What's deliverability?
Deliverability is the measure of whether your marketing emails (or messages, more broadly) actually arrive in recipients' inboxes instead of bouncing, landing in spam/junk folders, or being blocked entirely by the receiving mail server.
Warning things may get technical
Delivery: the message was accepted by the receiving mail server (no hard bounce). This is a binary, technical outcome.
Deliverability: a broader, more meaningful concept: did the message reach the inbox in a place the recipient will actually see it, not just get technically accepted and then filtered to spam.
The key drivers that will improve delivery of your ARC campaign include:
Sender reputation — built over time based on your sending domain/IP's history: complaint rates, bounce rates, spam-trap hits, and engagement (opens, clicks, replies).
Authentication — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records that prove you are who you say you are. Missing or misconfigured authentication is one of the fastest ways to get filtered.
List hygiene — sending to valid, engaged, permission-based addresses. High bounce rates or sending to purchased/scraped lists tanks reputation fast.
Engagement signals — ISPs (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) increasingly use recipient behavior (opens, deletes-without-reading, spam complaints, "mark as not spam") as a primary deliverability signal, not just technical factors.
Content factors — spammy language, excessive links/images, misleading subject lines, and poor HTML can trigger spam filters, though this matters less than reputation/authentication these days.
Volume and sending patterns — sudden spikes in volume, especially from a new or "cold" domain, look suspicious to ISPs and can trigger throttling or filtering.
Don't freak out! Cabins Press makes this easy.
One of the most critical aspects to successfully land your emails into inboxes is to avoid sending too many emails out of the blue. The email severs can detect when an email domain suddenly starts sending emails without any history of email sending. This is called cold starting. This raises the likely hood your emails will go to spam. Cabins Press has a user controlled email rate limiter to avoid over sending. This value can be changed by the user but we recommend keeping it small to start 2-5 emails per hour and then work your way up. It may make sense to start a newsletter before your arc campaign so you can start scaling up your email sends.
Cabins Press's email system was built using the best practices to make sure your emails land. For brand new domainsSomethings we do up front:
- We validate emails using our own domain so your domain does not take the hit for bounced emails. This takes care of List hygiene.
- We allow our authors to use their own email domain which allows them to control their Sender reputation directly.
- Email sending rates limits are set up by default and are configurable. We recommend starting ARC email campaigns slowly to avoid damaging your Sender reputation.
- If you're totally new to email marketing, join our Discord channel and poke us. Someone from Cabins Press will set up a 1:1 with you to configure your email domain Authentication.
- If you're concerned about Volume and sending patterns authors can set up an email warming service that sends emails to Friendly emails that mark your emails as not spam before your campaign starts. This is not required but can help a damaged domain.
Email delivery is just one component of what drives successful ARC campaigns, and Cabins Press is here to support your campaign from ideation to delivery!