# Beginner's Guide to Email Deliverability in 2026 (Ecommerce Email Marketing)

Channel: Max Sturtevant
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKfScRoMtz8
Duration: 20 min
Language: English
Words: 4888
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/xKfScRoMtz8

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[0:00] After auditing hundreds of different e-commerce brands and generating over $200 million in email marketing revenue, I can tell you that this is the one thing that people ignore and overlook the most. It's not your subject lines, it's not your design, and it's not your copy. It is your email deliverability, which just means whether your emails land in the main inbox or they land in the spam folder. And if you don't have good deliverability, you're not going to be able to make any money from your email list because you're just landing

[0:24] in spam and no one's going to see you. Because even the best emails in the world do not work if most of them never reach the people that you're sending to. However, a lot of brands don't even know if they're in spam and they don't even know how to check if they are because once results dip in their account, they're just assuming that the strategy is wrong. When in reality, it could just be an issue of landing in the spam folder. That's why in this video, I'm going to be showing you exactly how you can know if you are landing in the spam folder and if you are, how to get out of

[0:45] it. Before we get into deliverability, we need to talk about what's changed with email deliverability in 2026. Because email providers like Google, Apple, Outlook, and all the others are constantly changing their rules when it comes to inbox placement, specifically for brands. the strategies you were using a year ago might be completely useless in 2026. So now there are three

[1:03] major shifts that I'm seeing in 2026. And while they may not move you straight into the spam folder, they absolutely should change how you approach landing into the primary inbox. First, we have smarter promotions tab filtering. This is in most inboxes, but primarily it's in Gmail. There used to just be the inbox and then the spam folder, but now there's a new section called the promotions tab. And essentially, this is Google's way of kind of filtering out emails that could be coming from brands or are promotions of any type. The promotions tab is next to the main inbox, but somebody has to click an extra button to go to this tab. It's not

[1:36] the absolute end of the world to be in promotions, and you'll be in promotions a good amount, but it's definitely going to impact the amount of revenue that you can generate. And Gmail is automatically filtering brands and emails directly to go to here. So, in summary, there's a new promotions tab, and if you land in the promotions tab over the main inbox, you're going to make less money. So, the goal is to go from promotions to the main inbox. The second major shift I'm seeing is trigger words are a lot more sensitive. Using words like sale in all caps or free trial are going to increase

[2:00] your promotions and spam tab placement because how Gmail looks at it is would a friend ever send to another friend sale? Probably not. So, it's probably going to be a promotion and so they're going to be much more likely to send your emails into the promotions tab. So, you really have to be careful with what words you are including in your subject lines in your preview text specifically. If you're always doing sale, sale, sale, open now, buy now, things like that, you're going to be much more likely to land there. And third, engagement

[2:24] metrics matter more than ever. Engagement is becoming clear in a way the number one factor towards your inbox placement. Good open rates and good click rates are absolutely critical, as well as reducing your spam complaint rates. This is literally like all that these inbox providers are looking for. Do people like receiving your emails and do they engage with them? If people engage with your emails, great. They'll send you to the main inbox. people don't like receiving your emails, then Gmail doesn't want their users to receive your emails, so they send you to spam. And something I'm seeing as a huge positive signal are also your email replies. When

[2:52] someone replies to an email, Google interprets this as, "Oh, this person is interacting with this brand." This can move you from promotions into the main inbox. And I want to touch on one more huge change that you might have noticed as well. Maybe you've noticed, but unsubscribe rates are higher now than they have ever been before. And there was a specific update that Gmail rolled out that is causing this to happen. So, here inside of Omnis, which is an email sending tool that I use, it's a great option to house all of your data and send your emails for a really good price. They have a lot of different

[3:19] views that other email platforms don't have. And this is one specifically where we're looking at email domain performance. And what you'll see is how many emails are we sending to these different inbox providers. So, we have Gmail, we have Yahoo, then Hotmail. We can see clear and away Gmail is the most. You see open rates, click rates are kind of like on par, but what really stands out are these unsubscribe rates at 0.4. 47% when the next closest one is 0.26% and that's pretty much nobody. So we see this huge huge huge spike in Gmail unsubscribe rates. This is me looking at August of last year and you

