If you’re a small business owner relying on email marketing, and you’re not using a virtual assistant for small businesses in Australia, you could be missing a trick.
Truth is, a great VA can be a secret weapon in keeping your emails landing squarely in customers’ inboxes – which can make a serious difference to your open rates, lead nurturing and overall ROI.
When someone hits that dreaded SPAM button, it’s not just that email in trouble… It can drag down your entire domain reputation. Yep, even your biggest fans might suddenly stop seeing you in their inbox.
Want to know how to smash your email marketing – possibly even your entire marketing funnel – and stay firmly out of the junk folder? Follow along.
Why deliverability matters to your business
Even the best-written emails fall flat when they don’t actually make it to your subscribers’ inboxes. Key factors that spam filters track include:
- Bounce rates, unsubscribes or spam complaints: A high bounce rate can immediately damage your sender reputation.
- Email authentication setup: Incomplete authentication records (like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC) can mean your emails get flagged or blocked entirely.
- Inactive or invalid subscribers: Sending to these can lower your overall engagement percentage, and hurt your domain as responses go unopened, or bounce back.
Spending time upfront ensuring your list and email setup is healthy can lift deliverability, trust and ultimately help your open rates stay high. If the above sounds like complete gibberish, there’s good news: Many VAs specialise in this kind of work and speak email like a second tongue.
With a great email-specialised VA, the benefits are two-fold: Not only will you get to the elusive Inbox Zero faster, your customers will actually receive your marketing emails (which is a win-win for optimising your marketing spend).
Email tasks your VA or OBM can take on
Here are six proven areas that skilled VAs – especially those experienced in email systems like Keap, High Level, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign – can manage to keep your email delivery strong:
- Cleaning your list of inactive or invalid subscribers: They’ll set up rules to flag “inactive” subscribers (e.g. no opens in 6 months), segment them separately, and run re‑engagement campaigns or prune them altogether, saving invitations for people who will actually open your emails.
- Segmenting and tagging contacts: A VA can create tags and automations to label subscribers by interest, language, purchase history or location. This ensures emails are relevant, reducing spam filtering and boosting engagement.
- Monitoring bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints: By regularly reviewing bounce reports and automatically suppressing problem addresses, VAs help projects avoid the “hard bounce” penalty zones that hurt overall list performance.
- Checking technical settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC): A technical VA will be able to check your domain provider and ESP settings to ensure authentication remains current and valid, even after domain migrations or DNS changes.
- Fixing broken links or expired lead magnets: They’ll embed checks into your email templates to detect outdated URLs or links to unhosted PDFs. A VA can run a basic link‑check before each send and update the content accordingly, helping avoid poor subscriber experience or spam scores.
- Sending plain-text or test emails for deliverability mapping: A scrappy email-focused VA will send a clean text version and routing test email sends to evaluate spam signal risks before your major campaign goes live. Top tip: A great tool for this is mail-tester.com.
Email deliverability lessons learnt by our own founder, Fiona
Fiona Campbell is the founder of Thought Penny and the VA Lead Network, and an avid resident of both her own and clients’ inboxes. Here are her five tried‑and‑tested non‑negotiables that keep her list performing at 98% deliverability, 70% open rate and 12% clicks:
1: Quality over quantity
Focus on making your emails mean something to their target audience (it’s why segmenting can actually be the gold dust for ROI). Because list growth wins you nothing if subscribers ignore your emails. Remember, Google and Microsoft flag messages with low opens and may eventually mark them as spam for all their customers, harming deliverability.
2: Relentless list maintenance
Routinely pruning unconfirmed, inactive (e.g. 180‑day down‑times), unsubscribed or spam‑flagging contacts ensures your bounce and complaint rates stay ultra‑low. You don’t want dead weight on your email list, even if it feels like it’s worth keeping the numbers high. A smaller, more engaged list is much more valuable..
3: Be real, and relevant
Every email must speak directly to your ideal customer’s top pain point or desire. If your free content is worth opening, they’ll stick around and share.
4: Segment with precision
Dividing subscribers by behaviour, geography, or interest boosts open rates, drives clicks and dramatically reduces spam complaints and unsubscribes. Take, for example, a list that’s made up entirely of people who open emails, are shown to click through, and are tagged as having special interests or opt-ins to certain products. So, you send them a marketing email that’s designed with them in mind… It’s not a perfect science, of course, but it’s as close as you’ll get to it.
5: Authenticate your domain
Correctly setting SPF, DKIM and DMARC on all sending systems – for your CRM, website and Google workspace – builds trust with ISPs so your emails land in the inbox. Remember, while you’re not measuring size anymore, inbox providers are – and these five essentials form your deliverability firewall.
Good list hygiene improves open and click rates, which further boosts sender reputation, and keeps your campaigns landing where they belong: the inbox, not the spam folder.
Choosing the right email deliverability virtual assistant for small business in Australia
To get the best results with email management:
- Look for VAs who are familiar with your ESP and audit tools like Google Postmaster Tools or SparkPost.
- Make sure they understand segmenting, triggers, tags and double opt‑in settings… not just email copywriting (although it’s not uncommon for them to specialise in both!).
- Ask about their sampling methods: Will they actually send test emails to catch broken links, formatting glitches or image‑size errors, and how will they manage technical deliverability?
Want consistent opens? Let a VA become your deliverability ally
A VA with proper email systems experience can free you to focus on content and strategy, rather than Firebase errors and bounce-rate cleanups. So, even if you’re comfortable writing emails yourself, the behind‑the‑scenes work is still essential, and having a right-hand expert truly pays for itself here.
Right now, our jobs board is watched by technically trained, meticulous virtual assistants for small businesses in Australia who are obsessed with maintaining inbox delivery and jumping in if open rates tank or delivery fails.
If you know you need to offload some of this groundwork, simply create a free virtual role brief or book a free 15-minute call with us where we can guide you through the process, and draft a listing for your approval.
Great emails work wonders, and it’s time to get back to making them. Let a VA take the tech stuff off your plate, so you can focus on creating valuable content, planning campaigns and driving conversions, while enjoying cleaner lists and better open rates every time.