Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is the ability of an email message to arrive in the recipient’s main email inbox. Email deliverability is often measured as a percentage of emails accepted by the internet service provider (or ISP for short). 

When you think of email deliverability, you probably think about those emails you may have sent in the past that just somehow disappeared between your outgoing mail and the other person’s inbox. While this is one aspect of deliverability, there is more to it.

Deliverability is also related to inbox placement – whether an email appears in the primary inbox, the promotions tab or social tab, or the spam folder. 

Why Does Email Deliverability Matter?

Email marketers use email deliverability to figure out whether or not their emails are reaching their customers. A failure to reach customers reduces the performance of a marketing email, which is one reason that deliverability is extremely important to every business.

When you send out an email to your subscribers, you want them to open it and take action on it. This is why you’re sending it in the first place, isn’t it? 

But what if your message never even has a chance to reach their inbox? It makes you look bad to your audience, not delivering on your promise, but it also looks bad to your ISP or mail service.  

Even if your email list has a 98% delivery rate with 1,000 subscribers, that means 20 people never get to see your email. However, it doesn’t stop there! Even with a 98% delivery rate, you may only have an open rate of 20-40%. Where are those emails going?  Your message may be in the dreaded spam folder!

How many emails reach the inbox is called Deliverability Rate.

There’s really no easy way to know where it went and why, so the deliverability rate can only be inferred. However, there is something you can do! Always focus on the ultimate goal of making sure that every single person on your email list gets the chance to open your emails. 

This means landing directly in the inbox.

Whether you’re looking to make sure your deliverability rate remains high or you’ve noticed a dip in emails reaching your subscriber’s inbox, here’s how to make that happen.

What is a good email deliverability rate?

A good email delivery rate is higher than 95%. You can use email marketing platforms such as ActiveCampaign to see the exact percentage of your emails that were delivered, opened, or bounced.

Of course, 100% is ideal but unrealistic, so just make sure you keep it as high as possible!

Many factors go into email deliverability, many that you can control, but also some that you can’t control, such as outages, a subscriber’s inbox being full, or other technical problems.

Let’s dig into what exactly affects email deliverability and then talk about how we can avoid or fix poor deliverability rates! 

What Is an Email Bounce?

Whenever an email doesn’t reach its intended account, whether that’s the inbox, a different tab, or the spam folder, it is considered bounced and the viewer never has a chance to see it. In short, a bounced email is one that failed to reach the subscriber.

It’s important to know that there are two types of bounces: soft bounce and hard bounce.

What Is a Soft Bounce?

A soft bounce is a temporary issue in delivering your email due to a problem that can usually be resolved, such as a full inbox. While soft bounces were much more of a problem in the early days of email due to the limited amount of allowed incoming emails, most of these occur today if there is a sudden increase in the volume of emails being sent.

ISPs and mail servers watch for major spikes in send volume as it may be an indication that an account has been compromised or is being used for spam messages. For example, if you have consistently sent 1 email a week to 1000 subscribers and then try to send an email every day to those same subscribers, you’ve increased your send volume by 7x over a week and you will most likely see your bounce rate increase. Luckily, there are ways around this if you need to send an increased amount of emails in a short period.

What Is a Hard bounce?

A hard bounce is the permanent type of bounce that means there is something wrong with the email address you’re trying to reach. Often this is due to the email address no longer existing for whatever reason. A single hard bounce is a sign that you should remove that email address and won’t affect you too much, but if you continuously get these hard bounces, it will signal to your ISP that you’re not keeping up with proper list hygiene and will begin to hurt your reputation and email deliverability. 

What Affects Email Deliverability?

Factors such as sender reputation, authentication, and being blacklisted are all common reasons for low email deliverability. Being very clear about the content you send, and to who you send it to, is very important to maintain a high rate.

Let’s dive into these a bit more.

Email Sender Reputation Matters

Everything we talk about in this article comes down to one thing: email sender reputation score. The lower your sender reputation score is, the less likely your email will reach an active subscribers inbox. This score is calculated based on an algorithm of many different factors to determine whether or not your email should be trusted.

