Which practice improves email deliverability?

• A. Send to purchased lists to grow quickly.
• B. Maintain clean lists, permission-based sending, proper authentication (SPF/DKIM), avoid spam triggers, and monitor complaints and bounce rates.
• C. Ignore authentication and rely on content only.
• D. Use deceptive subject lines to increase opens.

Answer: (B)

Deliverability improves when you build trust with both recipients and inbox providers through permission-based sending, clean lists, proper authentication, avoiding spam signals, and ongoing monitoring. Keeping lists clean and emailing only people who opted in reduces bounces and complaints, which protects your sender reputation. Implementing SPF and DKIM helps ISPs verify that your messages actually come from your domain and haven’t been tampered with, increasing the likelihood they land in inboxes rather than spam folders. Avoiding spam triggers means sending relevant, well-formatted content with honest subject lines and cadence, which keeps recipients engaged and less likely to mark messages as spam. Monitoring complaints and bounce rates lets you react quickly to problems, remove problematic addresses, and adjust strategies to maintain a good sender reputation over time.

Buying lists often yields many invalid addresses and high complaint rates, which harms deliverability. Relying on content alone without authentication can still face trust and filtering issues. Deceptive subject lines undermine trust and are a red flag for filters and recipients.