[3:51] can see 0.3% compared to today where it's 0.47%. That's more than a 50% increase in the unsubscribe rate. What the hell did they do? Well, if you go into Gmail and you can do this on your own, what you can see is you have this easy unsubscribe button that Gmail has added. And so if you want to unsubscribe from a brand, you could literally not even open the email, click unsubscribe, and then boom, that person is unsubscribed. And then once somebody opens the email, they can open the email. And again, right here up at the top is this unsubscribe button right here. And now I'm unsubscribed. So

[4:23] that's another big shift that we need to take into account. But unsubscribes really don't have an impact on deliverability. So you don't need to be concerned about that in terms of landing in the spam folder, but it's something that we need to pay attention to and adjust our email strategies for. But before we talk about how to get out of spam, we need to know if we're landing in the spam in the first place. Because your deliverability could be completely fine one week and then tank the next and then you're screwed. Maybe you sent a campaign with a ton of spam trigger

[4:45] words. It got a ton of spam complaints. Maybe your engagement dropped over a period of weeks. Or maybe Gmail decided just to test your domain. And if you're not monitoring these changes, you might catch them before it's too late. So I'm going to walk you through exactly how to catch them. So this is the platform that

[4:59] I like to use. It is called Glock Apps. Glock apps.com. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. It's just my favorite deliverability tool to use. And essentially, they have this free spam checker and then we will send an email from our domain and Glock apps is going to tell us where we're landing. Essentially, it's giving like a ton of different emails and you send an email to them and then it'll report back where exactly you're landing. All you have to do is sign up, follow their instructions. All you have to do is go to the inbox insights product up here and then you're just going to want to do

[5:27] a full spam test, test this out, and then I will show you exactly what it looks like on the inside. So, here's what it looks like on the inside, and this is where we're going to be able to look at our prior campaigns and our reports on where the emails are landing. So, we did a test on a couple of campaigns here. And if you go into this reports tab, you can tell us that we send. And essentially, you get a score with the percentage. Uh, you can see 62.7% for one of them and 56.2% and 2% for the other. And then once you click onto any of these campaigns, you will be

[5:55] able to see right here exactly where you're landing. You can see 51% inbox. You can see the tabs, which is going to be promotions tab or any of the other tabs at 11%. Then the spam rate at 30.9%. So right there, that's showing that 30.9% of our emails are landing in the spam folder. So we got a bit of a spam problem. Ideally, where we want to be is under 5%. We want to be inbox at at least like 60 to 80%. No matter what, you're going to get some tabs and potentially a little bit of spam, and that's okay. Really, where we'd like to be is as high up in the inbox as

[6:27] possible. You can see the IP reputation right here. You can see the different block lists that we're on right here with these different IPs. It's not anything too much to be concerned of. I haven't seen any of these be a long-term issue for us, but you can see any issues here. And then they have support that will help you, but I haven't really had

[6:44] to do anything serious for any of these. The thing that's super helpful here is looking at the spam filters. You can see the Google spam filter right here. We're getting uh spam right here. And so you can click for a little bit more information and it'll have a ton of information for you to help out. And then it'll go even further in your location, where your location is, and the different types of domains and where you're landing in spam. So you can see the US popular right here, which is going to be the majority of the emails, 40% spam right here with 55% inbox. Then you can see the different locations

[7:13] depending on where your demographics are. And we can see right here the different providers as well and where we're having some issues. You can see Amazon versus like G Suite. So the actual like Gmail sort of emails uh right here that were bought from G Suite. And essentially a crap ton of stuff right here. It's going to give you a ton of different information in terms

[7:31] of like what you can do in action items. And so if there are any like big issues, then you can go in and kind of just like make the adjustments as you need. But if anything isn't like big red and super scary, then it's probably just an email engagement metrics thing. But it's super helpful here to be able to see how often you're landing in spam. And what I like to do is do one Glock apps test every single month. And then you can track how your spam placement rate is affected over time. So if you're anything above 20 to 30% spam rate, then you've got a

