- Email deliverability do's and don'ts. To wrap up, we've compiled a list of some of the most important do's and don'ts of email deliverability. Check and see if you're following emailing best practices, and get some ideas on where you can improve. Email deliverability things to avoid. Buying, renting, or harvesting email addresses.
- Many factors impact email delivery rates. The time it takes to deliver your email campaign to your entire audience depends on the sending server's reputation, the email's content, and its recipients. Email send times will also depend on the size of your audience, and on the current mail queue at Mailchimp.
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you'll be able to:
- Explain effective methods to improve deliverability.
- Describe how to protect your messages from spam filters.
QuickEmailVerification is an email verification company helping organizations reduce email bounce, improve email deliverability and increase marketing ROI. Our email verifier system processes thousands of email addresses every minute with a single goal: help customers connect with their customers.
It's All About Deliverability
Deliverability is the key to all email marketing. If your email isn't reaching the majority of your subscribers, then what's the point of sending it?
Let's talk about best practices you can use to ensure your emails are signed, sealed, delivered, and wanted. What do we mean when we say deliverability? It refers to the various stages of an email's life: the sending, receiving, and opening of an email.
Who's This From?
Some Internet service providers show only the From address, rather than the name and address of the sender. Because the From address can be just a mixture of letters and numbers instead of a recognizable name, recipients can think your email is spam. To avoid this, include an actual name in the From address.
Another way to ensure your subscribers recognize an email is from you is to add the name of your organization to the subject line. Using your organization name in both the From address and the subject line will decrease the chances your email will end up in spam folder.
Bounce and Purge
When you send out marketing emails, you often receive bounce-back messages alerting you to defunct email accounts. It‘s critical that you remove any bounced addresses from your mailing lists between one marketing message and the next that you send. Even though most email marketing systems stop sending to addresses that bounced a set number of times, a bounce rate over 20% for any single mailing can have serious consequences. This is because if deliverability is bad, your IP address can be put on a blocklist or even shut down. Don't let that happen. Nip it in the bud.
We also recommend purging old or inactive addresses from your mailing lists. Don't keep those names and emails that you haven't emailed in months. Don't spend money on sending emails that aren't even being opened.
The same holds for those subscribers who haven't opened your emails in months—remove them from your mailing lists using either a suppression list or more permanently, contact deletion. They detract from your profitability because it costs money to contact them, and they're more likely to complain about your emails. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can run reports that show you which subscribers are unengaged or have not opened an email or clicked.
Note
Learn how to run reports and track results in the Trailhead module: Marketing Cloud Setup.
Manage Email Frequency
Another best practice is to deliver what you promise. If you promised a monthly newsletter, make sure you send it monthly. Not bimonthly, not every other week—monthly. Not only do you want your communications with your subscribers to be personal and relevant, you want them to be anticipated. If your messages don't score a hit on those three points, is there really a need to send the content you're sending?
Note
You can also use AI to help out! Activate Einstein Engagement Frequency to evaluate your email activities and identify the optimum number of email messages to send.
Spam Filters
Most Internet service providers use filters to sort legitimate email from the junk or spam. There are more than 300 spam-filtering companies. They vary in the filter logic they use, but most spam filters use content—or keyword-based logic. Others might incorporate email volume from any one sender, customer complaints into their algorithms. Some function on a score basis and filter messages that rate high as spam after the characteristics of the message (content, volume, response, and sender) have been reviewed using anti-spam filters.
Deliverability is key when it comes to your emails. So think about everything that can affect deliverability and use it to your advantage when sending your emails!
Your emails are now being delivered directly to your subscribers' inboxes and are tempting your readers with offers they can't resist. That's great, but how do you get these subscribers in the first place? That's the topic of our next unit.
Resources
- External Site: Ultimate Guide to Deliverability (Download required)
quick links
Did your email engagement metrics drop significantly?
Emails bounce or end up at the SPAM folder?
