14 Deliverability Checks to Carry Out Before Sending Your Cold Email Campaign

You spend a lot of time creating sensational email copy, designing beautifully branded email templates, and crafting enticing and succinct email subject lines that gets skyrocketing CTRs.

But before pressing send button, have you thought about whether your prospect will even get the opportunity to read your email?

Despite being a legitimate email marketer, there are many things you may not even know about that will stop your hard-worked email from ever reaching your prospect’s inbox. With increasingly sophisticated spam filters and more stringent laws, it’s important to know everything that can affect your cold email’s deliverability.

Not only it will let you steer clear of legal troubles, but this knowledge will also help you in squeezing more ROI out of your email marketing campaign. Here is the list of things you should avoid in your email marketing campaign so that your messages are successfully delivered, and the things you must do to increase your chances of email deliverability.


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  1. Forget about renting or buying email lists.

While legally renting and purchasing lists of people who have agreed to email communications is ok, but I will not suggest It. Apart from being a dirty email marketing tactic that is against the general T&C for your email service provider, but it’s likely these unknown people might even want your emails. In other words, there’s a good chance your email will be marked as spam.

  1. Stop emailing people who have bounced already.

Hard bounces are caused due to an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address so these emails will never be successfully delivered. Internet service providers (ISPs) use Bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender’s reputation, so hard bounces are big monsters here.

  1. Never go on using all caps anywhere in your email or its subject line.

Don’t shout at people. It’s not good. If you are using all caps in your subject line, you may get the recipients’ attention, but in most cases not in a good way. Using all caps is annoying and can seem spammy.

  1. Don’t go on using exclamation points!!!!!

Coming to next of our point in lists of Deliverability Checks for Cold Email Marketing, Exclamation points — especially a whole bunch of them in a row can make your subject line and/or email look unprofessional and spammy. 

  1. Avoid using Flash, video or JavaScript within your email.

By default, most email clients disallow rich media like video embeds or Flash. Rather than that, use a snapshot of your video player (with a play button) that links to the rich media on your website page.

  1. Embedding forms in your emails is a big no-no

Common email clients don’t allow Forms in emails due to security risks. If required you should opt for a call-to-action button or a link to a landing page. This constitutes a very important one in Deliverability Checks for Cold Email Marketing

  1. Forget to use attachments in your emails.

If you wish to share a PDF or a Word document, you should not attach the file to the email else your email could get blocked by spam filters. Instead, using an effective call-to-action button with a link to download the doc will do the trick. This’ll lower the chance of being blocked by spam filters and lessen the load time of your email.





  1. Make sure you are not using spam trigger words.

One of best ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line.Think “free,” “guarantee,” no obligation,” and so on.

  1. Forget to use a red font when drafting your emails.

The same goes for using invisible text, i.e. a white font on top of a white background. Spammers use these tricks often, so it’s an instant red carpet for spam filters. also your prospect might not like irregular fonts, font sizes, and font colors at all in emails.

  1. Set your SPF & DKIM

Make sure you add these two records to your email server configuration ensuring you won’t look like a spammer to other email servers.

  1. Verify the reputation of your IP and domain

This is a very important thing to check, there are many free tools available on the web that allow you to assess the reputation of your domain and the IP of your SMTP server

  1. Create a different email account for outbound

Your main business email account is used or sending various emails to your co-workers, customers, partners, friends, etc.). Chances are that your entire team is also using the same domain. That’s why it’s a good idea to set up a separate company domain, and email addresses on this domain, which can be used exclusively for outbound email campaigns. this will give you full control over the number and the content of the emails coming out from your outbound mailboxes.

  1. Note your email provider limits

Another one in our list of Deliverability Checks for Cold Email Marketing is that Every email provider provides its own daily and hourly limits for the number of sent messages. You should not exceed those limits, as your account may get blocked for at least a couple of hours.

  1. Make the email more personalized

Personalization is one of the important Deliverability Checks for Cold Email Marketing due to two reasons:

One: properly-personalized emails are more prospect-oriented. They don’t sound spammy and annoying to the recipient. And you know who doesn’t likes to read about themselves.

Two: Even if you are sending many emails using the same template, this Personalization makes every email look a bit different, safely fielding it from the spam filters. In Smartreach, we call them ‘custom fields’ or ‘snippets’.


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