Deliverability: Your New Favorite Tool
Updated March 29, 2024
7 min read
Emailable decided enough is enough. Your emails are important, you take the time to craft creative and beneficial content for your customers so your emails should actually reach them. This tool takes the guesswork out of all your email marketing strategies. You’re now able to see which emails will actually land in the inboxes, and the actual inbox placement rate, and monitor whether or not you’re on any blacklists.
Inbox reports give you a comprehensive report on key metrics that impact your email deliverability. With the inbox reports you’re able to see:
- Insights: These insights start with an entire overview of your email’s performance. It will then provide you with color-coded badges that allow you to instantly see your key metrics.
- Authentication: Email authentication is a huge part of email deliverability because it protects your domain’s reputation. This helps ensure that your DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are all properly configured.
- Inbox Placement: You can see how your email delivers across all major email service providers. You can also see additional insights for some providers such as Gmail which will allow you to know which inbox category you’re reaching.
- SpamAssassin Analysis: See how your emails are performing against the industry-standard spam analysis solution. Your results are broken down into specific and actionable elements so you can see what is impacting your score and the best course of action to improve it.
- Link & Image Validation: Make sure every image included in your campaigns are set up properly. If there are any issues with a linked image, we’ll let you know and suggest possible solutions. Link and Image validation also suggest edits for accessibility and security too!
- Blacklist Report: Being on a blacklist can severely impact your overall deliverability. With a blacklist report, your IP address will be checked against 120+ real-time blacklists for any listings associated with any of the mail servers used to send your emails.
What is deliverability?
There is a difference between email delivery and email deliverability. Email delivery and deliverability sound similar, but are two very different concepts.
Email delivery is when an email is successfully delivered to the receiving server. While email deliverability is when the email successfully arrives in the person’s inbox.
It is possible to have good email delivery but poor deliverability because the emails end up in the spam folder (which is considered delivered) but not in their inbox.
Email Delivery
Imagine you draft an email campaign, the content is great and you’re ready to start email marketing. When you send that first email, the Email Service Providers (ESPs) will receive information about your email. They will determine if your message will be accepted (delivered) or rejected (bounced). This all comes from the details they are receiving.
You’re able to measure delivery rates by how many emails are accepted and by how many bounces. Keep in mind, that acceptance doesn’t guarantee that the email actually goes to an inbox. It just means that it has passed into the ESP system, but could either be in the inbox or in the spam folder.
Soft bounce, when there are temporary delivery errors versus, a hard bounce that is based on a permanent error will determine your delivery score. The more bounces the more red flags you will show up with which can lead to being blacklisted or permanently blocked from sending to that ESP.
Deliverability
Delivery is step one in your process. The actual meat of the process is the deliverability. Delivery is a good indicator to see if the ESP will receive an email. While Emailable helps improve your delivery by 99%, the new feature will help you improve your deliverability.
Deliverability can be calculated by tracking key KPIs such as bounce rates, open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates (CTR), and spam complaints. This gives you a better understanding of how your audience is engaging with your emails. Monitoring your metrics over time, it will reveal trends in audience engagement and activity.
Why is Deliverability Such an Important Email Marketing Factor?
There are 2 key factors when it comes to deliverability and why it matters to email marketers.
- Successful Deliverability = Successful Marketing
While you may have the most beautifully crafted email with awesome keywords, a great call to action and it may even be personalized, it only matters if your emails actually get delivered to an inbox. Email deliverability is the foundation on which email marketing is built.
To put it simply, a marketer is paying an ESP to send emails on their behalf. But, email marketers are simultaneously strategizing how to manage their email lists and program. This helps determine whether or not an email lands in an inbox or not.
Email generates the highest return on investment (ROI) to date. No matter how many innovations we have in technology, email marketing remains steadfast in fruitful marketing.