[7:59] real issue. And as long as there isn't anything clearly wrong that Glock Apps has pointed out to you, then there are a couple of other things that could be preventing us from landing in the main inbox and landing in the spam folder, which we'll get into. So now you know if you are landing in spam, which means it's time to start fixing it or preventing any issues that could get you there. Now there are three factors that I like to look at to fix this. First, you're going to have your technical setup. This is your demark, your CNA, your txt stuff, all the technical about your domain. They

[8:24] essentially prove that your emails are sent from your domain and that you're secure and trusted domain. You're not sending spam. Second, you have your sending patterns, which just means how often you're sending and at what scale and when. because blasting out emails to hundreds of thousands of people randomly and inconsistently looks spammy to inbox providers. And then lastly, you have your email engagement, open rates, click rates, reply rates, and then your spam complaint rates. These are the holy grail because they are directly telling inbox providers if people enjoy your emails or see them as spam. Now, these three factors make up what I like to call your domain credit score. Think of

[8:56] it like a financial credit score, except instead of banks trusting you with money, it's with inbox providers trusting you with landing into the inbox and contributing to their customers experience. And focusing on those three factors is what gives you a trustworthy score. Now, here's what you're going to make sure you do so that you can nail all three of these. Starting with the technical setup. Now, depending on your email platform, it'll tell you like directly inside of Clavio if you are having any issues with the technical setup of your domain. like this one for Clavio. You can see with this big yellow bar up at the top, some inbox providers

[9:25] may block your emails and new sender requirements. This needs attention. And so you can see that we've done two of the requirements right here. But adding demark to our domain is something that we need to do. And Claio has automatically detected this. And so it's super easy to set up demark for your domain. You have to go into your records, whatever your domain provider is. You need to add something super small. And this is literally just all you have to paste into your provider right inside here. So, there's a video right here inside of Claio and it'll

[9:52] help you set this up inside your DNS. Super duper easy. And then you need CNAME and TXT records, but Omnisign and Clavio and these inbox providers will automatically add this to your domain. And so, that's really it. Usually, for most brands, it's Demar that they don't have. And you can check if you have Demar by going into Glock apps again, and you can go to Demar Analyzer right here, and you can enter your domain and

[10:13] see what your Demark is, if it's set. Essentially, it's just yes or no. Do you have it? If you don't have it, add it. and you should be all good to go. And to be quite honest, it's pretty rare to have any technical issues with domains. It's rarely the issue when I'm analyzing a brand that has a inbox placement problem. Next, we want to talk about our send volume consistency and warming. So, imagine your Gmail looking at a domain that's sending emails. And this domain hasn't sent an email in 6 months, or maybe it's sent like one or two emails, then all of a sudden comes back onto the

[10:40] scene and sends an email to 250,000 people randomly. You think that Gmail is going to like that or trust that or think that it's not spammy? No. They view that as spammy. Or what about a different situation? Let's say your Gmail and you're looking at a domain that's sending emails and you see a new domain that has never sent an email just randomly sends an email blast to 100,000 people just randomly. It's a new domain that was just bought and now it sends an email to 100,000 people. Again, that looks spammy. They want to protect their customer experience. So, they want to make sure that you're a reputable sender

[11:10] before they really start landing you in the main inbox. And so if you have any sort of deliverability issues or spam issues, the number one way to fix this is by going through a warming period. A warming period is essentially starting small with how many emails that you're sending and slowly opening up your list and starting to slowly send to more people cuz you don't just want to come onto the scene and send to 200,000 people. No, we want to start by sending to 500 people and then a,000 and then 2500 and then 5,000. And then we want to get good engagement metrics on these small emails so that with every send

[11:41] we're building up our reputation, getting good engagement metrics, increasing the volume until eventually we have our reputation built up with our inbox providers. And so you can do this in two scenarios. Number one, if you have been sending emails, but you're getting really bad inbox placement, say you did a Glock apps test and you're landing majority in the spam folder, then you can absolutely do a warming period. Stop sending to the thousands and thousands of people that you've been sending to to all your sends. you're going to have to cut it down and for at least a few weeks send to a small list to boost up your reputation. Your

