How To Increase Your Email Deliverability

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Tired of missing deals because your email went to Spam?

I’ve had it happen, so I know how frustrating it can be.

But did you know it only takes 10 minutes to improve your email deliverability rate?

And no, you don’t have to be a tech guru to accomplish this.

Last year, I wrote a post titled, The Problem With Email And Shared Hosting that mentioned many of the challenges users face when trying to send email on a shared web host.

Don’t Be Cheap – Order A Dedicated IP Address

If you’re going to be using email on your shared hosting account it only makes common sense to use a dedicated IP address. Our Corporate Reseller package comes with 1 but you can add a dedicated IP to any account for under $3 a month.

For less than $0.10 a day, it will save you from a big headache down the road.

Sure, we constantly monitor IPs and immediately remove them from RBLs if we receive a hit, but isolating the IP to your website(s) just makes more practical sense.

So if you don’t already, order a dedicated IP address through your client panel or open a new ticket to have our team add it for you.

Test the Spammyness of your Emails

Mail-Tester is an excellent free tool that allows you to send a message to their system and it gives you a score based on 1 – 10 with how “spammy” your email is.

This is great to test the overall effectiveness of your email deliverability or to even paste in an exact newsletter prior to sending to make sure it will get in your customer’s inbox.

The higher you score, the more likely you are to hit an inbox.

I recommend doing your initial test directly from the webmail inside of cPanel. This ensures you’re coming directly from our server and there isn’t a third party setting out of wack that could be messing with your score.

I understand these webmail clients look like they came straight from the 90’s but it is what it is:

Draft A Real Looking Email So Your Score Isn’t Thrown Off

Don’t send an email with the subject/body test/test. Make it look like a legitimate email to ensure you’re getting a proper score:

Once you get your score you’ll be notified if there is anything wrong with your message:

The above screenshot already shows a 10/10 score. But if I was missing important Authentication records such as DKIM or SPF, it would be displayed here.

Make Sure your DKIM and SPF are correct in cPanel

If you login to your cPanel -> Authentication (under email) you can easily make sure your fully authenticated.

DKIM is a means of verifying incoming email. It ensures that incoming messages are unmodified and are from the sender from whom they claim to be. This feature works to prevent incoming spam messages.

The SPF system allows you to specify servers and IP addresses that are authorized to send mail from your domain(s). This feature works to prevent outgoing spam messages.

You want to make sure both are enabled (soon we will be enabling these on all new accounts by default):

Once you enable these, you just have to make sure you add your server’s host name (i.e. mark.uswebhost.com) as well as your dedicated IP (and/or shared IP).