In the ongoing battle against spam, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are imposing increasingly strict restrictions on mailbox access. While this may inconvenience senders, it ultimately benefits users by ensuring a clutter-free inbox with desired content and expected experiences.
However, important messages often fail to reach users’ inboxes due to careless mistakes made by senders in haste or due to lack of experience. To avoid such pitfalls, join us as we explore the fundamentals of email deliverability in this updated 2024 guide. We’ll highlight key focus areas and common pitfalls to avoid.
What is Email Deliverability?
Before delving into the intricacies of email deliverability, let’s first define what it entails. Simply put, email deliverability is the measurement and understanding of how effectively your marketing or transactional emails are delivered to recipients’ inboxes. It’s also referred to as inbox deliverability.
Email Deliverability vs Email Delivery
These terms are frequently mistaken for being identical, but they are distinct concepts, and it’s crucial to differentiate between them.
Email delivery refers to whether the recipient’s mail server accepted the email file and delivered it to the mailbox, regardless of the folder it landed in.
On the other hand, email deliverability involves the server accepting the file and delivering it to the mailbox, but the critical question is whether it ended up in the inbox, spam, social, updates, or any other folder that the recipient seldom checks.
In essence, email deliverability denotes the actual capability to ensure emails land in the recipient’s inbox.
Why Email Deliverability matters?
A user forgets her password? Send her an email containing reset instructions.
A new feature has just been launched? Share the exciting news with your subscribers’ inboxes.
The blog’s traffic is slower than usual? Send a roundup of the latest articles to your mailing list. Companies frequently send emails for various purposes.
However, according to the latest research from Influencer Marketing Hub, only 79.6% of legitimate emails reach their intended destination. This means that, on average, three out of every 20 users (or over 15,000 users in a seven-digit community):
– May not regain immediate access to their account and might abandon your platform.
– Might not be informed about the shiny new feature you’ve worked on for months, potentially leading them to competitors offering similar or even less functional options.
– Won’t be reminded of your existence and may not consider any of your paid plans.
If you can afford not to be concerned about it, we envy you. However, most content specialists strive to improve delivery rates, even by just a single percent.
At Email Jinny, where we deal with emails daily, we want to share the key considerations for improving deliverability.
What is a good Email Deliverability rate?
Determining what’s considered a good email deliverability rate isn’t straightforward.
Generally, it’s advised to aim for a rate between 85% and as high as 95% to make the most of your marketing efforts.
However, this number can vary depending on your business’s unique factors. It’s a good idea to research your industry to see how your competitors are doing and analyze your current email inbox placement rate, along with related metrics like engagement rates, to identify areas for improvement.
Once you have this information, you can set a benchmark for email deliverability and work together as a team to achieve it.
Marketing Emails Deliverability Rate
Usually, marketing emails don’t get a lot of attention, and they’re opened around 20-25% of the time.
But here’s the bright side: in many industries, having an open rate higher than 30% is seen as pretty good.
So, if you tried out an email warm-up service to give your emails a little push and you got an extra 5-10% increase in open rate, that’s actually a great outcome.
Transactional Emails Deliverability Rate
When it comes to transactional emails, things are a bit different because users usually anticipate receiving them and view them as legitimate even before they arrive.
As a result, most transactional emails boast deliverability and open rates as high as 80-85%. However, just because they typically perform well doesn’t mean you should skip testing them. Running tests can still help you achieve even better outcomes.
How to test Email Deliverability?
Today, there are numerous tools available, many of which are free, to help you conduct comprehensive email deliverability tests, examine various aspects of deliverability, and gauge the performance of your emails:
1. Mailtrap Email Testing: Utilize Email Sandbox to test your email workflows in a secure environment. Evaluate how emails appear in different clients, analyze their spam scores, and ensure proper delivery without the risk of spamming recipients.
2. Sender Score: Assess your domain reputation and receive a “Sender Score” for each IP address from which you send emails. It also verifies critical authentications and related website certificates.
3. MXToolbox: Offers a range of tools for reputation validation. In addition to their Blacklist tool, they provide others for authentications validation and domain health checks, among other features.
4. Mail-tester.com / Isnotspam.com / Spamcheck by Postmark: These are additional tools for basic reputation checks. Simply send an email to an individual address and receive a detailed report with suggestions for improvement within seconds.
5. SendForensics / Glock Apps / Kickbox: These are paid but more comprehensive email deliverability testing solutions that are worth considering.
What affects the Email Deliverability rate?
There are several factors that can lead to email deliverability problems, with some of the main ones including:
1. Frequency of received spam complaints
2. Content of the email
3. Volume of emails sent within a specific timeframe
4. Infrastructure used for sending emails
However, by effectively tracking these aspects and making necessary improvements, email deliverability issues can be greatly minimized. Let’s delve into how this can be accomplished in detail.
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