spam triggers proactively, allowing you to optimize messages before they impact your sender reputation.
Adhering to email regulations isn't just a legal requirement, it also supports better deliverability by aligning with practices email providers reward.
Key regulations affecting email marketing and sales outreach include:
These regulations are continually evolving, requiring organizations to stay informed and work with legal professionals on compliance strategies while implementing technical best practices that align with these laws' requirements. Good deliverability practices like maintaining clean lists, honoring unsubscribe requests promptly, and being transparent about data usage, often complement compliance efforts while optimizing inbox placement rates.
Effective monitoring is essential for maintaining strong email deliverability over time. Without proper tracking systems in place, issues can escalate before you have a chance to address them.
Effective email deliverability management requires monitoring several key metrics to identify and address issues before they impact performance.
Some of the key metrics to track are:
Each metric provides unique insights into different aspects of your email program's performance. Regular monitoring of these metrics creates an early warning system that allows you to address deliverability issues at their earliest stages, before they significantly impact your outreach performance and bottom line.
Several tools exist to help monitor and improve email deliverability, each offering different capabilities and specializations. Understanding the options available helps you select the right solution for your specific needs.
Popular Email Deliverability tools:
Each tool type serves different needs, from basic visibility to comprehensive protection. Most B2B sales teams find that solutions integrating directly with their sales engagement platforms provide the most seamless protection and actionable insights.
Check our recent post for a detailed comparison of the best email deliverability tools’ features, pricing, and use cases to help select the right solution for your specific requirements.
Modern spam filters use sophisticated algorithms to evaluate incoming messages, considering hundreds of factors beyond simple keyword matching. Understanding these filtering mechanisms helps you avoid common pitfalls.
Common spam triggers include:
To avoid these filters, focus on transparency, value, and engagement rather than attempting to outsmart the algorithms. Learn more about Gmail spam detection and Yahoo spam filters to understand how these major providers evaluate messages.
Email blacklists are databases of domains and IP addresses identified as sources of spam or malicious email. Being added to a major blacklist can severely impact your deliverability across multiple email providers.
Common causes of blacklisting include high bounce rates from sending to invalid addresses; spam trap hits, which indicate poor list acquisition practices; multiple spam complaints from recipients; sending to purchased or scraped lists of unknown quality; sudden, unusual sending volumes that resemble spammer behavior; and compromised sending infrastructure that might be exploited for malicious purposes.
If you discover your domain has been blacklisted:
Prevention through proactive monitoring and list hygiene is always preferable to remediation after blacklisting occurs.
When Workvivo, a leader in the HR tech space serving 1+ million employees through their platform, noticed their business development efforts were being undermined by deliverability issues, they knew they needed a specialized solution. Their global business development team focuses on Mid-Market to Enterprise clients like Amazon, VMware, and Mercedes, and recently they noticed their messages weren't consistently reaching prospect inboxes.
As Richard Mullins, Head of Global Business Development at Workvivo explains: "Nowadays, target buyers' inboxes have become more competitive than ever, especially if you're moving up-market. We noticed from our engagement data (like open rates & reply rates) that ISPs have become far more selective about what emails get inbox placement or go to spam. [...] I strongly believe if you don't have a product to monitor and improve inbox placement, investment in enablement for your sales team and other technologies like ZoomInfo and Outreach can be wasted because your reps messaging isn't being seen by even your most targeted personas".
Within a few months of implementing Allegrow's comprehensive deliverability solution, Workvivo experienced transformative results:
"Allegrow is the next big thing in the sales tech stack," says Mullins. "The team are responsive and work with you to really nail down and make improvements on ensuring your emails are getting inbox placement and not landing in spam or promotion folders."
"With our objectives on the go-to-market side of the business, success is mainly tied to two areas," explains Mullins. "Being able to monitor sender reputation accurately with Allegrow means we can understand how the changes we make to the go-to-market process impact how often we're reaching the primary inbox. This means our inbox placement is less of a guessing game, so we can be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to keeping our outbound emailing efficient. Secondly, having a sustainable platform to help improve sender reputation while running outbound email campaigns was key to reaching the engagement rates our SDRs need to drive pipeline and hit our overall targets."
Read the full Workvivo x Allegrow deliverability case study to learn more about their deliverability transformation.
Allegrow offers specialized email deliverability solutions designed specifically for B2B sales and marketing teams by:
Allegrow's seamless integration with leading platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, and Close CRM ensures these deliverability benefits work within your existing workflows. This integration is particularly valuable as email filtering continues to evolve, making strong deliverability the difference between connecting with prospects or missing opportunities entirely.
Allegrow's platform includes several powerful features to maximize your email deliverability:
These capabilities work together to provide comprehensive visibility and protection for your email program.
Getting started with Allegrow is simple and designed to deliver quick results. Here’s what to do:
Most Allegrow customers see significant deliverability improvements within the first month and measurable pipeline impact within the first quarter. This rapid return on investment makes Allegrow a crucial addition to any B2B email strategy.
Book your demo today and don't let poor email deliverability sabotage your sales efforts. Join the B2B teams who have already secured their inbox placement with Allegrow's comprehensive email deliverability system.