Improve Engagement – 'There are many nuances to deliverability and why email goes where it goes. When approaching any deliverability issue, there are some basic items that need to be in place before any other strategy is employed otherwise you may be met with diminished impact or no effect at all. And since engagement is an important element of email deliverability, let's look at ways how you can improve your brand identity: Use your own custom domain to send your email campaigns (as opposed to free email domains like Gmail) Use consistent Email fields (From, Name, and Address) across all your campaigns.
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Did your email engagement metrics drop significantly?
Emails bounce or end up at the SPAM folder?
It seems that you have issues with email deliverability and email sender's reputation. That's quite a common challenge that marketers address while implementing their email marketing strategies. According to ReturnPath data, 1 out of 5 emails never reaches the inbox. So this issue might become significant in the overall campaign performance.
When analyzing our clients' campaign deliverability complaints, we see widespread pitfalls that most clients get into. But the best practices come to light as well.
There are certain things that you should know when switching your email service provider or initiating a new email marketing strategy. So carry on reading and learn about how you can fix your email deliverability and avoid this headache in the future.
What Is Email Deliverability?
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to recipients' inboxes.
This metric is complex. It depends on many elements, such as service provider, sender's domain, quality of email list, email frequency, IP reputation, and overall sender's reputation profile.
It's vital to mention that email deliverability isn't the same as a delivery rate. A delivery rate indicates what percentage of your emails is received by subscribers' mailboxes, even if they land in the spam folder. Meanwhile, deliverability is the inbox placing indicator.
It shows whether your email gets into the primary inbox of a subscriber. So, even if you have a sound delivery rate, you can still have deliverability issues.
What Is A Good Email Deliverability Rate?
It's difficult to define what a good email deliverability rate is. Return Path claims, that 'just 79% of commercial emails lands in the inbox.' The rest is 'either sent to a spam folder or goes missing—most likely blocked by the mailbox provider.'
The goal of every marketer is to get an email delivered to 100% of subscribers. Unfortunately, very seldom marketer achieves such a high rate.
You should pay attention to the following metrics when you track your overall email deliverability:
- 95% and higher is considered to be a good delivery rate on behalf of an email service provider.
- The bounce rate shouldn't be higher than 3%.
- In terms of the SPAM rate, you shouldn't be ringing the alarm bells as long as it doesn't exceed 0.08%.
Partially, your email deliverability depends on the platform that you use for sending emails. All email service providers have different delivery rates.
Most often they fluctuate between 88-99%.
At Omnisend, we have a separate dedication for email deliverability and we pay a lot of attention to maintain this score as close to 100% as possible. Currently, it fluctuates between 98-99%.
If our clients follow the best practices and start sending email campaigns by warming up their senders' reputation, they can get deliverability close to perfection.
What is IP Warming?
IP warming is a process when a sender gradually increases the volume of messages sent with one IP address. It's necessary for establishing a reputation with internet service providers.
If your sender's reputation depends only on you, IP warming usually depends on your email service provider. Email marketing platforms cover the IP warming process because they have a lot of shared IPs for their clients and take care of them all.
Only companies with huge sending volume that reaches 1.5 M emails per month start using their own dedicated IPs and start warming them by themselves. Read more about shared and dedicated IPs here.
Building Your Sender's Reputation
A sender's reputation profile plays the most significant part in the email deliverability. So let's dig deeper and figure out what it is and under what circumstances should you implement reputation building processes into your strategy.
What Is A Sender's Reputation Warmup?
Reputation warmup is a process of improving your 'reputation profile' so that you avoid the SPAM folder. You do this by gradually increasing the number of emails you send out based on a specific schedule.
Reputation warmup is highly recommended if your subscriber list is higher than 50,000 contacts.
This procedure is typically done when:
- you've just moved from one email marketing service to another one, thereby gaining a new dedicated IP address
- you've just started with email marketing
It's also vital that the subscribers in your first few rounds are pretty active.
This means that they'll be more likely to open your emails and click them, which sends a good signal to Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and other providers that your content is quality and your IP address can be trusted.
How Should You Get Started With Reputation Warmup?
Gradually increasing your email volume helps you build a good and strong email sender's reputation.
Warm up sending volumes and segmentation recommendations:
It's also a good practice to segment out those contacts that haven't opened a campaign in the last 12 months. Learn more about that here. And don't even import them to the new email marketing platform, at all. They will damage your sender's reputation on the new platform.