Email Marketing: 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent
All of these efforts that are put into crafting the perfect strategy are wasted if the intended audience never opens the email because they never receive it in their inbox. It really benefits a marketer to manage their email program in such a way that inbox placement and open rates are optimized. Designing a thoughtful and attractive email only goes so far.
- Be the Best in Inbox
The digital and email worlds are extremely congested these days, making it even more difficult to stand out from the crowd. Individual senders compete with one another to get their emails accepted by inbox providers (such as Gmail) and subsequently filtered into the inbox.
With so many people and businesses using Gmail and so many spam emails being sent, it’s critical to put limits in place to protect inboxes. Every minute, Gmail blocks approximately 10 million spam emails using machine learning algorithms.
With email traffic growing at a rapid pace and inbox providers deploying additional screening technology to protect users’ inboxes, marketers must earn their spot in the inbox. Veteran marketers understand the importance of providing relevant and entertaining material with no fluff, delivering at the correct frequency to an engaged and interested audience, and building long-term connections with their subscribers.
Have we convinced you yet that email deliverability is a big thing? It deserves the recognition that you may have never thought it needed. So how does Emailable’s new Deliverability feature work? Is it worth the hype?
Why Deliverability
So deliverability, I hope by now, is at the top of your priority list. With Emailable’s new tool, you’re able to receive fully tailored reports of all the emails you send. This also allows you to see how many emails are landing in the inbox. This is a game-changer for email marketing because you are now able to see what needs to be done and how many of your campaigns are in people’s inboxes!
So let’s get started on getting your emails delivered to the inboxes! We will go through a step-by-step tutorial on how to get your emails uploaded, sent, and receive a full inbox report!
Once you get yourself logged in for the first time, Emailable’s Deliverability offers you a free 14-day trial. You can access your free trial here!
Once you have accessed your account you will be greeted with a get started window.
From there, you will click “Get Started” and it will take you to your inbox report tab where you’re able to use the test seed list to see how Deliverability works from your own email.
In this initial “Inbox Report” tab, step 1 allows you to see the email seed list and also provides you with a sample list. You will add your email list once you’re ready to send out a campaign. Step 2 then directs you to continue to see how your first email was sent. You will then move to the next phase of Deliverability checking your email lists to see where your emails ended up.
After this process is complete, your inbox report will look a bit different.
You will now see your overview of how your email performed. You can see authentication, placement, SpamAssasin, link, and image validation, and if you appear on any blacklists.Let’s take a look at your Authentication:
You can see how DomainKeys Identified (DKIM) is a protocol that allows an organization to take responsibility for transmitting a message by signing it in a way that mailbox providers can verify. DKIM record verification is made possible through cryptographic authentication.The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) email authentication protocol that domain owners use to specify the email servers they send email from, makes it harder for people to forge or fraud against the domain.
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Report and Conformance (DMARC) technical standard that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing.
Then let’s look at your inbox placement. Where did your emails make the inbox?
You can see how 50% of the emails we sent were placed in the inbox, and then it breaks down the servers that received your emails and whether or not they were in the inbox. You can take it one step further and view specific reports pertaining to each service provider. But next, we will look at the SpamAssassin.
The SpamAssassin tells you where you are when it comes to being flagged for spam. The higher the score you receive on the right-hand side, the more likely you are to be detected as spam.Our link and image validation is next:
There seems to be no issue with links or images for these particular emails! Yahoo!Finally, we reach the blacklist monitoring section.
Here we are able to see where there may be cause for concern about being on a blacklist. In this case, the flag comes from the gmail.com domain which is a server issue.Have we Charmed You Yet?
Email deliverability is a huge factor when it comes to your email marketing success. As we described above, there is a difference between delivery and deliverability. When you have a successful campaign, it is because your emails are landing in the inboxes. Instead of constantly tracking your KPIs let Deliverability do the work for you. You’re able to receive full inbox reports and know which emails are successful and strategies to help you fix low deliverability rates. Try your 14 free day trial with Deliverability, its helpfulness speaks for itself. You will be shocked with your email campaigns!