Email Marketing: Improving the Deliverability of Your Campaign

You should only be sending campaigns to those who have already consented to receive correspondence from you.

Sending emails to people who have never heard of your business or haven't asked for information is the quickest way to gather spam complaints and lower your sender reputation.

The best way to ensure long term email marketing success is by gradually building a list of people who are engaged with your content, and who want to be there.

If you send your campaign to email addresses you've bought or scraped off the internet, it's going to do you more harm than good.

Organically grow your mailing list by adding subscriber forms to your site, and offering valuable content in exchange for signing up for your newsletter or latest offers.

To align with best practices, make sure you also add a double-opt in for visitors to confirm their consent to be emailed by you.

Check your email list frequently for inactive subscribers, spam emails, as well as email addresses that no longer exist. If you send campaigns to non-existent email addresses, you'll get a hard bounce which negatively affects your sender reputation score.

Tip: Provide a way for people to easily unsubscribe from your mailing list to comply with email marketing best practices.

Your subject line should be straightforward and instantly let someone know what the content of the email contains. If your subject line reads like spam or clickbait (e.g. CLICK NOW or regret it later!) you are likely to get complaints or filtered as spam.

When a subscriber opens your email they need to immediately understand who is emailing them and what the email is about. Make sure your business name and address are clearly identified somewhere in the content or footer of the email. This builds trust and can increase your chance of getting replies.

Do your best to send relevant and stimulating content that gets subscribers interacting with your campaign. Include links to sign up or view more content, ask for feedback, and keep the conversation going. Enhance engagement by creating segments of your audience and sending more personalized content to better meet each segment's interest. When your subscribers are engaged with your emails, it shows ISPs that your content is valuable.

Note: Emails can be flagged if they contain a lot of content, too many images or very large attachments. Learn more about creating engaging content.

Emails that have a balanced ratio of images to text are more likely to reach the inbox instead of landing in spam. If your email campaign consists mostly of a single large image (like a flyer or poster) and very little text, email providers will likely mark it as spam. This is because spammers historically use images to hide text from security filters.

Provide key information in text to ensure that users can read the information even if images are blocked. Always type out important information and greetings rather than embedding them directly into your images.

Gradually warm up your email list to avoid triggering spam filters, especially if it is a new domain. ISPs track email patterns, and sudden spikes in volume can lead to your campaign being blacklisted. Start with fewer emails and increase frequency as you see engagement and positive responses.

Tip: Try to avoid irregular sending schedules. Once you've found what works stick to a consistent schedule so as not to frustrate subscribers or trigger spam filters.

If your campaign isn't reaching inboxes, review your sender reputation, email content and identification protocols. Learn more about Email Marketing best practices.

The most likely reason subscribers aren't seeing your campaign is that it's caught in a spam folder. This will still show as 'delivered' in your email marketing dashboard as the campaign reached the intended recipient, but the subscriber can't see it in their inbox.

Tip: Learn more about preventing spam.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo apply stricter rules to bulk marketing emails than to personal, one-to-one messages. While a single email is treated as personal correspondence, a campaign sent to many contacts is treated as commercial mail.

To give your campaign the best chance of reaching inboxes:

• Only email contacts who signed up to hear from you.

• Include a clear unsubscribe link and your business name and physical address in every campaign.

• Avoid spam-trigger words and all-caps subject lines (e.g. "FREE", "Limited time").

• Keep your contact list clean and send emails on a consistent schedule.

Tip: Bulk emails also rely on domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) to prove you're a legitimate sender. Learn more about authenticating your custom email domain.

When you send a campaign to a large, new, or unverified list, Wix automatically conducts a Sample Mailing. We send the email to a small portion of your contacts first. If the bounce rate of that small sample exceeds the industry standard (2%), the system halts the rest of the campaign to protect your sender reputation.

To fix this:

1. Go to Email Marketing in your site's dashboard.

2. Click the Check Stats icon

   

   on the campaign that was "Not sent to all".

3. Click the Email recipients tab.

4. Click the Filter by dropdown and select Bounced.

5. Remove any invalid contacts from your contact list (e.g. typos and role-based emails).

   Tip: Use an online email list validation tool (e.g. ZeroBounce in the Wix App Market) to verify email addresses that were collected offline or a long time ago.

6. Once your list is clean, reimport it and create a segment in contacts with only valid recipients. Resend your email campaign to only that segment so you know all email addresses are valid.

No. The sample mailing process is automated and cannot be manually overridden by Wix Customer Care. The best path forward is to clean your list and resend to a verified segment.

Addresses that were valid in the past can stop working over time. People change jobs, close accounts, and abandon inboxes. ISPs and anti-spam groups sometimes turn these abandoned addresses into spam traps, which are used to catch senders who don't keep their lists clean. Sending to them signals the list isn't well maintained. Validating the list and removing inactive addresses before resending helps avoid this.

If your subscriber didn't receive a campaign ask them to do the following:

• Check their spam filters in case the email went to spam

• Add the 'From' email address to their contact list so it is not viewed as foreign

• Check their webmail provider rules to see if a campaign can deliver up to 24 hours later

We do not recommend sending campaigns to role addresses. Because role addresses are often associated with many recipients (such as a business's 'support@' redirecting to 20 customer service representatives), they can generate spam complaints or fall into spam traps.

Tip: Learn more about role addresses and how they affect deliverability.

Use Wix's email marketing analytics to track opens, clicks, bounces, and other metrics. This data helps you understand your campaign's performance and make necessary adjustments for future emails.

Note: Always provide a way for your subscribers to easily unsubscribe from your emails. This not only complies with regulations but also helps maintain a healthy email list.