Here's a sample sender's reputation warming schedule for a client if he/she has 50,000 recipients in total:
Email Deliverability Issues
What are the factors that negatively affect email deliverability?
#1 A high complaint rate
If the email is unwanted, people will mark it as spam. This is one of the primary factors which lower the sender's reputation. As a result, all your emails might start landing in the SPAM folder. Therefore, try to avoid spam complaints as much as possible.
#2 A high bounce rate
This usually means that the list is outdated, low quality, or purchased. Inbox providers treat such senders poorly and affect their reputation.
#3 Low engagement
If a subscriber received 50 emails but did not open any, this is just another signal to the inbox provider that the sender is not following best practices.
Therefore, more and more of his/her emails will be placed into the spam folder.
Saying 'goodbye' to inactive contacts is always a good thing. There are some good practices on how to do it decently. Learn more about that here.
We've seen multiple times when a smaller active list of 10,000 contacts drives much more sales than 50,000 (because 40,000 contacts were inactive and those bad contacts were damaging the sender's reputation). Plus, sending emails to inactive contacts isn't cost-effective.
#4 Too frequent campaigns
Even high-quality subscribers might be overwhelmed by receiving too many campaigns a day and will mark your emails as spam.
The ideal frequency is 2-3 times/week. For daily senders: no more than once a day (with rare exceptions when there is a super rare once-in-a-quarter sale, etc.).
#5 A sudden increase in the number of emails sent
If a sender is usually sending to 50,000 subscribers and then starts sending to 150,000, this spike will cause more emails to be sent to the spam folder (because inbox providers consider spikes as an unexpected behavior and spam attack).
If you want to increase your mailing list size, do that gradually.
#6 Constantly switching between different email service providers
This hurts your sender reputation because the inbox provider might start seeing the sender as a spammer who's trying to hide his/her trail.
Improve Email Deliverability: Best Practices
By improving your reputation profile, you will increase the success score. These are email deliverability best practices to achieve that.
#1 Send emails to a highly engaged list, with a high click rate
The threshold here for 'high click rate' will depend on the industry you're in. That's why subscriber segmentation will be your best friend.
For ecommerce that sells apparel, small electronic devices, books or household pieces, the average click rate is 5-6%.
Improve Email Deliverability Marketing Cloud
#2 Make sure the email is wanted
This means that the subscriber explicitly agreed to receive an email. That's why lists must be opt-in and preferably GDPR-compliant.
#3 Gradually increase sending volume
As already discussed, if you have 500,000 emails in a list, starting your email marketing by sending campaigns to all of them immediately is a really bad idea.
If you start sending large batches on day one, inbox providers might see this as a threat and a spam attack. Therefore, your email will automatically be marked as spam.
#4 Keep your contact list clean
Statistically, 30% of subscribers change email addresses once per year. So you should clean and take care of your list periodically.
If someone hasn't interacted (clicked on your emails) in the last 12 months, that contact should be treated as inactive.
Such emails might later become spam traps. If a trap receives emails, this tells inbox providers that the sender isn't following email marketing best practices.
As a result, your reputation suffers.
Pro tip: when you migrate from one email marketing platform to another, at first migrate your best contacts who are constantly opening and clicking your emails and start sending to them only.
That way you'll gradually transfer your 'reputation' from one email marketing platform to another.
After a while, you can migrate the rest of the mailing list.
Once again, migrate gradually. Start with a small list, then grow the number of contacts.
Key Takeaways
Email deliverability is a metric worth keeping your eye on. You can't build it in a day but you can ruin it within the moment you send the reckless email campaign.
And even if it happens, these are the essential things on how to grow and improve email deliverability rates:
- Implement a sender's reputation warming
- Segment your lists to get the best engagement rate possible
- Be patient.
Join a platform that actually cares about your deliverability. Sign up for Omnisend today
Further Reading:
Email deliverability, Do you think it is the main concern to focus on improving? If your answer is YES!, then how will you improve that?
Well, No worries! Our experts have spent 30+ days to dig out some deep facts, that will blow you!
Shall we begin!?
Let's say, you do have a well-managed email list of your customers, and can effectively send emails to all your subscribers, but there is a need for you to ensure your emails are delivered to all your subscribers.
After sending an email campaign to your subscribers, you need to measure your deliverability rates accordingly. Email deliverability rates are the crucial element that you need to seriously consider for a successfulemail marketing campaign.
According to the Deliverability benchmark report (2015), only 79% of emails landed in the inboxes. That means Two out of every Ten emails never reach your recipient.
