Question Detail

Things you can do to improve your email delivery:

1. Remove inactive contacts
   In the event that you are sending to numerous dormant contacts who don't open your emails, ISPs will consider your mail "undesirable" and convey it to the spam folder. It's essential to routinely purge idle endorsers from your rundown or move them into fragments that get sent less regularly.
    
2. Focus on good, engaging content
   If your content is engaging and valuable your contacts will open and your emails will be delivered to the inbox. Make sure you are sending content that your subscribers signed up to receive and that it stays fresh and interesting. If you repeatedly send purely promotional, hard sell offers, you will see read rates lower and deliverability decline.
    
3. Review your signup process and try to think like a subscriber
   What did your contacts expect to receive when they signed up? If you are sending content they didn't expect to receive they won't read it and will mark as spam. Think about the language you use on your signup form and make sure it's clear about what people are opting in to receive. Also, make sure your email design is consistent. Don't change out your logo or template too often because this will confuse recipients and lead to spam complaints.
    
4. Send more targeted, triggered, personalized emails as opposed to batch and blast campaigns
   It's a lot more likely for big batches of mail to be identified as spam, whereas one-off automation messages will almost always be delivered and will keep your contacts engaged and happy. At the most basic level, be sure you have a welcome message to greet your subscribers after they signup. When possible always send fewer, more personalized messages.
    
5. Sending frequency
   If you have a larger list, it's important to find the right sending frequency. If you send too often, your subscribers will get burned out and may unsubscribe or mark your email as spam. If you send too infrequently, you won't establish a good reputation. As a general rule, you want to contact your subscribers a few times a week, but that depends on the relationship you have with your contacts.
    
6. Pay attention to the spam filter testing before sending
   This is an option on the summary step of creating campaign. It will let you know if it spots any major issues with your email that could affect delivery.
    
7. Don’t send a single graphics/image
   Sending an email that only contains a graphic is a sure-fire way to have delivery issues. You should take the time to design an email with text and graphics - not just a single image. On the flip side, it's not necessarily better to send plain text emails. The general rule is to have a good, balanced mix of images and text.
    
8. Don’t use a free email address as your “from” email
   Instead of using your free/personal email address such as @yahoo.com or @gmail.com, you should use an email address for the company or organization for which you are sending email.
    
9. Pay attention to your links in your email
   Spam filters check the URLS that you are linking to. If you link to a domain that has a poor reputation you will be penalized.
    
10. Don’t use link shortening services like bit.ly
    Your links should be full links to the real URL. Link shortening services like bit.ly are used heavily by spammers. You can also be penalized if you use an outward facing link like http://mypage.com/promo that links to a different page like http://mypage.com/offer-1. For the outward facing text, it's better to use “click here” or a button.
     
11. Send using a consistent “from” name and email address
    We do not suggest changing your “from” details often. Keeping it consistent can help build your reputation. Take some time to think about what from name will be the most recognizable to your recipients. It can be your company name, a figure in your company, or even something more unique. The more recognizable it is, the less likely people are to mark it as spam. The from name is a very important part of establishing your brand.
     
12. Check your automations
    If you have automations running, routinely do health checks. You may learn that certain contacts are getting 6, 8, 10 messages a day which is causing them to ignore everything and hurt your sending reputation.
     
13. Don’t test using the same phrase as your subject and email contents
    If you send an email with a very similar subject and message body it will likely be filtered as spam. (An example would be having the subject set to “this is a test” with the body set to “this is a test”.) You'll also want to avoid using the same “to” and “from” email addresses. Sending an email where the “to” email address is the same as the “from” email address will most certainly be marked as spam.
     
14. Make it very easy to unsubscribe
    A spam complaint is very bad for your deliverability, but an unsubscribe is not necessarily bad — it just indicates that someone no longer wants your mail. You should make it very easy for contacts to unsubscribe so that they are not encouraged to mark it as spam. Make sure your unsubscribe link is easy to spot and think about putting a second unsubscribe link at the top of your email.

We recommend that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain. An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain.

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forged From addresses at your domain. Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message purporting to be from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

For example, suppose that your domain example.com uses Gmail. You create an SPF record that identifies the G Suite mail servers as the authorized mail servers for your domain. When a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether it is a valid message. If the message comes from a server other than the G Suite mail servers listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server can reject it as spam.

If your domain does not have an SPF record, some recipient domains may reject messages from your users because they cannot validate that the messages come from an authorized mail server.

If you've already set the SPF record for your domain, it means that you have set Google's servers in the SPF records.

Set up DMARC to handle messages that fail SPF checks

When a message fails the SPF record check, your email carrier decides how to handle the failed message. To control how your carrier handles failures, you can create a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record for your G Suite domain. With DMARC, you specify a policy to either take no action, quarantine the message, or reject the message. Learn more about DMARC.

SPF records for outbound gateway

If you decide to enable the email gateway feature, you will need to make sure both Google server's and the outbound gateway SMTP server address is included in the SPF record.

Notes:

• If you purchased your domain from one of our registration partners while signing up for G Suite, Google does not publish SPF records for your domain.
• If you have an existing SPF record, you can update it to authorize an additional mail server. Be careful not to create multiple SPF records - only update the existing record. Multiple SPF records are not recommended and will cause authorization problems. See Add SPF records for more information.

See Authenticate email with a domain key and Understanding DMARC for other anti-spoofing measures available to you through Google.

We recommend that you create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for your domain. An SPF record is a type of Domain Name Service (DNS) record that identifies which mail servers are permitted to send email on behalf of your domain.

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forged From addresses at your domain. Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message purporting to be from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

For example, suppose that your domain example.com uses Gmail. You create an SPF record that identifies the G Suite mail servers as the authorized mail servers for your domain. When a recipient's mail server receives a message from user@example.com, it can check the SPF record for example.com to determine whether it is a valid message. If the message comes from a server other than the G Suite mail servers listed in the SPF record, the recipient's mail server can reject it as spam.

If your domain does not have an SPF record, some recipient domains may reject messages from your users because they cannot validate that the messages come from an authorized mail server.

If you've already set the SPF record for your domain, it means that you have set Google's servers in the SPF records.

Set up DMARC to handle messages that fail SPF checks

When a message fails the SPF record check, your email carrier decides how to handle the failed message. To control how your carrier handles failures, you can create a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) record for your G Suite domain. With DMARC, you specify a policy to either take no action, quarantine the message, or reject the message. Learn more about DMARC.

SPF records for outbound gateway

If you decide to enable the email gateway feature, you will need to make sure both Google server's and the outbound gateway SMTP server address is included in the SPF record.

Notes:

• If you purchased your domain from one of our registration partners while signing up for G Suite, Google does not publish SPF records for your domain.
• If you have an existing SPF record, you can update it to authorize an additional mail server. Be careful not to create multiple SPF records - only update the existing record. Multiple SPF records are not recommended and will cause authorization problems. See Add SPF records for more information.

See Authenticate email with a domain key and Understanding DMARC for other anti-spoofing measures available to you through Google.