Email Deliverability is the set of processes responsible for placing an email into your client’s inbox. Inbox placement and delivery is a complex subject. Many factors are taken into account by mailbox providers before placing an email into your subscribers’ inbox.
Difference between Email Deliverability and Email Delivery
Email is delivered first to the server and then to the client. Say, you have a Gmail account. My marketing emails to you will first get delivered to Gmail servers, which is called email delivery. At the server, it gets processed and checked for spam. The Gmail server checks if my email contains legitimate information and is not a virus or a spam message.
Once the server okays it, the email is delivered to your Gmail inbox, generally referred to as ‘subscriber inboxes’. This is called email deliverability. How the email delivery system works. From this definition, it’s obvious that email delivery is not everything. Without high deliverability, your email campaigns have no scope of performing well. If your marketing campaigns got delivered to the users’ inbox early on in the campaign, the email servers didn’t find anything spam in your emails.
Then due to one or more of the factors highlighted below, the servers started flagging your emails for spam. While emails were getting delivered to the servers, the deliverability rate kept dropping as the servers started rejecting your emails as spam. Low email deliverability means emails not reaching the final users. Hence the drop in engagement rates, email opens, and CTR.
Email deliverability is an under-the-hood stat that’s not immediately apparent. In fact, it’s not just a single factor; lots of small moving parts in the email marketing mechanism can lower your email deliverability. Your goal should be to improve email deliverability. Let’s see what those factors are:
- Your Email Server is not authenticated
Email servers run email authentication protocols to make sure the senders are not spamming or engaging in phishing. If you don’t implement these protocols, the receiver server will mistake you as a malicious sender. Your emails could land in the spam folder or might not be delivered at all.Here are the three primary email authentication protocols:
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) - IP Warming up
IP warm-up means starting with a low volume of approximately 100-500 email sends and then gradually increase it to full steam with tens of thousands of emails per month.Your fresh IP address has no sender reputation for these servers to judge the quality of your emails. Without a disciplined schedule, you will end up bombarding the server with a large volume of emails before the server has enough data to assign your IP a sender reputation. If you send bulk emails from a brand-new IP, the server will see your emails as spam because it doesn’t know what to make of them. You need to avoid it.
- Keep Your Lists Clean To Crush Bounce Rate
Clean your email lists! Bounces are emails that fail to reach the subscriber. Notwithstanding their impact on future email deliverability, they are a waste of resources. There are 2 types of bounce, soft and hard. - Be aware of Spam Complaints
When your subscribers hit the dreaded “Mark as spam” button, mailbox providers like Gmail, and ESPs like Moosend receive a notification. The bad news? Even senders with a small number of complaints are automatically blocked by mailbox providers. It’s for this reason that we strongly discourage the use of purchased lists. They will see your spam complaints rocket. - Don’t Get Blacklisted!
Black lists are lists of sender domains (e.g. yourdomain.com) and servers, or IP addresses that have been caught sending email spam.Send an email from a blacklisted server or domain and the chances are it will land in junk (or not at all). There are over 100 blacklists for different purposes and you need to stay off of every single one of them.
Follow the steps in this guide to maximize the deliverability of your emails. Your engagement stats will skyrocket. Need help to get better Email Deliverability? Consult with Cyrusson Experts.