Making sure your emails reach the inbox—not the junk folder—takes good technology and good content. Here’s what Nutshell does and what you can do.

Email providers use dozens of factors to decide whether a message goes to the junk folder or the inbox. Overwhelmingly, the best advice we can give is this:

Write useful, interesting, and engaging messages.

No amount of tinkering or gaming will be a substitute for a helpful message. For a jump start, check out Ben and Jack’s complete guide to writing better emails.

Here’s what you can do to ensure delivery

• Send from a consistent domain and an email address with a good reputation. Your domain and the address that you send from have a reputation. If one of your recipients has opened or interacted with your address before, you’re far more likely to reach their inbox. Likewise, if you have a brand new address and website, you will have a harder time reaching your recipients.

• Write content that’s engaging, helpful and friendly. If recipients click and reply to your messages, it sends a signal to email providers that they are helpful, and not merely promotions.

• Don’t use only images. Some email clients won’t load images, so put the most important information in text, and use images to enrich your message.

• Set up DKIM, SPF and bring-your-own-domain to authenticate your email. Nutshell can work with you to create DNS records on your domain name which authenticates emails that you send. This tells email providers that the messages sent with Nutshell are genuinely from you. This process should take your web expert about 15 minutes, and it makes your messages more reliable, and your URLs will be white-labeled for your domain.

• Import your unsubscribes and past bounces. Messages that bounce or receive complaints harm your reputation. Enough of these can completely block your ability to send future outreach. If you have historic opt-out, unsubscribe and bounce information (for example, from Mailchimp or ConstantContact), we will work with you to bring this information into Nutshell, for a better reputation. See how here, or contact our team for help!

Here’s what Nutshell Marketing does to ensure delivery

• We maintain multiple dedicated IP address pools to isolate risk. We segment our customers to keep one bad actor from damaging the reputation of others.

• We deliver from industry-standard AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure.

• We support DKIM, DMARC, SPF and bring-your-own-domain URLs. This allows you to authenticate messages sent from Nutshell as authentically yours. Build on your domain’s own good reputation, while still having the benefit of Nutshell’s click and unsubscribe management.

• We don’t offer a free service. We protect the reputation of our customers on our stable, sustainable, platform. This protects the reputation of our messages from drive-by spam.

• No-worry unsubscribe management. We automatically track your unsubscribes and prevent you from accidentally sending a message to an opted-out contact. Our unsubscribe form allows your recipients to opt out of a particular newsletter or sequence, or from all outreach. 

• Automatic bounce management. When an email address permanently bounces, we will no longer try to deliver to it. And, we won’t charge you for bouncing or unsubscribed contacts.

For a more detailed guide written by our very own marketing professional, please review this email deliverability guide.