Intro:
If you are a newbie Email Marketer who has just entered the industry it might be feeling a lot to go through each aspect of it. I understand. I remember the time when I started my journey, of course, it hasn’t ended for me either. It can be overwhelming.
CTR. Open Rate. IP Reputation. Domain Reputation. ISPs. ESPs. Bounce Rate. Spam Traps. Like I can go on and on and we wouldn’t run out of terminologies anytime soon.
But honestly, there isn’t anything more important than Email Deliverability. If there was a competition to place one above another, I’d definitely place it in the top 3.
And I have my reasons.
As would you by the time you would finish reading this piece about what Email Deliverability is and how it can influence your Email Marketing campaigns.
What Is Email Deliverability
In laymen\’s terms, it can be defined as a metric that is calculated based on the sender’s reputation. Now it could be both good and bad, just like the real world. However, there is a catch, while in real life your bad reputation might be ignored, in the Email Marketing world a bad sender reputation can lead to a direct impact on the campaign ROI.
You might be wondering why?
How To Get A Rough Idea Of Email Deliverability?
Well, Email Deliverability is the metric that paints the picture of your success story. Let’s consider the following scenario:
You have a contact list of 2000 people. You are sending a promotional Email about the product your company is set to launch in the following year. What would be your goal for this promotional campaign?
I’d go ahead and say that all 2000 of them get to receive (not read) your Email and CTA placed in the body puts up good conversion numbers.
However, what happens is that only 1600 people receive your Email. While 200 of them click on the button and performs the action.
So what can we take away from our results?
For starters our conversion rate was 10% which is not bad, it’s not great, yes, but it’s not bad either. Secondly, the Email Deliverability of our campaign is stacked at 80%. In other words, 80% of people in our contact list received our Email in their inbox.
Whether they opened it or not is another metric and it is called the Open Rate. For now, we are not concerned about it. What you need to understand is Email Deliverability is a good measure to understand the current standing of our sender reputation.
Because there are two!!!
The Good
The Bad
Good Email Deliverability?
In the above example, we saw a deliverability rate of 80%. Whether it falls on the good side or the bad side is a matter of perception. Because if it’s for a blog website that you set up a year ago, it’s really good. However, if it’s for the HubSpot campaign then HubSpot would need to work on it. Their standards deserve more than 80%.
Either way, a good Email Deliverability rate is proof that your brand has a Domain and IP reputation that is a trusted source for ISPs. They don’t see any problem in letting you land in the inbox.
Whereas…
Bad Email Deliverability?
A bad Email Deliverability rate is an alarming sign of falling standards of your Domain and IP reputation. This in turn would lead to deprecated sender reputation turning to ISPs denial of entry for your Emails at the port of entry.
Depending on the business bad Email Deliverability rate ranges from anywhere from less than 75% to all the way to 0%. Surely, just in the case of good rate scope of the enterprise matters a lot. In an ideal world, Email Deliverability would be 100%.
We don’t live in an ideal world.
Influencing Factors For Email Deliverability
In order to understand the factors that end up influencing Email Deliverability, it is important to realize term Email Deliverability in itself is a blanket term dependent on other metrics i.e. (IP Reputation & Domain Reputation). However, even those terms are granular metrics that are calculated based on your various activities.
- Content Relevancy – Your Email Content can make or break it for you. If a user would feel they are on receiving end of content that’s not of the same quality that was promised on the website/landing page they might begin flagging it to their ISPs which in turn could lead to a depleted deliverability rate.
- Bought List – The best way to end your Email Marketing career is by starting it by buying a scarped list. Because if an ISP detected your list hygiene is not up to it and it\’s most probably scrapped or bought from a third party. You can say goodbye to getting a place in the inbox.
- Email Frequency – How many times you send a client an email in a month or week is a determining factor for ISPs to weigh whether it\’s originating from a spam source or not. An alarming rate from a new domain might flag it as SPAM by ISPs and that could cause a downward spiral.
- Honey traps – For those of you who might be considering buying a list, you should know most of those are filled with honey traps. In easy words, email addresses that have long expired and are owned by ISPs to check if your domain is targeting an email address from a trapped list. If it would be an ISP could interpret it as a sign you bought the list and thus deny the entry to the inbox.
- Open Rate – When the user receives your email and opens it to read that count towards your Open Rate. If you have sent 500 emails and 250 of them are opened by subscribers that means you have a 50% Open Rate. Honestly, it’s great, however, a falling number could be a sign of irrelevant content It’s hard to know whether it is an actual factor or an indirect factor that could manipulate Email Deliverability.
- Bounce Rate – If you have sent an email that is addressed to an address not active anymore, your email would be counted as bounced. Since there are two major kinds of bounces: Soft Bounce and Hard Bounce. More of either of them could lower your Email Deliverability.
- Spam Complains – All the major ISPs arm their users with the ability to flag an email as Spam. In the case, a person flags your Email as such. It would be remembered by ISP to be extra cautious next time an Email from your domain would arrive.
How To Improve Email Deliverability
Just the same way there are many factors that can lead to low or high Email Deliverability rates. There are always solutions too. Yes, not all of them would/should be applicable to your condition. Mastery of a fair few of them could bring fruitful results.
- Content Relevancy – Always make sure you are providing the end user with the best possible content you can manage to fathom. Because in the end, it is what every other stat, metric, and number depends on.
- List Hygiene – In order to remain in the good books of ISPs it is considered good practice to have your subscriber list updated.
- Email Frequency – To make sure you don’t set off any alarms for a new domain. Domain Warming Up should be implemented in your Email Marketing strategy to have ISPs get familiar with your brand.
- Open Rate – To keep the Open Rate up and running around the 60-70% mark or more. You should A/B test your Email body, subject lines, and any other media that you would’ve included making sure the end-user experience is as optimized as it can be.
- Spam Complains – All the major ISPs arm their users with the ability to flag an email as Spam. Therefore it is your duty to make sure your Email isn’t – ever – on the received end of the ticket to the Spam folder. Especially when it has already successfully landed inside the inbox.
Bottom Line
I don’t know if anyone has ever thought like it but this complete process of sending an Email and it is checked at the entry point reminds me of traveling in the real world.
Where the passports that we carry are sender reputation and ISPs are officers working at the port of entry at airports who stamps your passport.
If you would visit 10 countries and get a pass to enter only 5 of them then that could be your Email Deliverability.
And it would be what folks???
50%
Frequently Asked Questions – FAQ
- What is Email Deliverability and why is it important?
Email Deliverability is a metric that measures the ratio/percentage of the number of Emails that successfully managed to land in a client inbox. It is important because a low number might indicate you have a falling Sender Reputation and it is not a good sign, not at all.
- What affects Email Deliverability?
There are many factors: Frequency of Emails sent in the defined time period, Age of Domain, IP Reputation, Domain Reputation, List hygiene, and Organic status of Contacts gained.
- What has the biggest impact on Email Deliverability?
When MailBox Server denies entry to your Email that has the biggest effect on Email Deliverability. In other words, Email Deliverability is the biggest factor in its success and failure. Although Sender Reputation counts too if you have IP and Domain Reputation not worth ISP time you can bet your Email Deliverability will take a hit.
- What causes issues with Email Deliverability
There are a lot of things that cause issues with Email Deliverability: Shared IP network, clear lack of regard for no authentication method, misuse of Domain warming up, and buying the list.
- What is the biggest Deliverability
Anything above 90% is good and big, but mathematically and logically it is of course 100% that takes the cake for the biggest Deliverability number.