Email Deliverability: Best Practices for SaaS Companies

In the digital age we live in today, there’s no shortage of media channels. And yet, emails do not die and remain to be the cornerstone of communication, especially for SaaS companies. According to Statista, the number of emails sent daily is predicted to increase from $306.4 billion to $376.4 billion in 2025, which shows the importance of email communication.

Businesses use emails to reach out to potential customers in the hope of beginning a relationship with them. This is also the main source to inform existing customers about promotions, discounts, and other important events. So, it’s highly important to ensure that your emails are delivered successfully to the inboxes.

In this article, we’ll reveal the best practices that SaaS companies can use to improve their email deliverability and prevent their emails from landing in the spam folder.

Newsletters in email marketing are indispensable and often form a crucial part of successful marketing strategies. By employing appropriate techniques, you might witness a doubling in your email open rate, which could profoundly enhance your business’s performance. To advance these numbers, think about using specialized applications dedicated to tracking and improving your email engagement consistently.

We will also tell you what metrics to keep an eye on to get the most benefit. Let’s dive in!

Understanding Email Deliverability

Before we move on to the practices, let’s first quickly explain what email deliverability means so you don’t confuse it with email delivery.

As you’ve already guessed, email delivery and email deliverability are two different terms. While email delivery is about getting your email to the inbox of a recipient, email deliverability is about ensuring that it not only arrives in the inbox but also doesn’t land in a spam folder and is opened by a user.

The difference between the two is significant. Of course, the metrics and goals that marketers follow are different, too. In the case of email delivery, particular attention is paid to the delivery and bounce rate. For email deliverability, on the other hand, it’s more important to track parameters, such as:

• Email open rate;
• Spam compliance;
• Sender reputation;
• Position in spam folders.

Speaking of goals, the main objective of email deliverability is to build a strong brand reputation so that customers are more likely to open and read your emails and not mark them as spam.

The Importance of Email Deliverability

If your marketing strategy involves email campaigns, you just can’t ignore email deliverability; it’s a fundamental aspect of email marketing success. Let’s go over the main reasons why it’s so important to focus on enhancing this indicator. Additionally, an email assistant can help you with email deliverability by reducing spam risk, personalised content and optimising subject lines.

• Better visibility. Emails from reputable senders don’t land in a spam box and, therefore, have a better chance of being seen and opened by potential customers;
• Higher conversion rates. Since emails from the main inbox have better visibility, they also tend to have better engagement and higher conversion rates, which is particularly important when it comes to sales;
• Helps prevent reputation damage. A good deliverability rate works on the reputation of your domain and ensures that more people will continue reading your emails;
• Cost efficiency. Finally, when your emails land in the recipient’s primary box and are actually opened, it saves you from wasting resources and automatically results in higher ROI for your marketing efforts, especially when managed effectively with email campaign management tools.

Best Practices for SaaS Companies

SaaS companies, more than any other, can benefit from the advantages of email marketing. Well-thought-out campaigns can help generate new leads, as well as increase the number of sign-ups and premium plan payments. Besides, they play a crucial role in maintaining relationships with existing clientele, ensuring stable recurring revenue.

Therefore, it’s important to know how to create emails that attract users’ attention while bypassing spam filters. Below, we share tips and recommendations that can take your email marketing to a whole new level.

1. Check Your IP 

You may have highly personalized emails with great content, but if your IP has been unfortunate to get on the blacklist of email servers, the chance of your email arriving in the inbox without being marked as spam is minuscule. So, first things first, check the health of your IP by using online IP blacklist checkers. WhatIsMyIp or MailGenius are the perfect tools for that.

If you find that your IP has been blacklisted, send an online form with a request to delist it. While you may not be able to fully recover from being blacklisted, submitting this form will send a positive signal to email service providers (ESP), demonstrating your commitment to resolving the issue.

While exemplary relevancy and customization optimize desired personalized emails for engaged recipients, flawed sender reputations from past infractions indefinitely handicap delivery regardless of merit.

Even if completely reformed, merely the historical existence of personalized emails breaches earning blacklists tanks hard-won relevance gains by hiding content from prospect eyeballs.

Before funneling resources into sculpting brilliantly personalized emails, brands must first invest in untarnished IP and domain reputations allowing messages to reliably land rather than automatically reroute to spam.

2. Create Great Content

Even if it’s something utterly boring that you’re trying to sell, great content can make a difference. In emails, everything matters, starting from a subject line to what follows it and how the content is being formatted, so you should pay attention to every detail.

Crafting an engaging subject line is essential for capturing your audience’s interest and elevating open rates. This task demands a strategic blend of creativity and clarity. Employing proven strategies and insights from successful models can markedly elevate the effectiveness of your communications.

Such an approach ensures your message stands out in overcrowded inboxes, enhancing engagement and interaction rates.

At the same time, don’t make the mistake of using misleading information. Unless you’re offering a product for free, don’t use the word “free” in the subject line. This may give you good open rates, but when people realize they’ve been tricked by providing false data, they’ll leave as quickly as they came.

