What Is Email Deliverability?

Looking at the email deliverability stats an email marketing campaign can be termed as successful or a failure. Optimizing email deliverability metrics is key to better sender’s reputation and getting into the inboxes of the intended users. Email deliverability also known as inbox placement is the metric that no email marketer should miss.

Email Deliverability Primary Factors

• Identification

Identification is the point where ISP validates if “you are who you say” by using the email authentication protocols as such SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Email authentication records act as a gatekeeper for the recipient’s inboxes that prevents spams and abuses.

• Sender’s reputation

Sender’s reputation is the score assigned to your domain. By looking at your sender’s reputation, the ISPs decide what happens with your emails, i.e. lands into the inboxes or dies into the spam folder. Sender’s score depends on the factors like bounce rates, complains, blacklist listings, engagement rents, and many others.

• Content

Content includes both the subject line and your email text. Writing like a spammer will make your emails end in the spam box. You must avoid spam triggering words to give your emails the best chance for successful email placements.

Reasons For Poor Email Deliverability

• Poor sender’s reputation

With a poor sender’s reputation, your emails and campaigns will go nowhere but into the spam boxes. Maintaining a good sender’s reputation can fuel your email marketing results by increasing trustworthiness of your domain and IP in the eyes of mailbox providers. Since the Sender’s score is so important, it’s crucial to choose a reputable email marketing provider, like Sender

• High complaint rates

Your subscribers have signed up with you to receive value in return. If you have been bombarding them with highly inappropriate emails and hardcore sales, be prepared to see spikes in your complaint rates. Keeping low complaints rates play a vital role in maintaining a good sender’s reputation.

• Landing in the blacklist

Even if you are a legitimate sender, you will end up on a blacklist if your content is spammy. Blacklist exists publically that helps mailbox providers to protect users from spam emails. Keep checking your domain and IP at regular interval to check if it is blacklisted.

• Poor email hygiene

The quality of an email list is often overlooked. Email accounts decay over time due to many reasons. It is imperative to remove invalid, inactive email subscribers from the email list to maintain healthy email deliverability rates.

• Improper email authentication

Lack of email authentication will always impact email deliverability. Setting-up proper email authentication allows the recipient of an email as well as the inbox providers to the confirm and validate the identity of the email sender. Lack of authentication often leads to rejection of the message or goes through additional filters to determine if the email can be delivered.

5 Email Deliverability Best Practices For Hitting Inboxes

• Say No To Purchased Email List

Growing an email list takes time; this why many email marketers tend to buy an email list. Purchasing an email list is a complete disaster because the email accounts in that list never opted-in to receive your emails. Also, they do not care for your emails and will mark them as spam.
Increasing spam complaints will violate terms of your email marketing service, which can lead to account ban.

• Provide Email Preferences

Valuing your subscribers have been crucial than ever with the GDPR, and CAN-SPAM acts in place. Including an un-subscription link in every email is one common practice for allowing users to manage their subscription.

Another way out is having an email preference center that directs users to a form that offers different subscription options.

Quick fact – 43% of people mark emails as spam just because they could not find an unsubscription link.

• Segment Your Email List

Instead of mass-mailing to the entire list of subscribers, segmenting them by interests, buying history, and preferences can bring better engagement rates.
Email list segmentation is a proven technique to send targeted emails to a small group of prospects or subscribers.

• Don’t end up on a blacklist

Ending up on a blacklist will hurt your email deliverability drastically. Apart from all the points mentioned above, watch-out the content of email copies and subject lines. Writing spam triggering content will make you look like a spammer and book your seat on the blacklist(s).

• Clean Your Email List

Purging email list not only saves your email marketing costs but also keeps your sender’s reputation protected. Mailing to a clean email list gets better inbox placements.
Removing inactive and bad email subscribers can be done quickly by using any of the email validation services.