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Summary
What is email deliverability?
Why is email deliverability important?
How does email deliverability work?
Why are your emails being delivered to spam?
What affects deliverability?
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is the ability to reach your recipients' inbox. It is australia whatsapp number data 5 million an important measure of success in email marketing.
For webmail, email deliverability is the percentage of emails that reach the recipient's primary inbox, excluding emails that end up in the promotions or spam folder.
However, there is a little clarification to be made. Did you know that there is a difference between email deliverability and email delivery?
Why email deliverability and not email delivery?
Email delivery is the process of successfully sending an email to a recipient server. It is not distinguished whether the email arrives in the primary inbox or the spam folder. It is therefore quite possible to have a high delivery rate, but a low deliverability.
For this reason, let's take a look together at email deliverability and how to improve it.
Why is email deliverability important?
In email marketing, it is very important to track the deliverability rate of your emails for several reasons:
Reason #1: Know if your recipient received your email
One of the essential reasons to track the deliverability of your emails is to verify whether your newsletter subscribers have actually received your emails.
Marketers are interested in this metric to identify:
Their most active subscribers.
Factors that affect engagement.
Recipients who don't open emails.
Reason #2: Measure your recipient’s engagement
Having a healthy subscriber database is great! But if those contacts aren’t opening or clicking on your emails, you may struggle to achieve your marketing and sales goals.
Lack of engagement from your subscribers will heavily impact your deliverability and therefore your reputation. Unengaged content is considered spam by webmails. Your messages will be filtered, including those sent to engaged subscribers.
The engagement of your subscribers is therefore something to monitor closely. At Actito, for example, we offer an engagement score module. This engagement score is represented by a visual gauge that allows you to measure at a glance how engaged each profile is with your brand. This score allows you to distinguish between highly engaged profiles (to whom you could offer a reward program) and disengaged profiles (which should instead be targeted with a reactivation campaign).
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Reason #3: Improve the campaign in the future
Email deliverability helps the marketer understand:
Unsubscribing and Complaints
Unsubscribing allows us to identify a message that generates a certain dissatisfaction or too much marketing pressure.
The complaint is a report made by the recipient indicating that the message is spam. Some webmails offer a feedback loop service that will generate the sending of an email and that will allow Actito to identify the complainant and blacklist him.
Indicators of engagement and responsiveness
These two indicators will help identify what works and therefore improve reputation because it is a positive point for webmails.
How does email deliverability work?
Understanding the journey of an email
STEP 1: Sending the email
Sending an email begins with establishing a connection between the sending server (sender of the email) and the recipient's mail server. If the sender has bad practices and therefore a bad reputation, the connection is stopped. The email will be refused (bounce). There can be a blockage and therefore a deliverability problem without the email being sent.
STEP 2: Email Delivery
In a second step, the email is delivered.
If your email is rejected, it is a bounce. At Actito there are 3 types of bounces:
Hard bounce: The email could not be delivered because the address or domain does not exist (the server for the address's domain responded that the address before the @ did not exist).
Spam bounce: The email was not delivered due to sender reputation or failure to follow best practices. This type of error will pause sending and retry sending at a later time. For example, if you usually send 200,000 emails per day, and on a given day you send 250,000, the extra 50,000 emails will likely be rejected as spam bounces.
Soft bounce: The majority of soft bounces are full mailboxes or pending messages that could not be delivered.
STEP 3: The email arrives in the inbox
The webmail will therefore check the content of the message (HTML code, links, spam words) to determine where it will deliver the message: inbox, spam folder or trash.
As a reminder, some webmails have set up tabs to make it easier for their users to access important emails (Gmail / Hotmail).
There is no technique to land in the Priority tab for a marketing email and the fact that your promotional messages arrive in this tab is not a mistake or a punishment.
Your recipients are used to it and if they want to receive your messages in their Priority tab, they can decide freely. Any circumvention trick is very negatively viewed by Gmail which can generate heavy sanctions.
The Promotions tab also allows you to highlight certain emails that match the recipient.
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Gmail offers a tab dedicated to transactional sendings (Notifications) to make life easier for their users. For your transactional emails to be well classified, it is necessary that these emails are sent with a dedicated domain.
STEP 4: The recipient opens the email, or not
The fourth step is whether or not the recipient opens the email. This depends on the relevance and appeal of your subject line.
Attention Apple, since IOS15, has made this metric unusable. Apple will emit systematic openings which scrambles the signal. For this reason, Actito no longer counts IOS15 openings (only clicks are taken into account on Actito).
STEP 5: Recipient action
As a final step, the recipient can perform one of the following actions:
Click on one of the links in your email.
Unsubscribe from your newsletter.
Mark your email as spam.
Clicks will have a positive impact on your reputation because the webmail will understand that the recipient is interested.
Unsubscribing is a neutral click.
On the other hand, if the recipient declares the email as spam, this will negatively impact your reputation.
Some webmails offer a service to collect complaint information (feedback loop) which is processed by Actito (the email is blacklisted and will no longer be contactable).
The webmails that offer the feedback loop are Hotmail, Yahoo, La Poste, SFR...