Consider how many elements you use in an email. There must be something to catch the eye of a reader, but it shouldn’t be overpowering. The same goes for text. While there’s nothing wrong with highlighting an important message with caps lock, it’s never a good idea to write entire sentences in caps unless you want to put off your readers with unsightly emails.

As you may have realized by now, in today’s world, the biggest companies and corporations succeed because they adeptly orchestrate their marketing tactics.

And email marketing is the best and main helper in this! Therefore, pay attention to it in advance and if you have problems understanding it, find a quality specialist who will set up a mailing system.

3. Vet Your Subscriber List Regularly

If you keep sending emails to people who aren’t interested in your offer or who have long changed their emails, you’ll not achieve any results. Even worse, this is the direct route to being blacklisted by email server providers. So, it’s essential to check your subscriber list and adjust it regularly.

Regularly vetting your subscriber list is crucial for maintaining the quality of your audience and improving the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.

Incorporating tools like the Playwright & Python scraper allows for a dynamic approach to identifying and reaching out to target prospects, enhancing the precision and efficiency of subscriber engagement efforts.

Actively managing your subscriber list not only heightens the relevance of your campaigns but also shows respect for your audience’s choices, fostering trust and a favourable brand image.

Furthermore, keeping your list up-to-date ensures adherence to the latest data protection regulations, safeguarding your marketing activities from potential legal complications.

Here are a few golden rules:

• Never send emails to people who haven’t given their consent. This will not help build a good reputation. Vice versa. People will start to complain, potentially landing your emails in the spam folder;
• Ensure you have a clear and comprehensive privacy policy template in place, which informs subscribers about how their data will be used and provides them with an option to opt-out at any time;
• In addition to a privacy policy, implementing a NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) can further safeguard sensitive information, ensuring both parties are legally bound to confidentiality, which is crucial in email communications for SaaS companies;
• Don’t buy mailing lists. The reason is the same. People need to agree to receive your emails for the email deliverability rate to be high. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to recipients from bought mailing lists;
• Segment your lists to enhance email open rates. By tailoring your campaigns based on the audience’s interests, demographics, and age, you’ll significantly increase engagement;
• If possible, ask your loyal users to add you to their address book. This sends a strong signal to ESP, telling them that your brand is reputable and worth a high score;
• If you notice that you have a lot of unengaged subscribers, it’s best to remove them. Alternatively, you can try sending an email asking if they still want to be subscribed. Quite often, reconfirmation emails help revitalize relationships with customers.

4. Pass Domain Authentication

If you’ve got no problem with IP, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the deliverability of your emails, it may be because you’ve not passed domain authentication. Companies that send emails to a large group of customers on a regular basis need to set up email protocols such as DKIM, DMARC, or SPF.

Let’s quickly cover each of them:

• SPF — specifies which servers are authorized to send emails on your behalf. As a result, it helps prevent email spoofing and ensures that your emails are more likely to reach recipients’ inboxes; 
• DMARK — allows you to specify how ISPs should handle emails that fail authentication checks. It works in conjunction with SPF and DKIM;
• DKIM — provides you with the option to use a digital signature in your emails. This signature verifies that the email was indeed sent by your domain and hasn’t been tampered with along the way. 

5. Use Secondary Domains

Professionals in the field of email marketing frequently commend platforms such as Omnisend and Klaviyo due to their proficiency in harmoniously amalgamating email, web push notifications, and SMS communications into unified operational flows.

These systems furnish a diverse array of marketing avenues, proving to be indispensable for a wide range of businesses. Their comprehensive strategies enable organizations to adeptly orchestrate their marketing tactics across a spectrum of communication mediums.

Relying on one domain to send blast emails is the worst thing you can do. As we’ve mentioned earlier, if a customer marks your primary domain as spam, you’ll have a hard time trying to recover it. With secondary domains, however, you’ll not have this headache.

By creating and using secondary emails, you’ll protect your domain from being blacklisted and avoid harming the reputation of your brand. Secondary domains are particularly useful if you often send cold emails. If one of them ends up in spam, you can quickly switch to the other to continue your marketing campaign.

Just don’t forget to build a SaaS website and include links so that people who are interested in your product can check it out on your official page.

6. Optimize for Mobile

It goes without saying that your emails should be cross-browser compatible and optimized for mobile. According to recent statistics, over 1.7 billion people read emails on their gadgets, which is twice more compared to desktops. So, mobile optimization should be a priority.

Also, make sure to test your emails in different modes. You can have a great email design that looks wonderful on a white background, but it may come across completely differently on a screen viewed in a dark mode. Ideally, it’s best to stick to neutral designs to cater to a broader audience.

7. Use Reliable Email Marketing Software

Last but not least, if you’re not using a proprietary email server, select a reliable email marketing software that offers features for list management, email template design, automation, and analytics. With quality marketing software companies, it’ll be much easier to implement best practices and improve deliverability.

Final Thoughts

To reiterate, emails aren’t as obsolete as some people think. They still remain a popular channel for communication due to its cost-efficiency and high level of personalization. Using emails, SaaS companies can not only nurture new leads but also maintain relationships with existing customers, run promotions, inform users about special offers, and increase sign-ups.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you can take action to improve your deliverability rate and unlock the full potential of email marketing for your company.