Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for audience engagement, follow-up, and keeping users connected to your brand.
However, it requires careful attention and best practices. Good or bad emailing practices can make or break your marketing campaign.
Below is important information about email deliverability, including key dos and don'ts.
Bounces
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce refers to the permanent failure of email delivery. Common reasons include:
Invalid recipient address
The email domain doesn't exist or isn't real
The recipient's email server isn't accepting incoming emails
Too many soft bounces from the same address
Your message contains links flagged for malicious activity, suspicious phrases, or problematic images
Soft Bounce
A soft bounce indicates temporary delivery failure. Unlike permanent hard bounces, these emails will be retried for delivery. Common causes include:
Recipient's inbox is full
Email message is too large
Email server is temporarily down
Message rejected by the recipient's incoming filter
After multiple unsuccessful delivery attempts, a soft bounce will convert to a hard bounce, resulting in permanent delivery failure.
How Bounces Affect Your Score
Hard bounces negatively impact your sender reputation with email service providers (ESPs). If your bounce rate exceeds 5%, our system temporarily disables your emailing capabilities until your practices are reviewed.
This is not meant to be something that "limits" you.
This is actually a benefit for everyone who uses our platform, as it increases the total deliverability of everyone by preventing bad actors from destroying your email deliverability by being on the same server.
Spam
Spam complaints are common during email campaigns and shouldn't be ignored. They damage your sender reputation, hurt deliverability, and can eventually disable your email service if complaints reach high rates.
A spam complaint occurs when a recipient reports your email as spam. The global standard maximum spam rate is 0.1% (1 complaint per 1,000 emails sent).
How Spam Affects You As A Sender
When your email is marked as spam, several negative consequences occur:
Your emails may be blacklisted, landing in spam folders instead of inboxes
Your entire email service could be blocked
Your domain could be permanently blocked from sending emails entirely
It can damage our ability to provide email services to all users
Spam Traps
What Are Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses used to monitor email hygiene. They identify senders who email old addresses or send to recipients without permission. These addresses can't subscribe to lists or double opt-in, so sending to them indicates poor emailing practices and can result in service suspension.
How To Avoid Spam Traps
Maintain good email list hygiene by:
Cleaning your lists regularly
Using double opt-in processes
Never purchasing email lists online
Always ensuring recipients expect your emails
Permission
What Permission Means
Permission refers to your subscribers' agreement to receive marketing emails from you. This prevents them from reporting your emails as spam since they expect to hear from you.
Unfortunately, some users report emails as spam when they simply want to unsubscribe. Always provide a clear unsubscribe option.
How To Obtain Permission
Double opt-in forms ensure all subscribers have agreed to receive your emails and that their addresses are active. After submitting a form, subscribers receive an email with a confirmation link. Clicking this link confirms their agreement to receive your emails. Check out our guide on How To Set Up Double Opt-Ins Within The Swiftwebsites.ai Platform Here
Double opt-in verification ensures emails won't bounce due to typos and significantly reduces spam report rates.
Email Sending Limitations
Why We Limit And Review Email Accounts
In order to improve your own email marketing deliverability we review and score all accounts on our platform based on their sending history. We put accounts in review mode for two main reasons:
Sending Allowance
New users need time to establish a sending score. All new senders start with a 1,000 email limit, giving us enough data to assess bounce and spam rates. After generating your score, we'll extend your allowance. This process is automatic and usually takes no more than 2 hours.
Review begins at about 80% of your allowance limit. The allowance tiers are: 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 / Unlimited.
Bad Reputation
If your score is low due to high bounce or spam rates, the platform automatically pauses your account pending admin approval or decline.
Issues With Links
If a user's links lead to content that violates our terms and conditions, or if they use link shorteners or multiple redirects, their account will automatically be put under admin review in order to protect all the users on our platforms ability to maintain their high reputation.
What To Do If Your Email Has Been Limited
If you're limited due to sending allowance, no action is needed. The review is automatic and your service will be restored within 2 hours.
It's recommended that if you're hitting your email sending limits that you either upgrade the plan you're on within the Billing Sub Tab inside your account Dashboard.
Just as well, from the Billing Sub Tab you can also enable automatic limit increases for email sending so you don't have to manually adjust your volume limits. (Recommended)
If you're limited due to poor reputation, please contact us & let us know the following pieces of information so we can help improve your email reputation & get you back on track:
How you're collecting leads and contacts?
If & how you obtain explicit consent from contacts before emailing them
What type of emails you send
How often you're sending emails