[12:11] revenue is going to take a hit in the short term, but in the long term, you're going to build up your reputation. And then the second scenario is for new brands or new sending domains and you haven't sent an email and you need to build up a reputation. That's when you're going to have a warming situation again. And I've warmed so many different accounts, domains, like I can't even tell you. And it's a really straightforward process. And I'll walk through an example with you. Okay, so let's take a look at this example in warming period that we did for this brand. So this brand had like 50,000

[12:37] profiles, but they hadn't sent any campaigns before. And these profiles were people who had bought from their brand in the past. All they had was like a simple welcome email and then like an abandoned cart email. So that was slowly sending emails, but we couldn't just blast to 50,000 people. But let's take a look at what we did. So here are the first two campaigns that we sent. June 20th and June 30th. You can see how little people we sent to. we sent to a,000 people in both of these right here. And what we did is we created this engaged segment of anybody who had

[13:04] opened an email in the past 30 days. That's going to show people who are interested in your brand and have recently engaged with an email, proving that they will open emails if you send them. And so this first email, the first one that we sent out, we only got 30% opens. It's pretty standard for a new domain and a new blast to do that. But hey, look at that. $974 and a very high click rate. And you can see with our next scent, we actually had over a double in the open rate right here. We started to land in the inbox just a little bit more just from this. And then

[13:31] we can go into our next campaign. So we were sending to a,000 people for those campaigns. And let's look here. So you can see how often we're sending July 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 10th. We have to send multiple times per week so that Gmail sees our consistency. They see we're building up a reputation. So what we do here again, we send to a,000

[13:47] people and we're getting 65% opens. Okay, cool. Now we're going to expand the list a little bit. Now we send it to 2,000 people. We opened it up a little bit with a slightly different list. You can see right here, okay, we go down to 40% opens, 23% opens. But hey, we don't panic. We stick to the process. We slightly adjust our segmentation and make sure we're sending to people who are engaging. We keep sending. We lower

[14:08] it down to,000 people. We get 78% opens. Then we send it to 2,000. We go back down again. But slowly, we're just going up and down with each send. And mind you, we're getting a lot of revenue in the process as well. And slowly, we start opening things up right up here to now we're sending to 3,000 people. And we're getting 47% 50% opens. And then every time we expand the list, we get a little bit of push back. But then we start to build it back up again. And let's go now to this next month right here. And then now, okay, we've started to get a reputation. We're starting to

[14:36] get a little bit more ambitious with how many people we're sending to. And then now we're getting 27% opens to a larger list. Now we're sending to over 10,000 people to 20,000 people. And then boom, now we kind of have an engaged list of about like 4,000 5,000 people who are opening our emails. So now we started off sending to 1,000 people and now we're sending to 10,000 people and getting 43% opens. You can see some of the performance on these campaigns getting 11 grand, 16 grand, 7 grand. Now we're still not in a great spot because we have some of these lower open rate in

[15:08] click rate campaigns. And so we made sure to tighten things up and be conservative with how often we're sending and really trying to send to just highly engaged people and try to get as many 40 to 50% open rate campaigns that we can. But now we're feeling good. We have a decently warmed up account and we're happy with where we were. We just engaged at least 10,000 new people for this brand and we were generating multi6 figures every single month for them. Now I can fast forward to today and let's look at these engagement metrics. Over 60% opens, getting 14,000 to 15,000 opens for each campaign. You can see the performance on

[15:40] all of them. So that's where you have to be patient. Just trust the process. Even if you're not getting amazing open rates and click rates as you're ramping up, just stick with it and slowly over time it'll go up. Here's another example where we were quite ambitious in terms of who we were sending to. And this was a brand who was transferring from another platform, Mailchimp, into Clavio. So what we did was we took Mailchimp, we took just small groups of people and we took the most engaged email addresses on Mailchimp. So we took people who have opened multiple emails in the past 14 days and that's who we

