You take the time to craft the perfect email newsletter, come up with a catchy headline, and hit send. However, if your email never actually makes it into your subscribers’ inboxes, all of the blood, sweat, and tears that you’ve put into email marketing basically makes it worthless.

It’s important to note that there is a very clear distinction between email delivery and email deliverability.

Email delivery refers to if your email actually makes it to your intended recipient. If it doesn’t, you’re probably dealing with an old or incorrect email address.

Email deliverability refers to where the message ends up once it’s received. Did it go right to spam or is it waiting in your subscriber’s inbox to be read? Obviously, the latter is where you want your email to be.

So how can you improve the likelihood that your email arrives in your subscriber’s inbox? Here are 3 best practices to follow to help you get the most success from your email marketing strategy:

1. Keep your contact list squeaky clean.
We talk a lot about the positive impact that permission-based marketing can have on your business. When you ask people to “opt in” to receive your emails, you can more effectively build an accurate contact list of qualified leads.

However, over time, your email subscribers can become inactive, which in turn will offset your engagement metrics. This is why you’ll want to make a point to regularly remove invalid emails and periodically re-confirm your inactive subscribers.

2. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.
There’s no evidence that having people unsubscribe to your emails hurts your rate of deliverability. In fact, making it easy for recipients to unsubscribe can help you to maintain a clean contact list and ultimately boost subscriber engagement. This makes sense because you’ll be sending your email newsletters to people that actually want to read them.

3. Personalize your emails.
What we mean by personalizing your emails is sending content to your subscribers that is relevant to them. Are you creating email content surrounding topics that they actually want to hear about? This should be the most important question that you ask yourself before hitting “send.” When you take the time to create personalized content that really resonates with your audience, you’ll boost engagement and will better be able to build relationships with your subscribers.

Email marketing still continues to be one of the most effective marketing channels to reach your targeted audience. By using the 3 best practices outlined below, you’ll experience better results from email marketing and will build a base of loyal followers.