Email Deliverability - Causes and Best Practices

Email deliverability is the likelihood of your emails arriving in the receiver's mailbox. If delivery fails, the email is blocked by the receiving email server or goes into spam or junk.

Since email communication is critical for an event organizer, it is essential to understand the causes of failures and how to prevent them. This article explains the scenarios of email deliverability failures and the factors that result in poor deliverability. This guide aims to equip organizers with adequate information about email deliverability and improve their domain reputation.

Zuddl domain or custom domain

Using the Zuddl domain is usually enough; however, there could be some downsides to not using a custom domain.

For instance, if someone tags event emails sent by other Zuddl users as junk or spam, this would affect Zuddl’s domain reputation, and if you are using the Zuddl domain, it would also affect the event emails you send to your attendees. Using a custom domain can prevent such external causes and gain more control over your organization’s communications.

Volume

Inviting attendees is inevitable for any event. If you are hosting a large-scale event and are planning to send out email invites to, say, 10,000 attendees, sending out that many email invites in one go can result in blocking your email domain by the mailbox provider. You should always send emails in smaller batches of, say, 2000 invite emails at a time. Though this may sound like a tedious effort, it helps prevent Google or any mailbox provider from rate limiting or blacklisting your domain. 

Other reasons

Some common reasons why an email could bounce or be marked as spam

- Unformatted emails with broken HTML may also end up in attendees' spam inboxes, affecting your email reputation. Ensure that you format your email before sending it out. Zuddl allows you to edit your email efficiently using merge tags. [Learn how to use merge tags for emails](https://support.zuddl.com/kb/article/165/how-to-build-an-email-for-a-virtual-event-in-zuddl#how-to-use-merge-tags)
- Another factor is the frequency of emails. You must also consider the number of emails you send to your attendees. Google also blacklists senders who send email frequently. So focus on sending timely but only essential emails without flooding the attendee’s mailbox.
Emails without unsubscribe links can also be a cause of failure in some cases, as Google recommends that emails include an unsubscribe link.
- Sending bulk email invites to a long list of recipients where emails bounce a lot would also impact the domain's reputation, thereby marking other emails as spam

Email statuses

You can also check the status of the emails you send from your Zuddl dashboard. Learn how to view insights of emails and learn the different email statuses.