What is Email Deliverability, and why should I care?
To put it simply, Email Deliverability is your emails landing in your advocates’ inboxes and not a spam folder or bouncing. Without a focus on good Email Deliverability practices, your messages will not be received. Following good practices outlined in this guide will help your messages to be delivered to your audience.
An email’s ability to be delivered in an advocates inbox is dependent on your reputation with email clients (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook). Properly setting your account up in this guide and continuing best practices is your best bet in ensuring that your messages are received and read. AdvocacyAI helps facilitate email sending, but the relationship your email domain has with email clients is ultimately a result of the health of your email list and email practices.
📬 What Influences Deliverability?
AdvocacyAI helps improve deliverability by managing:
- Email sending infrastructure (IP reputation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC configuration)
- Send throttling and batching to prevent spam flagging
- Content checks for known spam triggers
- Bounce handling and suppression lists
However, you control key factors that impact inbox placement, including:
- Audience quality (valid emails, low bounce rates)
- Engagement rates (opens, clicks, unsubscribes)
- Sending frequency and consistency
- Content relevance and clarity
📣 Building and maintaining a healthy sender reputation is a long-term strategy driven by list hygiene and audience trust.
Starting a New Email Program
To start on a new email platform, you’ll need to get in touch with the person or department who can edit your DNS record before getting started in the email tool in AdvocacyAI.
If you have an email list over 100,000 email addresses, you should reach out to help@advocacyai.com to discuss getting a dedicated IP address. If you think your email program could grow to that number within 6 months, we recommend reaching out now.
Technical Setup
When getting started in AdvocacyAI, you will need to ensure that you have access to edit your DNS. This will be necessary to ensure your SPF and DKIM records are properly updated for your email domain. Refer to this help doc for the necessary steps.
Non-Technical Setup
In addition to the DNS changes, you will also need to ensure that you also are mindful of how you begin your new email sending in AdvocacyAI. As you are starting an email program in a new software, you will need to allow for a transition time to avoid email clients seeing this change as spam.
Tagging Opted-In and Highly Engaged Advocates
First and foremost, as you are uploading your advocates to the system, you need to ensure that you are tagging them to indicate that they have opted in and have engaged with your email program.
If emails you are uploading to the system have not explicitly opted into your email program, you cannot email them.
The best rule of thumb is to define “highly engaged” as people who have opened an email or clicked a link in one in the last 30 days. The more emails the person opens or clicks, the more engaged they are.
You can and should move over and tag advocates who are not necessarily highly engaged. This means tagging them as something like “medium engaged” for people who have opened an email within the last 6 months. Depending on the frequency of your email program if a person has not engaged with an email in 6-12 months, you should no longer include them in your email sends.
An example of tagging is below:
Segment Tag | Who’s In It? | Why It’s First |
Core_30 | Opened/clicked in last 30 days | Highest engagement; strongest reputation signal |
Core_90 | Engaged 31–90 days ago | 2nd highest engagement |
Dormant | No activity > 90 days | Warm last; suppress non-responders quickly |
Sending Your First Emails (Warm Up)
When starting to send from the new system, you should begin with only the highly engaged. If possible, your first email should be to people who are likely to open and click an email (and with concise language that they have a reason to engage with.)
Mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) score every email sender. When they see a brand-new domain (as when you start using a new email sending platform) or one that’s been quiet for months jump from zero to thousands of emails overnight, they assume it might be spam. By starting small and stepping up volume, you show them real people open, click, and don’t complain, so future emails land in the inbox instead of the junk folder.
After you have engagement with your first few initial emails from the system, you should expand to the remainder of your highly engaged universe before eventually slowly adding your medium engaged advocates.
This process will allow your list to warm up and show email clients that you are a legitimate sender from the new IP Addresses used in the system. (This is true even if you do not get a dedicated IP Address!)
Be sure to review the ongoing practices outlined below for your email content for your email messages as well!
Cheat Sheet for Warm Up
Follow the cheat sheet below for a recommended email warm up based on your audience size. Make sure for initial warming sends:
- Spacing: Leave at least 2–3 days between each warm-up send so you can review metrics and remove bad addresses.
- Health check: Pause increases if bounce > 2 %, spam > 0.1 %, or opens < 20 %. Resume only after metrics recover.
- Consistent setup: Keep your “from” or “sender” name the same and lightweight template (without too many photos) for all warm-up sends.
Total List Size | Active Recipients*(# of sends) | Mid–High Engaged(# of sends) | Full List OK |
≤ 10 k | 2 sends | 1 send | Send 3 |
10 k – 50 k | 2 sends | 2 sends | Send 5 |
50 k – 150 k | 2 sends | 3 sends | Send 6 |
150 k + | 3 sends | 3–4 sends | Send 7–8 |
Ongoing Best Practices
Email Deliverability is something you need to consider even after you have onboarded into the system! It should be a cornerstone of your email program to ensure best results with email clients.
Content
When building your email messages, you should be mindful of your content to ensure an email client does not consider it spam.
- Do not shorten your links
- You should never use bit.ly or similar shortened URLs. This is a common practice used by spammers and will likely get your emails flagged as spam!
- Keep your email length as brief as possible
- Email clients, particularly Gmail, will truncate long emails. You also risk long emails going to spam. The best way to avoid this is to keep your email content brief and to the point
List Hygiene and Segmentation
It is critical for your email program to only send to email addresses that have explicitly opted into your email list and continue to engage with your emails.
- List Swaps are not allowed in the system
- Purchasing an email list or swapping email addresses between organizations without the emails opting in is not permissible in the system.
- If you want to engage contacts from another organization (this includes sibling organizations like a c4/c3), the email addresses need to explicitly have indicated that they want to opt into the email list.
- Do not email your whole list
- It is a best practice to have different Tags for different interests or types of emails you might send. You should then tailor your audience to ensure that you are not emailing your entire email list.
- Remove email addresses that don’t engage
- If an email has not interacted with any of your emails in 12 months, you should remove them from your email audience.
- Make a re-engagement Journey
- Before an email address hits the 12 month mark of not engaging in an email from your organization, you can set up a Journey with content specifically designed to re-engage them in your program.
- If they do not interact with this re-engagement attempt, you should remove them from your email audience.
Frequency of your sends
- Consistently send emails with relevant content
- It is important to establish a regular cadence of sending in your email program. While you don’t want to send too frequent emails, it’s also important to avoid only waiting to send during a busy advocacy campaign or end of year.
- Send emails at a regular pace with brief and engaging content to keep your lists engaged and warm. The ideal timeframe is to send an email every 2 weeks.
- Avoid sending on a boom and bust cycle
- You risk your email program’s deliverability by sending to a large portion of your email list multiple times a day. You further risk the deliverability by then stopping sending entirely.
- When you know a busy time is approaching (e.g. end of year), plan a slow, steady increase of emails without sending multiple in a day. When the critical period has passed, it is’ crucial to ramp down to your normal consistent send schedule outlined above.