It seems that you have issues with email deliverability and email sender's reputation. That's quite a common challenge that marketers address while implementing their email marketing strategies. According to ReturnPath data, 1 out of 5 emails never reaches the inbox. So this issue might become significant in the overall campaign performance.
When analyzing our clients' campaign deliverability complaints, we see widespread pitfalls that most clients get into. But the best practices come to light as well.
There are certain things that you should know when switching your email service provider or initiating a new email marketing strategy. So carry on reading and learn about how you can fix your email deliverability and avoid this headache in the future.
What Is Email Deliverability?
How To Improve Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to recipients' inboxes.
This metric is complex. It depends on many elements, such as service provider, sender's domain, quality of email list, email frequency, IP reputation, and overall sender's reputation profile.
It's vital to mention that email deliverability isn't the same as a delivery rate. A delivery rate indicates what percentage of your emails is received by subscribers' mailboxes, even if they land in the spam folder. Meanwhile, deliverability is the inbox placing indicator.
It shows whether your email gets into the primary inbox of a subscriber. So, even if you have a sound delivery rate, you can still have deliverability issues.
What Is A Good Email Deliverability Rate?
It's difficult to define what a good email deliverability rate is. Return Path claims, that 'just 79% of commercial emails lands in the inbox.' The rest is 'either sent to a spam folder or goes missing—most likely blocked by the mailbox provider.'
The goal of every marketer is to get an email delivered to 100% of subscribers. Unfortunately, very seldom marketer achieves such a high rate.
You should pay attention to the following metrics when you track your overall email deliverability:
- 95% and higher is considered to be a good delivery rate on behalf of an email service provider.
- The bounce rate shouldn't be higher than 3%.
- In terms of the SPAM rate, you shouldn't be ringing the alarm bells as long as it doesn't exceed 0.08%.
Partially, your email deliverability depends on the platform that you use for sending emails. All email service providers have different delivery rates.
Most often they fluctuate between 88-99%.
At Omnisend, we have a separate dedication for email deliverability and we pay a lot of attention to maintain this score as close to 100% as possible. Currently, it fluctuates between 98-99%.
If our clients follow the best practices and start sending email campaigns by warming up their senders' reputation, they can get deliverability close to perfection.
What is IP Warming?
IP warming is a process when a sender gradually increases the volume of messages sent with one IP address. It's necessary for establishing a reputation with internet service providers.
If your sender's reputation depends only on you, IP warming usually depends on your email service provider. Email marketing platforms cover the IP warming process because they have a lot of shared IPs for their clients and take care of them all.
Only companies with huge sending volume that reaches 1.5 M emails per month start using their own dedicated IPs and start warming them by themselves. Read more about shared and dedicated IPs here.
Building Your Sender's Reputation
A sender's reputation profile plays the most significant part in the email deliverability. So let's dig deeper and figure out what it is and under what circumstances should you implement reputation building processes into your strategy.
What Is A Sender's Reputation Warmup?
Reputation warmup is a process of improving your 'reputation profile' so that you avoid the SPAM folder. You do this by gradually increasing the number of emails you send out based on a specific schedule.
Reputation warmup is highly recommended if your subscriber list is higher than 50,000 contacts.
This procedure is typically done when:
- you've just moved from one email marketing service to another one, thereby gaining a new dedicated IP address
- you've just started with email marketing
It's also vital that the subscribers in your first few rounds are pretty active.
This means that they'll be more likely to open your emails and click them, which sends a good signal to Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and other providers that your content is quality and your IP address can be trusted.
How Should You Get Started With Reputation Warmup?
Gradually increasing your email volume helps you build a good and strong email sender's reputation.
Warm up sending volumes and segmentation recommendations:
Which Strategy Will Improve Email Deliverability
It's also a good practice to segment out those contacts that haven't opened a campaign in the last 12 months. Learn more about that here. And don't even import them to the new email marketing platform, at all. They will damage your sender's reputation on the new platform.
