Email Deliverability Rate: Why Is It Important & How to Improve Yours

Your email deliverability plays a huge part in the success of your marketing campaigns. Email deliverability is the measurement of how many of your contacts actually receive the emails you send them. It is considered to be the most important factor when determining email marketing success.

For any email marketing campaign to work, your emails first have to be delivered. There is no point in putting in the time and effort to create perfect content when they will never be received. While deliverability also involves more than just sending emails and building an audience, do not stress, it does not have to be complicated.

As most email marketers know, the spam folder is your worst and most feared enemy. Legitimate emails that end up in the spam folder, not even making it to the inbox, keep them up at night. While low end email marketing programs let you create compelling emails for little to no money, the key factor that many seem to ignore which is the most important aspect is the email delivery.

Here we are going to discuss the importance of email deliverability, how it specifically applies to you, your email marketing strategy, and your customers. Regardless if you’re tracking each campaign statistic or you’re just hearing about email deliverability now, we will uncover the best practices that will help you create an even more successful and effective email marketing campaign.

Email delivery x Email deliverability

To start with the basics: what is email delivery versus email deliverability?

Email delivery and deliverability may sound similar, but they are two 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.

Delivery

When you send an email, the Email Service Providers (ESPs) will receive some information in regards to why the message was rejected (aka Bounced). This comes from the details the receiving sends back in the error message.

Then, you’re able to accurately measure delivery rates- how many emails are accepted and how many bounces. Remember, “accepted” doesn’t guarantee that the email goes to the desired inbox. Examples of bounced emails are temporary delivery errors (a soft bounce), because the server is unavailable, or a permanent error (hard bounce) because the email is no longer valid.

The more bounces, though, the more red flags your ESP is detecting. Too many red flags and your email could be blacklisted or permanently blocked from ever delivering.

Deliverability

Delivery is only the beginning of an email’s journey. It is the first step to seeing whether or not the inbox will ever receive the email. For example, Emailable helps improve your email delivery by 99%.

You can track your bounce rates, open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates (CTR), and spam complaints to get a better understanding of how people react and engage with your emails. Monitoring these metrics over time can reveal various trends in audience engagement and activity.

Engagement is another important metric for email deliverability since it is directly correlated to sender reputation. A great sender reputation is crucial for any email deliverability.

But why is email deliverability a crucial factor in email marketing?

There are three important factors when it comes to deliverability and why it matters to marketers.

1. Successful Deliverability = Successful Marketing

It doesn’t matter how effective and well-written your email marketing campaign is, it will not matter if the emails never get delivered. Email deliverability is the foundation on which email marketing is built.

At a base level, a marketer is paying an ESP to send emails on their behalf but that isn’t the whole piece of the pie. Email marketers are (or at least they should be) strategizing how they manage their subscriber list and email program. This will determine whether or not the email is placed in subscribers’ inboxes.

Email generates the highest return on investment (ROI) to date. Regardless of how technologically advanced we seem today, email marketing remains steadfast in fruitful marketing.

Email Marketing: 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent

Email remains very relevant in today’s digital marketing age and has the potential to be highly lucrative.

Marketers spend so much time and effort in creating the perfect email. Having the ideal ratio of text to images, spacing, eye-catching font, personalization, and selecting the optimum sending time and frequency all come into play for a successful email. One error in any of these aspects can harm your campaign.

All of these efforts 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.

2. Be the Best in Inbox

The digital world and email world are very busy these days, making it even harder to stand out amongst the competition. Individual senders are competing against each other for their emails to be both accepted by inbox providers (for example, Gmail) and then get filtered into the inbox.

To put it in perspective, in March 2018, the Radicati Group estimated the number of email accounts worldwide at 3.8 billion, with about 124.5 billion business emails, and 111.1 billion consumer emails sent and received each day, while Propellercrm.com states that in the same year, 14.5 billion spam messages are sent globally EACH DAY.

In more recent times, TechJury posted that In 2021, Gmail posted that they have around 1.8 billion, monthly active users. This isn’t even accounting for all the businesses that use Gmail in the workplace. With many individuals and businesses using Gmail, and so many spam emails being sent, restrictions in place to protect inboxes are paramount. Gmail uses machine learning algorithms to block nearly 10 million spam emails every minute.

