Email Deliverability 

What is email deliverability? 

Email deliverability measures the ability of an email to reach a recipient’s inbox without being filtered out or marked as spam. Moreover, it ensures that emails are successfully delivered to the intended recipients and they are not blocked or left undelivered. 

Why is email deliverability important? 

Email deliverability is important for several reasons.  

1. Engages Intended Audience: The first step is to send emails to your recipients’ inbox to ensure that your message reaches the intended audience. However, if emails end up in spam folders or are undelivered, your target audience may never see them. Good email deliverability increases the chances of your emails being opened, read, and acted upon, leading to higher engagement and conversions. 

2. Avoids Wasting Money: Email marketing campaigns, and marketing campaigns in general, require resources and investment. If your emails have poor deliverability, a significant portion of your budget and efforts will go to waste. If you focus on improving deliverability, you will maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing campaigns. 

3. Promotes Customer Loyalty: When your emails consistently reach the inbox of your customers, it enhances the trust and reliability of your brand in the eyes of your recipients. By delivering relevant and valuable content, you can strengthen the relationship with your audience and promote strong customer loyalty. On the other hand, poor deliverability can lead to frustration and reduced engagement. 

4. Maintains Sender Reputation: Email service providers (ESPs) monitor the reputation of senders to protect their users from spam and malicious emails. Maintaining a good sender reputation is crucial for long-term email deliverability success. By following best practices and avoiding practices that harm your reputation (such as high bounce rates or spam complaints), you can establish and maintain a positive reputation. 

Email deliverability is important because it ensures that your emails reach the right target audience, maximize your campaign’s ROI, ensure customer loyalty, and help maintain a positive sender reputation. 

What is a good email deliverability rate? 

Email delivery rates, or “Acceptance Rates”, are the rates at which your mail is accepted into the Mailbox Provider (MBP)’s servers. These rates are often measured using specific email deliverability metrics to evaluate the success and effectiveness of email deliverability. These metrics include: 

• Delivery rate 
• Open rate 
• Click through rate 
• Bounce rate 
• Unsubscribe rate 

Moreover, a “good” email deliverability rate depends on many factors. These factors include sender reputation, recipient list quality, engagement metrics, industry, and campaign specifics. With these factors in mind, a good email deliverability rate typically exceeds 95%. This means that more than 95% of the emails you send successfully reach the recipients’ inbox. 

What are the common email deliverability issues? 

Email deliverability issues occur more than you might think. Here are some of the common issued faced by marketers: 

• Spam filters: Email service providers often encourage users to turn on spam filters to protect them from unsolicited and potentially harmful emails. If your emails trigger these filters due to specific content, they may be diverted to user’s spam folders, or your content may be blocked entirely. 
• Low sender reputation: As mentioned above, email service providers look at the reputation of senders based on factors like engagement rates and complaint rates. Consequently, if your sender reputation is low, it can prevent users from receiving your emails. 
• Email bounce: An email bounce is simply where an email is not successfully delivered to the recipient’s mailbox and “bounces” back to the sender. Bounces can occur for various reasons, such as invalid email addresses, full mailboxes, or server issues. 

Now, there are two different types of email bounces that you should be aware of. 

• Soft bounce: A soft bounce is a temporary failure to deliver an email. This is when the email reaches the recipient’s mail server but cannot be delivered to the mailbox at that specific time. Soft bounces can occur for several reasons including a full mailbox, a temporary server issue, or an oversized email.   

• Hard bounce: A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email. It occurs when the email is returned to the sender because the recipient’s email address is invalid, doesn’t exist, or is blocked. After a hard bounce, the recipient is usually removed from the mailing list to prevent further attempts to send emails to this address. 

Best practices to improve email deliverability 

In order to improve email deliverability and reach your desired audience, there are many best practices that you can follow. 

1. Maintain sender reputation: First and foremost, you want to use a reputable email service provider (ESP). Also, in order to avoid email spoofing (somebody taking control of your email domain), you want to authenticate your emails with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to verify your sending domain. 

2. Perfect your opt-in process: It’s very important to implement an opt-in process where subscribers confirm their email addresses after signing up. This helps ensure that the email addresses provided are valid and that your email list is full of engaged users. 

3. Create personalized subject lines: A subject line will ultimately determine if the recipient opens your email. It is helpful to avoid using phrases that are not personalized to the individual user or indicate spam mail. 

4. Monitor deliverability metrics: It is beneficial to regularly monitor email deliverability metrics such as delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, complaint rates, and unsubscribe rates. This data is used to identify trends, issues, and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, you want to leverage this data to remove inactive users and eliminate the risk of damage to your reputation and deliverability rates. 

How can Optimove’s email deliverability solution Help You Grow Your Business? 

Optimove can help you improve deliverability rates and increase user engagement by integrating the most advanced customer email platform available with the world’s leading customer relationship management hub. 

1. Optimove can provide increased email relevance through unparalleled email personalization and customer hyper-targeting that leverages all available Optimove data and insights (customer database, customer model, activity tracking, predictive analytics, AI recommendations, etc.) 

2. Moreover, the DynamicMail add-on ensures that each customer sees the most relevant messages, products, prices and offers, even when emails are opened long after being sent. 

3. Most importantly, high deliverability is ensured through the combination of first-rate technology and a specialized deliverability support team (No integrations or external services required).

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