It is an exercise in futility if your email can't reach the recipient's inbox. Here are some points that can help you to increase email deliverability and ensure your subscribers receive your emails.
Register a subdomain
Does reputation play a vital role in email marketing and what better way to build trust than with the use of a subdomain? While not for everyone, registering a subdomain exclusively for an email marketing purpose builds trust over time.
Moreover, a subdomain permits domain-specificmonitoring of your IP reputation. Consequently, your emails can triumph over some domain-based certification filters.
For example, if you have an e-commerce based service and you are using both transactional emails (for order confirmation) and marketing emails (for promotion) from one domain, you can't ensure that specific emails reach the inbox. The promotional email might have low engagement. So, the separation of IP's according to the different functions will help you ensure email deliverability.
Use a Double Opt-In
If you start sending large batches on day one, inbox providers might see this as a threat and a spam attack. Therefore, your email will automatically be marked as spam.
#4 Keep your contact list clean
Statistically, 30% of subscribers change email addresses once per year. So you should clean and take care of your list periodically.
If someone hasn't interacted (clicked on your emails) in the last 12 months, that contact should be treated as inactive.
Such emails might later become spam traps. If a trap receives emails, this tells inbox providers that the sender isn't following email marketing best practices.
As a result, your reputation suffers.
Pro tip: when you migrate from one email marketing platform to another, at first migrate your best contacts who are constantly opening and clicking your emails and start sending to them only.
That way you'll gradually transfer your 'reputation' from one email marketing platform to another.
After a while, you can migrate the rest of the mailing list.
Once again, migrate gradually. Start with a small list, then grow the number of contacts.
Key Takeaways
Email deliverability is a metric worth keeping your eye on. You can't build it in a day but you can ruin it within the moment you send the reckless email campaign.
And even if it happens, these are the essential things on how to grow and improve email deliverability rates:
- Implement a sender's reputation warming
- Segment your lists to get the best engagement rate possible
- Be patient.
Join a platform that actually cares about your deliverability. Sign up for Omnisend today
Further Reading:
Email deliverability, Do you think it is the main concern to focus on improving? If your answer is YES!, then how will you improve that?
Well, No worries! Our experts have spent 30+ days to dig out some deep facts, that will blow you!
Shall we begin!?
Let's say, you do have a well-managed email list of your customers, and can effectively send emails to all your subscribers, but there is a need for you to ensure your emails are delivered to all your subscribers.
After sending an email campaign to your subscribers, you need to measure your deliverability rates accordingly. Email deliverability rates are the crucial element that you need to seriously consider for a successfulemail marketing campaign.
According to the Deliverability benchmark report (2015), only 79% of emails landed in the inboxes. That means Two out of every Ten emails never reach your recipient.
It is an exercise in futility if your email can't reach the recipient's inbox. Here are some points that can help you to increase email deliverability and ensure your subscribers receive your emails.
Register a subdomain
Does reputation play a vital role in email marketing and what better way to build trust than with the use of a subdomain? While not for everyone, registering a subdomain exclusively for an email marketing purpose builds trust over time.
Moreover, a subdomain permits domain-specificmonitoring of your IP reputation. Consequently, your emails can triumph over some domain-based certification filters.
For example, if you have an e-commerce based service and you are using both transactional emails (for order confirmation) and marketing emails (for promotion) from one domain, you can't ensure that specific emails reach the inbox. The promotional email might have low engagement. So, the separation of IP's according to the different functions will help you ensure email deliverability.
Use a Double Opt-In
What you might be unaware of is the high rate of spam complaints. This could be detrimental to your sender reputation since ISPs tend to block such sending servers.
Double opt-ins help fix the issue of spam complaints as it encourages a cleaner, engaged, verified email list. The new user is required to give their consent after submitting their address. This is done by validating the address via a confirmation email.
How To Improve Email Deliverability
By using a double opt-in, you're confident that subscriptions are not just intentional but wanted. Besides, you could employ an email validation to validateyour email lists and reach a more genuine audience.
For example, if you have an online clothing store and you want to engage with your customers or visitor who has visited your products but didn't make a purchase, you can offer them a discount if they share their email address and register on your site. You can then send them a confirmation mail; Once they click on the confirmation, they become a double-opt-in subscriber.
Perform Blacklist Checks
Blacklist was created to protect all users from IPs that receive spam reports. Your IP can be a blacklist if you have sent lots of spam. You have to ensure your IP is not on that list.