Your email deliverability is then determined highly based on this sender score, as is where your email ends up. While a slightly low sender reputation may mean you get sent to some subscriber’s junk folder, an extremely low score will drop your deliverability down to nothing.  

Other types of reputation are domain reputation, which is tied to the domain you are sending from, and IP reputation, which affects deliverability for specific IP addresses you use to send from.

Steps to Avoid and Manage Poor Email Deliverability

There are many ways to fix and improve your email deliverability rate. You can avoid email deliverability problems by regularly cleaning your email list, sending high-quality emails, and implementing a double opt-in process. The first thing you should do is figure out why you’re having deliverability issues. 

1. Test Your Email Deliverability and Reputation

If you’re just starting out or haven’t had any complaints about your emails not reaching subscribers or ending up in the spam folder, chances are you don’t need to worry about testing your email deliverability and reputation. 

However, if these issues have come up, or you’re seeing bad email delivery rates, there are a few ways to test and see what the real problem is. 

• Use ActiveCampaign’s free authentication checker
• Check reputation with mail-tester.com and isnotspam.com, and even get advice on how to improve
• Use MXToolbox for a more robust set of tools to check authentication and reputation

2. Always Send Engaging Content

The very first thing you should do if you start to notice your open rates, bounce rates, or deliverability rates suffering is to confirm that the content you are sending is high quality and what subscribers opted in for. If they don’t care about what you’re sending, they’re more likely to ignore the email or report it as spam.

If you’re sure that the content within the email isn’t the problem, the next step is to look into your subject lines. Be sure to use subject line best practices to create an engaging subject that makes your subscribers want to click and keep coming back each time you reach their inbox.

Building automations and re-engagement campaigns are another way to keep your subscribers engaged in your content and increase those engagement rates!

3. Make It Easy To Unsubscribe

There was a time when a less-than-ethical business could make it extremely hard to unsubscribe to an email list. Thankfully, times have changed and now it is required that every email contains a way to unsubscribe. While this might seem counterintuitive, remember that an unengaged subscriber who doesn’t open your emails, or worse, reports them as spam, actually hurts your sender reputation. 

Recently, it’s become increasingly popular to include an unsubscribe link at the top of each email you send, especially for regular newsletters. However, at a minimum, make it easy by placing the unsubscribe link near the bottom of your email with the rest of the information on your company. 

4. Be Careful Of Sending Limits and Volume

A consistent schedule is key when it comes to both growing your list and keeping your deliverability high. However, there are times when you may need to send mass emails within a short period of time, such as a major sale or promotion. The problem is, if you increase your send too much at once, a mail server may see this as a sign of spam. 

While there is no set number of emails to hit your sending limit, the best way to avoid hitting it is to slowly increase the number of emails you send leading up to the event.

For example, if you normally send 1 email every other week but have an upcoming promotion where you’ll be sending your whole list 4 emails in 4 days, you can set up the campaign to send preview or teaser emails every few days leading up to the promotion. By the time the big week comes, mail servers will have adjusted to a higher sending volume.

In short, the more of a regular schedule you have, the higher your deliverability will be.

5. Practice Good Email Hygiene

Keeping your email list healthy is very much like keeping your teeth clean. If you keep up with regular maintenance, you’re less likely to develop a cavity, or in the case of your email list, low deliverability!

You should make sure to review and remove inactive subscribers often to avoid high unopen and bounce rates. If your emails are continuously bounced back or remain unopen, your sender reputation will suffer, followed by your deliverability. 

Hard bounced emails should be taken off right away. But in the case of low open or engagement rates, it’s always good practice to try and re-engage them before removing them.

It’s also important to note that, while a very high unsubscribe rate may cause deliverability issues, keeping your list clean has a much higher impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE80DyHGEOg&list=PLdg4YtrtIzukZpfbfIeN_1Ttm1RlDoXzo&index=16