Email Deliverability: Comprehensive Guide to Understanding 2023

What Is Email Deliverability?

When creating a marketing strategy, your primary goal for any email campaign is to get as many eyes on your content as possible. However, when you’re a company with an extensive list of subscribers and many emails to send each day, it’s possible to hit some bumps in the road with deliverability.

Email deliverability measures how often the messages you send make it to the recipient’s inbox. Multiple factors influence the deliverability rate, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), throttling, spam reports, sender reputation, blocklists, bounce rate, and cold inboxes, or IPs. The rise of spammers and scammers has led to more sensitive spam filters to protect consumers from unwanted messages.

However, it’s crucial to recognize that deliverability rates don’t necessarily measure the delivery to the recipient’s inbox. Some people only calculate whether the email got to the recipient for deliverability, whether it went into the Promotions, Spam, or Primary folder. The true goal of email deliverability is to get your message into your client’s inbox, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this article.

For this post, when we reference deliverability rate, we’re talking about inbox placement.

Having a high deliverability rate is essential because it maximizes the potential of your email campaigns. You can spend time, money, and effort to craft an incredible, engaging campaign, but it won’t matter if people don’t see your content.

We understand how frustrating it is that you’re simply trying to run your business, and cybercriminals are making it increasingly difficult to do your job. It should be a given that your messages reach your subscribers’ inboxes, but you have to remember the tidal wave of emails a consumer gets in a day. ISPs and spam filters are doing their best to keep their clients from getting taken advantage of or overwhelmed at the volume of messages.

The positive is that there are multiple steps you can take to improve your deliverability rate and get your messages in front of the people who want to read them.

How Does Email Deliverability Work?

Step 1: The Mailing List

When your content is ready, it’s time to send the emails. The moment you press the send button, most of the messages will make their way from your server to the ISPs of their recipients. But there are some emails that your server will not attempt to deliver, known as skipped emails. Typically the recipient unsubscribed to your content but hasn’t been removed from your mailing list yet, so your server skips over them automatically.

Step 2: Send the Email

When your content is ready, it’s time to send the emails. The moment you press the send button, most of the messages will make their way from your server to the ISPs of their recipients. But there are some emails that your server will not attempt to deliver, known as skipped emails. Typically the recipient unsubscribed to your content but hasn’t been removed from your mailing list yet, so your server skips over them automatically.

Step 3: The Recipient’s ISP

Before the emails reach the inbox, they’re reviewed by the recipient’s ISP, which determines whether your message will be delivered or bounced. If your email is bounced, it will either be a soft or a hard bounce. A soft bounce occurs when the recipient has a full inbox, is suddenly getting too many messages at one time, or you’ve sent the recipient too many emails over a short period of time. A hard bounce is when the email address doesn’t exist or is invalid, and too many hard bounces indicate that your mailing list isn’t updated. You can try to send the message to that address again if it’s a soft bounce, but hard bounces mean that something is wrong with the email you typed in.

Step 4: The Decision

If the ISP decides that it’s safe to deliver your message, it’ll then choose which folder to send it to: inbox, junk, blocked, or spam trap. Spam traps are catfish email addresses that ISPs use to identify spammers, and landing in spam traps frequently will severely damage your sender’s reputation. As stated earlier, some people calculate deliverability just by getting to step four, but we believe it’s essential to focus on getting emails to an active inbox.

Additionally, the email campaign doesn’t end as soon as the email is delivered to an inbox (or another folder). Monitoring the open rate and the click rate provides a better picture of customer engagement with your content.

Why Is Email Deliverability Important?

Good email deliverability is important at its core because more emails will be opened and read by your target audience. Your new and existing customers will get updates on your latest products, upcoming promotions, and more. Emails also keep your customers updated on their purchase status. If your emails aren’t landing in inboxes, your customers may get frustrated when they can’t find the information they’re looking for. The higher your delivery rates, the more people you’ll be able to move through your sales funnel.

A great email deliverability rate increases your ROI on email campaigns, helps you convert leads, and builds brand loyalty. On top of that, if your competitors are consistently landing in your shared audience’s spam folders while you’re getting into their inboxes, then you have a massive leg up on them. A high deliverability rate allows you to analyze how effective your content is and adjust future marketing strategies.

How to Improve Email Deliverability

Improving your email deliverability rate isn’t too hard if you’re already practicing ethical email standards. Your efforts to get your messages into more inboxes will also help you improve your sender score and sender reputation, making your campaigns even more successful.

Moving forward, here are things to include in your email marketing efforts and things to avoid as much as possible:

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