You can use a tool like mxtoolbox, which will check anIP address against more than 100 DNS based email blacklists. If your mail server has been blacklisted, some of the emails you send may not be conveyed. Email blacklists is a typical method for reducing spam.
Implement a sender policy framework
An SPF record is a cross-check of the domain name against the related IP address, to determine its authenticity. With the help of this protocol, senders can specify the IP addresses that are authorized to send emails on behalf of a specific domain.
A sender policy framework or SPF increases the receipt of emails by an email server. Your emails will be rejected if you don't have an SPF in place.
By using authenticated emails, you can protect your customers, brand, and business from phishing and spoofing attacks.
For example, If you want to purchase a product or service, you will most likely search for a reputable or well-known brand. It's the same way with the use of the SPF protocol. It gives your IP authenticity a strong boost, leaving fewer chances of rejection of your emails.
Stick to a Consistent Email Marketing Schedule
With the use of a dedicated IP address, you need to warm up your IP (more so if it's been more than 30 days since you last sent an email). The reason for a lower sender score and IP rejection is random and erratic broadcast activity. Maintain a regular schedule with your emails.
Warming up gives room to send more emails as you establish a good sender reputation gradually.
Low sender score and IP rejection are two common issues faced by email marketers due to random broadcast activity and spending spikes. Hence, maintaining a schedule with consistency is a must.
How Much of a Reputable Sender Are You?
The sender's reputation is a score that an Internet Service Provider assigns to the mail server of a sender. There are many factors affecting sender reputation — for example, domain reputation and IP reputation — but you don't have to consider everyone.
If you're receiving non-delivery reports, a low sender score is a key culprit. This is because ISPs automatically reject emails that fall below a specific rating.
Therefore, have in mind to keep your sender reputation high to improve the deliverability of your emails.
Check Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are useful to Email service providers todetect abuse of their services. Whenever your recipient clicks on 'Mark as spam,' your ESP service considers them as 'complaints.'
By using feedback loops, senders are able to listen to their subscribers and can correct the situation by removing them if there are any complaints.
For example, you have sent a mail to your subscribers and they are not interested in your service but mistakenly subscribe to your mail. What happens next? They will mark your email as spam. So you have to remove them from your subscriber list. This will help you improve your email deliverability. For more details, visit the how to implement the FBL.
Make ISPs Trust Your IP
Since ISP filters are solely maintained to rule out spamming, showing the filters that your IP is trustworthy does the trick. Here, progression is key.
Improve Email Deliverability Hubspot
You start your campaigns by sending emails to only addresses you're connected with. As the messages are received and opened by engaged users, ISPs note this and the trust in your IP strengthens.
Which Strategy Will Improve Email Deliverability
Now, expand the number of emails cautiously until you reach your peak volume.
Use your brand name in your signature
If your brand name is well established and you use it in your signature, it reduces spam complaints and helps you to improve your email open rates.
Increasingly, some companies or organizations use an individual to handle their email marketing to give it a more personal feel.
For example, If you prepared a draft to send us an email, as the 'form' name, you can use the below:
ABC
xyz.com
your company logo
Remember to warm-up your IP before every email marketing campaign
When you read this, the first question that comes to mind is: 'How do you warm-up your IP?' The answer is – Start your campaign with a low volume and gradually work up the volume by analyzing open and click-through rates, and spam complaints. These data points give an overview of how recipients react to the emails you send them.
Carry out this process before each email campaign as it establishes a positive sender reputation and assists email deliverability. To avoid sending a large number of emails (which result in bounces and opt-outs), adhere to the rules of each email provider to boost deliverability for effective email marketing campaigns.
Daily maximum mails per domain | |
| Week 1 | Max 1k emails/hr per IP domain |
| Week 2 | Max 2k emails/hr per IP domain |
| Week 3 | Max 4k emails/hr per IP domain |
| Week 4 | Max 8k emails/hr per IP domain |
| Week 5 | Max 10k emails/hr per IP domain |
| Week 6 | Max 15k emails/hr per IP domain |
Above and Beyond
Well, Email marketing works wonders, but that's only if those emails are delivered. Approximately 20% of emails never reach their destination, so you need to be careful before sending your email marketing campaign. Before sending your email marketing campaign, make sure your email list is clean.
Email deliverability depends on multiple factors, but the points mentioned above will surely get it on track and improve it. The key is to be focused on improving your sender reputation and ensuring that ISPs trust your IP.
Here's a famous email marketing quote by David Newman:
If you're a new sender, what kinds of challenges did you face ramping up your programs? Let us know in the comments section below.