Here's a sample sender's reputation warming schedule for a client if he/she has 50,000 recipients in total:
Email Deliverability Issues
What are the factors that negatively affect email deliverability?
#1 A high complaint rate
If the email is unwanted, people will mark it as spam. This is one of the primary factors which lower the sender's reputation. As a result, all your emails might start landing in the SPAM folder. Therefore, try to avoid spam complaints as much as possible.
#2 A high bounce rate
This usually means that the list is outdated, low quality, or purchased. Inbox providers treat such senders poorly and affect their reputation.
#3 Low engagement
If a subscriber received 50 emails but did not open any, this is just another signal to the inbox provider that the sender is not following best practices.
Therefore, more and more of his/her emails will be placed into the spam folder.
Saying 'goodbye' to inactive contacts is always a good thing. There are some good practices on how to do it decently. Learn more about that here.
We've seen multiple times when a smaller active list of 10,000 contacts drives much more sales than 50,000 (because 40,000 contacts were inactive and those bad contacts were damaging the sender's reputation). Plus, sending emails to inactive contacts isn't cost-effective.
#4 Too frequent campaigns
Even high-quality subscribers might be overwhelmed by receiving too many campaigns a day and will mark your emails as spam.
The ideal frequency is 2-3 times/week. For daily senders: no more than once a day (with rare exceptions when there is a super rare once-in-a-quarter sale, etc.).
#5 A sudden increase in the number of emails sent
If a sender is usually sending to 50,000 subscribers and then starts sending to 150,000, this spike will cause more emails to be sent to the spam folder (because inbox providers consider spikes as an unexpected behavior and spam attack).
If you want to increase your mailing list size, do that gradually.
#6 Constantly switching between different email service providers
This hurts your sender reputation because the inbox provider might start seeing the sender as a spammer who's trying to hide his/her trail.
Improve Email Deliverability: Best Practices
By improving your reputation profile, you will increase the success score. These are email deliverability best practices to achieve that.
#1 Send emails to a highly engaged list, with a high click rate
The threshold here for 'high click rate' will depend on the industry you're in. That's why subscriber segmentation will be your best friend.
For ecommerce that sells apparel, small electronic devices, books or household pieces, the average click rate is 5-6%.
#2 Make sure the email is wanted
This means that the subscriber explicitly agreed to receive an email. That's why lists must be opt-in and preferably GDPR-compliant.
#3 Gradually increase sending volume
As already discussed, if you have 500,000 emails in a list, starting your email marketing by sending campaigns to all of them immediately is a really bad idea.
If you start sending large batches on day one, inbox providers might see this as a threat and a spam attack. Therefore, your email will automatically be marked as spam.
#4 Keep your contact list clean
Statistically, 30% of subscribers change email addresses once per year. So you should clean and take care of your list periodically.
If someone hasn't interacted (clicked on your emails) in the last 12 months, that contact should be treated as inactive.
Such emails might later become spam traps. If a trap receives emails, this tells inbox providers that the sender isn't following email marketing best practices.
As a result, your reputation suffers.
Pro tip: when you migrate from one email marketing platform to another, at first migrate your best contacts who are constantly opening and clicking your emails and start sending to them only.
That way you'll gradually transfer your 'reputation' from one email marketing platform to another.
After a while, you can migrate the rest of the mailing list.
Once again, migrate gradually. Start with a small list, then grow the number of contacts.
Key Takeaways
Email deliverability is a metric worth keeping your eye on. You can't build it in a day but you can ruin it within the moment you send the reckless email campaign.
And even if it happens, these are the essential things on how to grow and improve email deliverability rates:
- Implement a sender's reputation warming
- Segment your lists to get the best engagement rate possible
- Be patient.
Join a platform that actually cares about your deliverability. Sign up for Omnisend today
Further Reading:
