What are the best email practices that influence delivery?
Starting in February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo are rolling out new authentication requirements which require using a custom DKIM authenticated domain with DMARC reinforced.
In April 2025, Microsoft joined them with a similar announcement.
GetResponse strongly advises all senders to use email addresses from their own private domains as a from email address, and to configure both DKIM and DMARC.
For additional details on these modifications, refer to our blog posts:
Gmail and Yahoo’s Authentication Changes: All You Need to Know
Microsoft’s new authentication requirements — All you need to know
The best email marketing practices can be summarized into 4 points:
- Acquire your list properly, do not add any addresses that did not express explicit permission to be mailed by you! Double opt-in is a good choice.
- Provide your subscribers with valuable content, and send them the messages that they expect. This guarantees proper list engagement because subscribers will be eager to read your mailings and will not report them as spam.
- Do not “flood” your list with too many messages. If you see lower engagement – take some preventative steps – and you can determine which subscribers are no longer interested and try to win them back. If they’re still unresponsive – let them go.
- Respect your subscribers – process all unsubscribe requests and listen to your recipients’ suggestions.
- Use your custom business domain, protected with proper authentication protocols (DKIM, SPF, DMARC). Using a freemail domain (like Gmail or Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Mail.ru) may cause your emails to be rejected entirely (due to the DMARC policy of those domains).
You can also use Spam score checker available in the message editor to review the content of your message to find out whether anything may cause it to be classified as spam.
