Simply put, email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails successfully to the inboxes of subscribers. It can be measured as a metric that indicates the number of emails that have reached the recipient’s inboxes successfully
What is the Definition of Email Deliverability?
If you send one thousand emails as part of your outreach campaign and only 800 were delivered, it’s important to understand this in order to figure out what went wrong with the remaining two hundred emails.
One of the most common reasons is that the email bounced – this can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, if the email does not exist, has not been spelt correctly, or the server is having issues receiving emails for some reason.
You can often measure email deliverability by checking the bounce rate or the open rate. A low open rate may mean that while the emails have been delivered, they have gone to the spam folder rather than directly to the recipient’s main email inbox.
Why is Email Deliverability Important?
The deliverability of emails plays a major role in email marketing and email outreach campaigns, including email newsletters and product or brand onboarding. In any scenario, poor email deliverability can have a very big impact when it comes to the brand’s results and success rate.
A good deliverability rate will improve a business’ results, while a poor deliverability rate can cause a brand to have a bad reputation, which puts them in a difficult position. This can often be too big of a risk to take for well-established brands, or for brands that are sending out emails to mass recipient lists.
Essentially, email deliverability helps a brand ultimately achieve the main goal of its campaign. The impact of poor deliverability is especially visible when a brand has a large number of email newsletter subscribers.
In the case of onboarding emails, the impact can be even more devastating as these are often essential to convert registered trial users or interested parties into paying customers, and the brand may lose the customer completely if the email is not delivered. And depending on the product and pricing offered by your brand, simply converting one new customer per week could make a huge difference to profits.
How to Test Email Deliverability?
Data suggests that the average rate of email deliverability is around 80%. Anything above this is considered to be good, while anything that falls below should be a sign that you need to conduct an email deliverability test.
In addition, you may find it useful to perform testing before starting a new campaign to ensure that it is as effective as possible. There are several ways to test email deliverability, including:
• Content Testing: This analyses email content against popular spam filters to ensure that the mail you send will pass the various authentication checks used by email service providers and land in the recipient’s inbox rather than the spam section.
• Authentication Testing: This type of testing is done to verify whether your outgoing mail server is correctly configured so that authentication testing will be passed when mail is sent to addresses from various service providers.
• Seed List Testing: This takes a small sample of email addresses from your list and checks the deliverability of your marketing emails across various services, which can be one of the best ways to uncover a range of important deliverability issues that you can address before you start sending out messages for your campaign for real.
How to Improve the Deliverability of Emails?
There are several things that you can do to avoid email deliverability problems and improve the deliverability of the emails that you send to subscribers. These include:
• Use verified tools with good reviews for deliverability, such as Bouncer
• Maintain the hygiene of your email list, including verifying emails in your database and using tools that search for verified emails before sending the emails in your outreach campaign. Regularly go through your email list to find any emails that are no longer in use, have long-standing server issues, or are misspelt to remove them
• Categorize any inactive subscribers that you find and remove them from any relevant campaigns
• Use double opt-in rather than a single opt-in system to double-check emails when subscribers sign up
• Make sure that it is really easy for subscribers to unsubscribe from your email newsletters at any time
• Avoid using URL shorteners
• Use warm-up tools such as automated sends, replies, and engagement
• Make sure that emails are formatted in a way that encourages the recipients to engage. For example, some options to consider include improving email copy, using attractive and appealing subject lines, and making calls to action clear
• Ensure that all emails are optimized for mobile
What is the Best Email Deliverability Service?
To improve your email deliverability rates, you will need to use an email validation tool. Bouncer is an ideal choice.
You can use their email checking service to verify your email address list and ensure that you are only sending out marketing emails to addresses that are valid, active, and in use. They even offer a free email checking service that takes a sample to verify from your existing email list, making Bouncer an ideal solution for companies on a budget.
Bouncer is a powerful option for businesses of all sizes that want to improve their email deliverability and bounce rates. You can buy credits to use over time that never expires, and the more credits you purchase at once, the cheaper they will be.
It offers an easy-to-use app where you simply drag and drop your email list with up to 250,000 email addresses at a time. Then, all you need to do is sit back and let Bouncer’s email checking tools get to work. You will get information on which emails are safe to send to, and which emails should be removed from your list before sending mail.
What are Some Email Marketing Deliverability Best Practices?
There are several proven techniques and best practices that you can use to test and improve email deliverability and get the best results. These include:
• Perform Email Validation: This will help you filter any spam traps and make sure that irrelevant or unused email addresses are removed from your list. You can use email validation tools like Bouncer to identify any addresses that are likely to increase your bounce rate and leave your reputation vulnerable to damage.
• Double Opt-In: This process is useful if you used checkboxes to gather subscribers. It works by sending a message to recipients who have opted in to confirm that they want to join your mailing list. While not everybody will choose to confirm, it is useful for reducing spam complaints.
• Email Segmentation: This can also improve email deliverability. Research by MailChimp found that segmenting emails by demographic, location, position in the sales funnel, and past purchases improved email deliverability, open rate, and click rate along with reducing the bounce rate of emails.
• Remove Inactive Users: A high number of subscribers is not always a good thing if some of them never engage with your content. Inactive subscribers can impact your email deliverability rates, so be sure to filter your list occasionally and remove them.
Izabela is a leading contributor to the Bouncer’s blog. She is inspired to help companies all around the world to get emails into their recipients’ inboxes
