Email deliverability is the number of emails that reach an email mailbox compared to the number of sent emails.  But email deliverability is also about the number of emails that reach the Inbox and not the Spam folder.  To improve email deliverability, you want try to make your emails look like they are coming from you.  This is a trust signal that email servers look at when determining if an email message is legitimate.  This is more complicated if you are using an email marketing service like ConvertKit or MailChimp to send emails in addition to the email hosting service you use.

Email is sent using a protocol called SMTP which stands for Simple Mail Transport Protocol.  This protocol allows email servers to communicate to send emails between each other.

There are two additional configurations that can help improve  email deliverability.  These both use the DNS (Domain Name Service).  The first is SPF (Send Policy Framework).  SPF is adding additional records to your DNS to identify which email servers are allowed to send email from a given domain name.  The second is DKIM (DomainKey Identified Mail).  DKIM uses a pair of encryption keys in the email header to validate the domain.  This helps to prevent spoofing or altering of outgoing email messages.

By adding both of these to your domain name, receiving email servers can confirm if the email that appears to be coming from your domain name is from a server you approved and the message wasn’t altered in transit.

If you would like to learn how to configure deliverability in ConvertKit, check out a companion article on Digital Marketing Extreme.