There is an accelerating increase in email traffic and inbox providers placing more filtering technology to secure users’ inboxes, a marketer has to earn their place in the inbox. Veteran marketers know that they need to provide relevant and engaging content, no fluff, delivered at the right frequency to an interested and engaged audience, and build long-term relationships with their subscribers.

3. Care About Your Audience

Customer experience with your emails is just as important as customer experience in a physical store. Marketers are in competition with all other email senders to win a spot in an inbox. For your email marketing to be successful, people actually need to open your emails and engage with your content. To be successful, you need to put yourself in the recipient’s shoes.

Some questions to ask yourself:

• Would you like to receive the email you’re sending?
• Is this information relevant to your customer?
• Are you segmenting your email list?
• Are you personalizing your emails?

Stop sending emails to the least engaged addresses. Try to focus on those who are engaging back with your emails and reaffirm that they want to continue receiving your emails.

Additionally, you should try targeting your customer base. Not everyone has the same interests, and not everyone is at the same stage of the customer funnel.

You can strategically target your audience by personalizing your campaigns into different segments and help improve your open rate. When information is relevant it is way more likely to be opened.

People value when they feel that a message was specifically designed for them. For example, you can include their first name in the subject line and opening sentence. You can personalize the campaigns into specific niches when you know that certain customers like a certain product or service based on their purchase history.

Some companies also go as bold as to send emails that are not in any special template, no promotional imagery, just raw email. You’re writing an email, not a pamphlet or a detailed infographic. The email was designed for person-to-person communication, so why should a company to a personal email be any different?

How to Improve Your Deliverability

As we’ve discussed above, we know the importance of deliverability and gave you some helpful information when crafting your next email campaign. But let’s talk about some other factors you need to consider.

Delivery Speed

As you, your sales, and marketing colleagues chat about inbox and spam rates, add delivery speed to the list. This is a metric that is just as important as any other email rate. It tells you how quickly your emails have arrived. It is the best way to truly appreciate the value of supersonic email delivery speed, and forces you to take a step back to see the effects of delayed delivery.

For example, imagine you’re in a B2B company that sends out proposals to interested prospects who are asking for prices and other details. You will be sending those out by email. Your prospect will then select various companies for a product pitch, then you’re the one to inform them. Your prospect doesn’t have all the time in the world to sit and await your response. They will quickly select all the proposals they’ve collected and review them. If yours is not among these proposals due to a delayed email, you’re toast. You don’t even have your hat in the running.

Increase commitment Speed

To increase delivery speed, consider reliant providers with lightning-fast response times for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SMTP is the protocol used for most email communications and is most likely the same protocol you use to send emails. It’s crucial to use email software that excels in these response times as it allows you to increase delivery speed, dramatically. Software like this work because they focus on the delivery of your emails, as opposed to sending software.

Have a Clean Email List

Your email marketing success depends a lot on the fact of if your emails actually get delivered or not. When you have a list of thousands and thousands of email addresses, you can send out as many campaigns as you want but it only matters if they get delivered.

The cold hard truth is that your email lists decay and depreciate as time goes on. People change email addresses, could have used a temporary address, inputted their name wrong, and a million other things. So if you are sending out emails to people who don’t exist or spam traps you could be temporarily banned from sending emails in general. This is called getting blacklisted and it’s an email marketer’s personal headache.

If you want to increase your deliverability rate, make sure that you have a clean email list and know that your hard work will get delivered to the intended recipients. This also helps protect your sender reputation score and helps guarantee that you will avoid blacklists at all costs.

Just sending emails is not enough. You need to have them delivered. Improve your deliverability and email marketing campaign ROI with the most reliable and affordable email checker. The best solution is Emailable: you will be able to maintain a clean and healthy list as well as increase your conversion rates.

To Conclude

Email delivery and deliverability are two entirely different concepts, although they both function as two key aspects of email marketing.

Email delivery is making sure that your emails get through to an email service provider, this doesn’t take into account whether the email ended up in spam or not.

Email deliverability is the rate at which your emails actually end up in the desired inbox. Which is the best place for them to be?

Make sure you’re taking delivery speed, commitment speed, and your list hygiene into consideration. These are minute details that even the most experienced email markets can forget.