SalesLoft Email Deliverability Best Practices

When it comes to email deliverability, there's no magic bullet to guarantee your team's emails will reach a prospects' inboxes. However, there are steps and measures your team can take to greatly reduce the risk of an email being flagged as spam.

In this article, we will walk through some of the measures for your team, including: 

• Email Technical Setup
• Recommended SalesLoft Email Settings
• General Email Best Practices

Email Technical Setup

The first step to solid email deliverability involves literally setting your team up for success by setting up the following for your team: 

• Ensure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup and passing email authentication.
  • Best Practice Tip: Align all domains including SPF, DKIM, and tracking domain with your sending domain.
• Setup a Custom Tracking domain. Custom tracking domains ensure your links in the body of emails are wrapped with your tracking domain. This avoids 3rd party links, which can cause spam filters to flag your email.
• Utilize Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your sending reputation. While this is data is specific to Gmail, it gives you a good idea how your overall domain/IP reputation is doing.
  • Things to Note: Google requires a certain threshold of volume from a domain/IP before they populate results, so you may not see any data.

Recommended SalesLoft Email Settings

Your SalesLoft Team Email Settings provide another tool to maintain solid email deliverability. Here are some of the SalesLoft settings we recommend: 

• Keep email delay at least 30 seconds. This helps avoid mailbox providers from seeing your emails as automated bulk sends.
• SalesLoft recommends settings the daily send limit to 250. However, users can send up to 1,000 emails each day.
• Set the default Domain Throttling limit to 5 emails per day. This will help avoid reps from sending too many emails to the same domain within a given period, which can cause spam and reputation flags for their email domain. 
• Enable Click-Tracking in templates and signatures.
  • Things to Note: Be sure to enable click tracking in templates and your signature, otherwise links will not be wrapped with your custom tracking domain.
• Use opt-out links. This prompts users to hit unsubscribe rather than mark your email as spam, which hurts your reputation and deliverability

General Email Best Practices

Here are the general rules of thumb for email deliverability best practices you can share with your team: 

• Maintain consistent volume of sends. Sudden spikes in volume are red flags to spam filters and can cause deliverability issues.
• Ensure you are sending to engaged and verified users. Even if you are only sending 100 emails/day and the majority of those recipients mark as spam or bounce, it can still hurt your reputation and deliverability.
  • Purchased data poses a very high risk to deliverability as they are not opt in users.
  • List cleanse tools can help minimize risk of invalid addresses and spam traps, but does not address the bigger risk of user complaints
  • Use your marketing data so you are targeting people who are more likely to engage positively with your emails (open, click, reply, move to folder).
• Make sure there are no broken images or links within your email content.
• Always send personalized and relevant content to boost user engagement.
• Keep total email size under 100KB and attachments under 10MB. Attachments and oversized emails are common flags to spam filters, especially B2B domains.
• Keep bounce and complaint rates low.
  • Under 5% bounce rate is acceptable
  • Under 0.1% complaint rate is acceptable
• Immediately remove any complaints, verbal opt-outs, and bounced email addresses from future sends and Cadences. You can update their Contact Restriction to Restrict Emails to that Person. 
  • Things to Note: If a Person opts-out of an email using an opt-out link in SalesLoft, they will automatically be added to the Do Not Contact list and removed from Cadences.