Email Deliverability is a complex topic that has spawned a veritable cottage industry of expensive consultants ready to take your money to implement a laundry list of technical solutions that nobody can be sure actually works.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’re going to do a real simple breakdown below, with links to simple actionable tips you can activate in your Beacons account to improve your deliverability.

The first thing to know is that every email inbox service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc, have their own spam filters, powered by machine learning, continuously monitoring and filtering for spammers.

The second thing to know is that most of these services score your reputation based on past engagements your emails got from their users. This is called “Sender Reputation Score.” Think of it like a credit score for your marketing email.

If you have a new account, you’re likely to have a low sender reputation score (just like a credit score). Even if you haven’t done any spammy activities. Oftentimes they will send emails from new senders into the spam inbox, until you build your “credit” with more history and good engagement.

The good news is that you can quickly improve your reputation score with the tools we give you in Beacons. The most important thing to do is to setup an airtight signup to welcome flow. This Beacons Creator University Guide goes deep into the hows and whys of setting up a good flow:

Here's a youtube video on the same topic:

There are many other incremental things you can do in your Beacons email app to improve your score as quickly as possible. Check out this Creator University guide for more tactics:

Last note: sending test emails to yourself for the first time is especially suspicious to email services, especially if your name or reply to email matches the inbox you are sending the test to. From the perspective of, say Gmail’s spam filters, that looks like someone is trying to impersonate you, which is tactic spammers will sometimes use.