[16:10] sent to the first thousand people. And you can see these people recognized us and you can see how engaged they were. And you can see then as we were getting these open rates, we just got super ambitious. we're getting good engagement rates. And so we kept increasing the amount of people we were sending to to the point where the next month, especially with since we're sending emails every single day, we could ramp things up to then we were sending to hundreds of thousands of people and getting these numbers. So sometimes you can just kind of feel it out. And really like a good signal for you is if you're

[16:36] getting 60% opens on multiple sends in a row, then it's time to expand your list. And once you've warmed up your account, you just want to focus on consistency. Have your automations live. Have them firing. Those are emails that will get good engagement. your welcome flow and your abandonment flows and just be consistent. Try to send at least two email campaigns per week. If you go dormant for a bit, then you run the risk of Gmail losing the credibility that you have with them. So, make sure that you're doing that. The third factor here is your engagement optimization. Getting better open rates, click rates, less spam complaint rates. There really two

[17:07] things you can do if you want to improve your engagement rates. The first thing, send better emails. seems so stupid, but if people receive emails that they like, they're not going to report you as spam and they're going to continue opening and clicking your emails. So, make sure you create actually good content. Use memes in your emails like this. This is super fun. Have like funny like Windows sort of stuff here where it looks like a vintage like Windows computer. Have awesome looking design on your emails that visually engage with the customer and give them dopamine. And of course, have fun with it. Things like this comic

[17:37] email that my team put together. Send good content that's fun and people will stay subscribed. and make sure you're rewarding them every now and again with sales and exclusive offers. It does help, but don't spam them with offers because then they're going to get annoyed and then they're going to unsubscribe. So, first, send better content. And I have plenty of YouTube videos showing you how to create better content, good copy, and design. So, make sure you check those out. But the second thing is your segmentation. Who are you sending emails to? Never, never, never just send an email blast to your whole list. No, we need to use strong

[18:04] segmentation and only send to people who are actively opening and engaging with our emails. And so for all of your sends, you want to make sure you're using some sort of engaged list. So what we want to do is we want to create a segment of someone can receive email marketing. Then we want to add something like they have opened an email at least once. We typically our standard is 90 days. If someone's opened an email in the last 90 days or you can optionally include this as well if you're in a good place with deliverability. You can also do what someone has done has been active

[18:32] on site at least once in the past 90 days or somebody what somebody has done has placed an order at least once in the past 90 days. You could even extend this if you want depending on your open rates. But typically what we like to do is honestly for an engagement list you could literally just do open demast once in the past 90 days. And then for big events like Black Friday or a big monthly sale, sure, go ahead and blast it to the whole list. But we want to make sure that consistently we're getting at least 50% opens. Because if we only send to people who are actively

[19:00] engaging with our emails, then they're going to continue engaging with our emails and help our sender reputation. If I could sum up how to fix your deliverability in just 10 seconds, it is use this segment. Just someone has opened email at least once in the past 90 days and just send emails to these people. And then once a month, you can expand a send to your whole list to try to get those people into the engage list right here. Cuz say you send an email to your whole list. If somebody opens that email, then they're going to be added to the segment and start receiving the next

[19:26] emails that you're sending. So, open rates, just shoot for above 50%, click rates, as long as you are not below 0.1%, you're generally going to be fine. Obviously, the more the better. For click rates, I like to be at at least 0.5% or above. And that's really all you have to worry about. For other metrics, I like to have unsubscribe rates below 0.3%. It doesn't really affect deliverability, but it's something to consider. And then spam complaint rates,

[19:50] I like to have them at .001% or below. You're really going to get some issues if you start getting to 0.05% 05% or above. So, if you have any issues like that, start using more tight engaged lists and you might want to consider slowing down your send volume. So, start sending to your engaged list, create better content, and monitor your inbox placement with Glock apps. That is what you have to do to be on top of your email deliverability. And that's exactly how to fix your email deliverability in 2026. But deliverability is only one small part of getting email marketing revenue and getting your email platform

[20:19] generating you a ton of money. So, if you want to learn the complete email and SMS strategy that we use to generate $500,000 per month for this brand, watch this video and I will see you

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