Overview

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email to successfully reach the inbox of its intended recipient, as opposed to being filtered into spam or junk folders, bounced back, or blocked entirely.

It’s important to constantly monitor and make the necessary adjustments to keep your email deliverability as high as possible because strong deliverability allows you to reach your target audience, establish trust and credibility with them, and achieve higher engagement. Basically, no email campaign can be successful without high deliverability.

But because deliverability is influenced by several factors, including the content of the email, the sender’s reputation, list quality, and more, it can be hard to figure out where to start when troubleshooting low deliverability.

What Impacts Email Deliverability?

Before we can begin troubleshooting, it’s important to understand the factors that impact email deliverability. Here are a few of the most important ones:

Volume

How many emails you send may impact your ability to reach your recipient’s inbox successfully. Too many emails may be flagged as spam by email servers so you need to be mindful of the amount of emails you send.

Send Frequency

Similar to email volume, the rate at which you send emails can impact deliverability. If you’re sending emails too often, this could lead to higher unsubscribe rates and potential spam filter notifications for excessive messages.

Content

Make sure the content in your emails is relevant and applicable to your target audience. Use appropriate subject lines, preheader text, body content, and images and be sure to not include marketing related content in operational emails (confirmations, reminders, event follow up emails, etc.). If the content in your email is irrelevant to your target audience, it can be marked as spam, decrease deliverability rates, and increase unsubscribe rates.

List Quality

Avoid using purchased lists as many of these emails can be invalid or inaccurate. Your sender reputation can be impacted and deliverability rates can rapidly decline with poor lists. To improve the quality of your list, try following these best practices:

1. Remove duplicate email addresses
2. Use a list validation service to confirm which emails are valid and which aren’t
3. Check for typos

As you can see, a good list will be free of duplicates, confirmed to be legitimate, and won’t have any typos, not to mention it will encompass leads you’ve gathered directly as opposed to ones purchased.

Sender Reputation

This is a score that Internet Service Providers (ISP) or an email service assigns to any organization sending out emails. The score is determined by the organization’s IP and domain reputation. The higher the score, the more likely your email will be delivered into someone’s inbox as opposed to their spam/junk folder. Your sender reputation is built up over time, so you’ll want to keep tabs on deliverability and open rates. If for some reason they start to decline, the topics listed above may need to be addressed.

How Can You Combat Deliverability Issues?

Deliverability issues can be caused by a variety of reasons, many of which are in your control. Below are some common issues you may come across along with solutions to help troubleshoot them.

Problem: Your deliverability rates and sender reputation begin to decline.
Solution: Avoid purchasing email lists.

• Purchased email list contacts have not given consent to be marketed to and will not expect your emails; they’re more likely to mark you as spam than people who have expressed interest in some way.
• Oftentimes these purchased lists contain old information and are not updated. This leads to higher bounces or invalid emails which affects your sender reputation, deliverability, and opens you up to hitting a honey pot/spam trap (an email address no longer in use that is sold to blocklisting companies for the express purpose of penalizing companies that don’t practice good data hygiene).

Problem: You notice your emails are bouncing at a higher rate than usual.
Solution: Review bounces and automate a regulation process.

• Automate suspending them temporarily or permanently to reduce likelihood of blocklisting and improve sender reputation.
• Implementing the bounce management framework can help to manage/monitor bounces by ensuring data available on the bounce activity is placed onto a field for reporting/monitoring.

Problem: Unmarketable records are receiving emails.
Solution: Check marketability of database.

• Are records who should not be marketable still being marketed to?
• Ensure problem sources for email deliverability are suspended until they can be proven okay.
• Automate email invalid/suspension based on bounce categories/reasons.
• Automate blocklisting based on competitors/embargoed countries.
• Implement a Marketability Manager to track all marketability fields in one place, appending reasons, to account for all of the above.

Problem: You begin having higher unsubscribe and spam rates.
Solution: Establish a preference center.

• Let your audience manage their email preferences.
• If not in place already, implementing a preference center where your customers or prospects can update their email preferences can reduce unsubscribe/spam complaint rates and increase engagement with emails they want to receive.

Problem: Your target audiences are receiving too many emails.
Solution: Establish a traffic director.

• Ensure records are not being over-emailed – review your communication limits and make sure it’s followed in the actual email send campaigns.
• Segment the audiences that will receive your emails to ensure you are targeting the appropriate audience for relevancy.
• If using multiple nurtures, implementing a traffic director can prevent over emailing and ensure audiences receive the most relevant information to them.

Problem: You are not abiding by or are unaware of privacy compliance laws.
Solution: Abide by and understand privacy compliance laws.

• Send emails to engaged users only or those that have opted in.
• Learn about the various global data privacy laws, including CCPA, GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CASL and be sure you understand them.
• Privacy compliance can help manage when opt-in is required and might be causing issues across other regions.
• This can help reduce spam complaints and ensure compliance with global regulations to prevent fines.

Problem: There are unengaged records in your database.
Solution: Implement database cleanup.

• Regularly remove inactive and invalid email addresses from your database.

Problem: You are unsure what the deliverability of your email will be before sending.
Solution: Utilize a third party tool to assess.

• A third party tool (like Everest, Messagebird, Email on Acid or Litmus) can evaluate email deliverability before you send it.

Problem: You don’t know your sender reputation score.
Solution: Review your sender reputation regularly through third party tools or monitoring bounces.

• Doing so will allow you to evaluate your status and offer room for improvement.

Problem: You are having an increased amount of unsubscribes due to ignoring opt-out requests.
Solution: Reduce the number of operational emails.

• Limit the number of operational emails which ignore any previous user opt-out requests. Operational emails should only be used for critical, non-marketing communications, such as account and product based alerts.

Conclusion

Keeping your deliverability rate as high as possible cannot be understated. If you begin to have low or declining deliverability rates, this could mean your marketing dollars are going by the wayside and nobody wants that! Following some of the key best practices discussed above can help maintain the health of your marketing campaigns and ensure you’re getting the ROI your team’s hard efforts deserve.

Key Email Deliverability Terms

Delivery rate: The percentage of emails the internet service provider’s (ISP) servers did not return or bounce (i.e. emails that reach a recipient’s inbox).

Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that are either temporarily (soft bounces) or permanently (hard bounces) unable to deliver to a recipient’s inbox.

Spam complaint rate: The percentage of your audience who mark an email as spam.

Open rate: The percentage of your delivered emails that have been opened by your recipients.

Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of how many people click on a link in your email compared to the total number of emails delivered.

Unsubscribe rate: Measures how many people opt out of your emails.