No one wants the emails they send out to be marked as spam, especially email marketers. This can be extremely damaging for their email ROI. Understandably, they are insulted when their messages are marked as such. What many marketers don’t know is that the emails they send can be affected by email deliverability. By understanding what email deliverability is, email marketers can avoid being marked as spam by their email recipients and maintain a positive email reputation.
Read on to learn the basics of email deliverability and why this email metric matters for all email marketers.
Email Deliverability is not Guaranteed
Email is the backbone of emarketing online. Can you imagine how companies would operate without email? It is often the primary form of communication between a company and its customers. Email is a highly versatile emarketing channel that can send everything from order confirmations to privacy updates.
Email deliverability is important for any business that relies on email communications. Unfortunately, most companies to not understand what email deliverability is until it’s too late and hurt your email ROI—like when thousands of emails fail to make it to recipient inboxes. Many businesses assume that emails are delivered if they do not receive bounce notifications. This is not true though. The reality is that over 21% of emails never reach recipients inboxes.
This means it is necessary to understand email deliverability in order to increase the reliability of your email campaigns.
What is Email Deliverability
One thing to understand is that “email deliver” and “email deliverability” are two different things. They are not the same metric, although many marketers use the terms interchangeably. This can make understanding these metrics confusing.
Although email delivery and email deliverability are not the same metric, they are interconnected. They play an important role in the process of sending an email:
Email delivery measures the first step in the process of sending an email. It is often referred to as an acceptance rate and indicates whether your campaign is accepted by internet service providers (ISPs). Basically, it determines if your email can be sent out in the first place. The email delivery metric measures the total messages sent that did not bounce, regardless of where the email landed. It does not take into account if an email landed in a recipient’s inbox or spam folder.
Email deliverability measures the second step in the process of sending an email. It is sometimes referred to as an inbox placement metric. Email deliverability measures the percentage of emails that actually make it to your recipient’s inboxes. It is a more specific measurement than email delivery and offers more insight on the success of your campaigns because emails that land in inboxes are more likely to be opened by recipients.
The Components of Email Deliverability
There are three main components that affect email deliverability: identification, reputation and content.
- Identification: Identification is just what it sounds like. This is where a subscriber’s ISP will validate that you are who you say you are—rather than a spammer impersonating you. It will do this using a set of standard protocols: Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). These protocols protect recipient’s inboxes from spam or other unwanted email. Passing the identification does not guarantee your email will get delivered, but it does help ISPs differentiate your business from spammers or other illegitimate senders.
- Reputation: Your domain is assigned a reputation score which determines how trustworthy you are as a sender. It is based on several factors including (but not limited to): blacklisting, bounce rates, complaint rates, email volume and spam trap hits. Your email reputation affects how ISPs respond to your email delivery requests; meaning, it determines whether you will end up in your recipient’s inboxes or spam folders. Senders with good reputations end up getting delivered. Senders with poor reputations either get blocked from delivery or have their emails land in the spam folder.
- Content: The quality of your email content matters. It plays a substantial role on whether your emails land in a person’s inbox or not. Emails with spammy subject lines such as “BUY NOW”, “MAKE MONEY FAST”, or other strange formatting are viewed negatively by ISPs. Ensuring that your email content is high-quality and relevant to your recipients is key.
Conclusion
Email deliverability is a complex topic, although this post should make understanding it a little bit easier. Look out for upcoming blog posts which outline 5 causes of poor email deliverability, email deliverability best practices and ways to improve email deliverability. At FrescoData, we are committed to helping your team increase email ROI by sending out the highest-quality emails that actually land in recipient inboxes.
Are you having email deliverability issues? Noticing your email ROI is down? Not sure how to fix these problem? FrescoData has a team of experts that are ready to assist you with your email deliverability goals. We use our industry knowledge to send email campaigns with a 95% email deliverability rate. With our team by your side, you can increase sales and email campaign success. Contact us to learn more about our products, services and pricing.
