Email marketing has long been one of the most effective channels for engaging an audience, driving sales, increasing revenue, and strengthening customer relationships.
However, even the most strategic, compelling email campaigns can fall flat if they don’t reach the recipient’s inbox — and that’s where email deliverability comes into play. Improving your understanding (and execution) of this critical email marketing metric can be the difference between a campaign that thrives, and one that misses the mark.
In this blog, we’ll take you through all things email deliverability, starting with what deliverability is and why it matters, and ending with eight ways to improve your email deliverability.
Let’s get into it!
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the likelihood of your emails reaching your recipient’s inboxes instead of landing in spam folders or bounding back. In other words, it measures your ability to connect with your audience via email.
Many things can influence your brand’s email deliverability from sender reputation and email content to recipient engagement, all of which can improve (or reduce) your ability to land in your subscriber’s inboxes.
But remember: strong email deliverability doesn’t just “happen.”
It takes a deliberate commitment to best practices and ongoing monitoring to ensure your brand’s email deliverability is strong. Luckily, any brand can improve email deliverability, as long as they consistently meet technical and content-related standards.
Why Email Deliverability Matters
So, now you know what email deliverability is… but why does it matter? There are five main reasons email deliverability matters to your email marketing efforts.
1. Email Deliverability is How You Reach Your Audience
Strong email deliverability ensures that your emails successfully land in the inbox of your target audience. Without it, your audience may never see your messages at all.
2. Email Deliverability Strengthens Your Reputation
Emails that consistently reach the inbox build trust with both the recipient and their email service provider, and a good sender reputation increases your email deliverability!
3. Email Deliverability Maximizes Campaign ROI
Email marketing is usually cost-effective, but poor deliverability can undermine its potential. Ensuring your emails actually get delivered maximizes your campaign ROI.
4. Email Deliverability Drives Engagement and Conversions
If your emails don’t reach your recipients, you can’t expect them to engage with them. After all, recipients can’t open, click through, or buy from emails that aren’t there!
5. Email Deliverability Maintains Customer Relationships
Emails are a vital touchpoint for nurturing customer relationships. High deliverability keeps your audience informed and engaged, reinforcing loyalty and satisfaction.
Key Metrics for Email Deliverability
Now that we’re on the same page about why email deliverability matters, you need to know how to monitor it, leveraging different metrics to evaluate what is and isn’t working.
These are the main metrics that provide insight into your brand’s email deliverability.
■ Delivery Rate — This measures the percentage of emails that successfully reach your recipients’ servers. A high delivery rate doesn’t necessarily mean the emails land in the inbox, but it’s the first step to building strong deliverability.
■ Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) — IPR is a more precise metric than delivery rate. It measures how many emails land in your recipients’ “primary” inbox (where you want them to land) versus their spam or promotions folders.
■ Bounce Rate — This measures the percentage of emails that fail to deliver to your recipients’ servers whether due to invalid addresses (hard bounces) or temporary issues like a server being down (soft bounces).
■ Spam Complaint Rate —This measures how many email recipients have marked your emails as spam. A high spam complaint rate means your audience isn’t satisfied with your emails, which can hurt your reputation and deliverability.
■ Engagement Metrics — Open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates provide engagement-based feedback on email deliverability. High engagement is good, as service providers factor in engagement rates when filtering emails.
Factors Affecting Email Deliverability
Several other factors impact your email deliverability outside the metrics outlined above.
The Number of Emails You Send
Sending large numbers of emails without a proper strategy guiding them can look suspicious to service providers, especially if the engagement rate is low. You can work around this by slowly scaling your sending volume (provided engagement stays high).
Email Content and Formatting
Internet service providers use sophisticated algorithms to detect (and reject) content that looks like spam. Avoid spam-like content and formatting such as excessive exclamation marks, all-caps copy, and words that trigger spam filters.
List Quality and Engagement
Sending emails to outdated or unengaged subscribers can result in high bounce rates and low engagement (both of which hurt deliverability). Combat this by removing outdated or unengaged subscribers and keeping your subscriber list clean.
Sender Reputation and Authentication
Your sender reputation is like a credit score for email marketing; it tells service providers whether they should trust you. Avoid using unverified domains or generating spam complaints to keep your reputation strong.
How to Test and Optimize for Email Deliverability
A successful email campaign begins long before (and ends long after) pressing “send” on an email. There are several ways to test and optimize email deliverability before, during, and after sending your campaign.
Pre-Send Testing
The pre-send stage focuses on preparation, making sure that:
■ Your email lists are clean
■ Your domain is authenticated
■ Your content adheres to best practices
You can also use testing tools in this stage to simulate how your email will perform and how it delivers, helping you catch and correct issues beforehand. Adhering to these pre-send steps will minimize potential deliverability issues while supporting your brand reputation, too.
A/B Testing for Engagement
You can experiment with deliverability factors during an email send with A/B tests, tweaking and testing variables like:
■ Subject lines
■ Email content
■ Call-to-action buttons
This can give you insight into what resonates most with your audience, based on whether they engage more with a certain type of subject line or a certain style of body content. And remember: strong engagement can improve deliverability!
Post-Send Monitoring
The post-send stage focuses on monitoring performance and metrics, including:
■ Delivery rate
■ Bounce rate
■ Click-through rate
Once your email is live, staying on top of its performance is key to understanding how your audience is receiving and engaging with it (or not). This post-send monitoring stage can also reveal where your email is underperforming, highlighting areas to improve your next send.
8 Proven Ways to Improve Deliverability
Equipped with all this new knowledge about email deliverability, it’s time to adjust your email marketing efforts, making strategic changes to strengthen and improve your email deliverability rates.
Here are eight simple (and proven!) ways to improve your brand’s email deliverability.
1. Make Emails Personal
Personalized emails better resonate with their recipients and encourage meaningful engagement. Use dynamic fields for names, preferences, or past behaviors to create a tailored experience.
2. Maintain a Clean, Engaged Email List
Regularly updating your email list by removing invalid addresses and disengaged subscribers is good practice for strong deliverability. A high-quality list is good for your sender reputation!
3. Check Your Sender Reputation
Staying on top of your sender reputation is a great way to catch (and address) issues before they harm your reputation and deliverability. SenderScore or Microsoft SNDS are great tools for this.
4. Implement Proper Authentication
Using proper authentication protocols — like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — proves that your emails are coming from a legitimate source, reducing the chance of them being marked as spam.
5. Craft Relevant and Engaging Email Content
Ensure you’re only sending emails that provide value to the recipient, prioritizing clear, engaging messaging and meaningful topics. Avoid spammy tactics like clickbait or excessive formatting.
6. Optimize Sending Frequency
Use your existing engagement data to determine an optimal sending frequency for your brand’s email marketing. Find a balance between staying top-of-mind and not overwhelming your audience.
7. Monitor Feedback Loops
Feedback loops allow you to receive reports when recipients mark your email as spam. Monitoring this information is invaluable for identifying and adjusting problematic campaigns or lists.
8. Avoid Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses used to catch spammers, often found in purchased lists or inactive accounts. Use list-cleaning services to minimize risk and never, ever purchase email lists!
Final Thoughts
Improving your brand’s email deliverability is an ongoing commitment that requires attention to technical details, content quality, and audience engagement. By prioritizing deliverability, you can ensure your messages consistently reach the inbox, strengthening your customer relationships and maximizing the impact of your email marketing efforts.
Unsure how to start improving your brand’s email deliverability?
DIDO Agency can help!