How to successfully deliver your emails to GMAIL:
5 important things GMAIL will not tell you about

Few days ago, the EmailLabs team returned from the international conference, during which providers of the best infrastructure for sending emails, ISP, ESP talked, among others, about the issues which have to be considered while optimizing delivery to the largest providers, including Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. We will share these details with you in our next articles. Today we will take a closer look at Gmail.

All information that we present are our know-how developed during many years of cooperation with clients and their email performances, both transactional and marketing. Google has never told us to change any of our customer’s parameters to achieve better deliverability results. Why? Well, it is not possible for Gmail representatives to tell it straight – we can only use the set of rules we have developed during years that are worth implementing and optimizing. As the number of variables is large, it’s always good to test best practices on your own email performance.

1. Customer’s engagement is your ally in email deliverability

Unsolicited emails are the bane of many mailbox users. Likewise providers who are doing more and more to limit the number of unwanted messages. For this purpose Google has been using Tensor Flow machine learning for several years, which, as declared by the Mountain View company, guarantees resistance to unsolicited messages, phishing emails and malware of 99.9%. One of the main aspects of this classification is a user response to received messages. So not only opens and clicks matter, but also whether users reply to your emails. Now it’s better to avoid one-way communication including noreply addresses (more about noreply addresses). What is more, it’s good to work on your contact list segmentation and make sure you don’t send the same notification to all recipients. Remember that this doesn’t concern marketing emails. Transactional emails, especially those sent regularly with very similar content, may be less interesting for your recipients.

2. Your brand matters

Google knows a lot about us. That is why it is able to view full history of our website and based on its evaluation properly classify messages that we send. Not only the address from and email content matters but also web positioning.

3. Infrastructure pre-warm up process

Google puts emphasis on earlier warm up process of the infrastructure from which we send emails. Sending several hundred thousand messages from a new IPs may end up getting filtered or spambounced. What is more, as a result of this action, you will probably need to replace the infrastructure with a new one and start the whole warming up process from the very beginning. This not only takes time but also cost money.

4. Message template and content

Setting up an infrastructure is not all, what we send is also important. Do you avoid messy code, open tags, heavy code (putting pictures in the message), and full links in the message? Do you keep the balance between image and text? In this case, many factors may have influence on your delivery result. It’s worth to make a few tests with your email content to see which factors can affect the classification of messages as “Promotions” or “Spam”.

5. SPF, DKIM, DMARC are not only the best practices

Everyone agrees, the future belongs to DMARCA (see why you need DMARC and how to Set it up). Where exactly did it come from? Well, unfortunately, more and more forged emails are sent, and it’s DMARC that provides the best protection against phishing. DMARC is based on established SPF and DKIM records, but unlike them, it can tell the email server if it should accept messages. The correct configuration of SPF, DKIM and DMARC has a significant impact on email delivery to Gmail users.

Want to learn more about how to optimize your Gmail reputation? Write to us at [email protected] We specialize in email performances to Polish and global providers (including local ones, such as Seznam.cz or Libero.it and many others), we follow guidelines and rules of each ISP, and we base our know-how on implementations of thousands of clients from industries such as e-commerce, fintech or retail.