A comprehensive email deliverability guide to help your newsletter open rates
I'm quite new to the Indie Hackers community but I've been running a newsletter for over two years now.
In these two years, we've probably delivered over 3 million emails with an average open rate around 45% which made me think our processes that helped improve our deliverability are useful to others too.
We published this on our website about a month ago and it's been very well received by other marketers, so I thought it would be a good share for everyone here in the Newsletter Crew.
It's not behind any form, it's all free to read in full on our website right here.
It's something that we'll update as time goes by, whether some things won't be valid anymore or we find out new things.
An important notice: Good deliverability won't make up for content your subscribers don't want to get. This just helps when people actually want to get your newsletter.
Great point about content being the foundation — deliverability infrastructure can only do so much.
One thing I'd add: the setup is quite different if you're running transactional emails (password resets, receipts, notifications) versus newsletters, and mixing them on the same sending domain is often where people run into trouble. Marketing email gets unsubscribes and spam reports, which can drag down the reputation you need for your critical auth emails.
A practice I've found helpful: keep transactional and marketing streams on separate sending domains and IPs from the start. It adds a bit of setup complexity, but your transactional email reputation stays clean regardless of what happens with your campaign sends. Most major providers let you configure this, it's just not the default path.
I want to share these practices to improve your deliverability. https://unspam.email/articles/email-deliverability-practices/
Please share other useful links.
This is great @Manu_C. Thanks for sharing.
Awesome, glad it's useful!
It's a great guide! (BTW if you are interested in marketing, the Stacked Marketer is definitely one of the best newsletters out there.)
Haha, thanks for the kind words!
This is an amazing guide, very helpful. I skimmed through the chapters and some specific. This definitely will give me some work to do to maximize the deliverability of my newsletter.
Nice, glad it can help!
Great article. Very helpful.
Didn’t I see you guys advertise in the hustle recently? How did that work out for you?
Yep, we did advertise in The Hustle in May. It went alright... The results didn't amaze me but based on our calculations, still profitable.
That’s the important thing.
Just shared the article in the FB “newsletter creators” group.
Thanks!