Best Practices for Sending Internal Emails

How to improve internal email deliverability

Despite new messaging platforms popping up from time to time, email remains the go-to channel for corporate correspondence.

That doesn’t mean, however, internal email communication is operating at an optimal level. Poor habits and unexamined strategies can have a negative impact on email deliverability.

When internal emails land in junk folders, the business suffers. Critical information gets ignored. Deadlines get missed. Opportunities get lost. Employee engagement, along with company morale, declines.

Following best practices helps ensure every internal message arrives where it belongs: the employee’s inbox.

What is internal email deliverability?

Internal email deliverability is a company’s ability to effectively transmit bulk emails to its employees.

It requires navigating technical checks within the organization’s email system and maintaining a credible sender reputation to prevent the system from redirecting messages to the spam folder.

Overall, internal email deliverability comes down to thoughtful execution. Simply drafting a note and hitting the send button isn’t enough to guarantee the email gets delivered to the right place.

What affects email deliverability?

Below are common problems that prevent internal emails from reaching their intended destination, followed by tips on how to fix email deliverability:

Poor list management

• The problem: Sending a message to an outdated or non-existent email address will hurt deliverability. If your intended recipients aren’t engaging with your emails on a routine basis, your email filter system may start sending those messages to spam and junk folders. This, in turn, will only further damage your deliverability rate.
• The solution: Keep your distribution lists current. A thorough email list cleanup includes removing the accounts of employees who just left the company. Also, rather than relying on huge bulk emails, consider segmenting recipients into more manageable audiences that fit into distinct categories, such as seniority level or geographical location. And consider using PoliteMail’s Syncronym feature, which automatically updates changes on distribution lists.

Misaligned authentication protocols

• The problem: If your email lacks domain authentication, a proper security system will identify it as illegitimate and send it straight to junk and spam folders every time.
• The solution: To ensure your emails are getting delivered, ask your IT department to double-check that your DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are set up and working properly.

Sender reputation

• The problem: An email that looks and sounds like spam isn’t likely to appear in a recipient’s inbox. Certain subject lines and text within the message itself can trigger filters to block the email from getting to where it’s going.
• The solution: Compose emails that employees want to click on and read. Make the content engaging, relevant, and valuable. Establish and maintain yourself as a credible source of information to avoid the junk folder.

Attachment size limits

• The problem: Whether it’s a video or whitepaper, if an attachment is too big for your server the email won’t send. Sometimes it may send, but not arrive, prompting a bounce message. Either way, attachment size limits pose a serious hurdle to deliverability rates.
• The solution: Upload the document to a cloud service, such as Google Drive, or use PoliteMail’s smart attachment feature, which allows users to send large documents by hosting them on PoliteMail’s server. The tool also encrypts the content to make it secure and tracks how many people download it, generating valuable data to inform future decision-making.