Email deliverability basics (1/8)
Section 1 - What is deliverability?
The deliverability of an email is complex and can be difficult for many businesses to understand. In this section, we'll cover four topics to help you understand the details of delivering an email to the recipient's inbox.
- Delivery vs. deliverability
- Did your email arrive in your inbox?
- Factors affecting delivery
- Financial consequences of poor delivery
Delivery vs. deliverability
Welcome to the course on the deliverability of emails.
The goal is to help businesses that send emails all over the world and are experiencing email deliverability issues to get the most out of email marketing. We have selected a number of effective strategies and I look forward to sharing them with you.
As the name suggests, this eight-module course gives businesses of all skill and marketing levels an in-depth look at email deliverability, what affects it and how to improve it to get better results via email. Go at your own pace, but remember that you must read the lessons in order.
First of all, let's address your biggest question right now: What is deliverability?
Deliverability is a critical part of success for anyone sending email. But it's an issue that is commonly misunderstood and lacking in priority by businesses, which can have a devastating impact on overall email marketing performance.
Ready for a scary statistic? One in six emails does not reach the inbox. And businesses that don't closely follow delivery have no idea that this is happening.
There is big difference between delivery and deliverability, although they are often confused.
Many senders see a high "delivery rate" reported by their email service provider and believe it to be in excellent condition. But this metric can be misleading.
"Delivery Rate" reflects only the percentage of emails accepted by an email provider (MBP). The delivery rate does not reveal whether these messages are actually transferred to the inbox, the spam folder, or simply lost.
Deliverability, on the other hand, provides a true picture of whether your emails were delivered to your subscribers' inboxes. To get a more accurate picture of deliverability, you need to track the delivery rate to their inbox. The inbox delivery rate represents the percentage of emails that end up in your inbox and not in your spam folder.
Understanding the difference between delivery and deliverability is crucial. After all, the ultimate goal of all email marketing campaigns should be to get to your inbox, where subscribers can see and read your messages. And ideally they should click to be taken to your website where they will take your desired action.
Did your email arrive in your inbox?
As I mentioned earlier, one in six emails don't make it to the inbox. These emails are usually filtered into the spam folder or blocked entirely by email providers. So you're spending time, energy and money to send email. But if your emails never make it to the inbox, where your subscribers can click and interact with them, all that investment falls flat.
As global sending volumes continue to increase each year, MBPs are forced to be even more aggressive with their filtering algorithms to avoid flooding email recipients. Think about the last time you checked your spam folder. How often do you think your subscribers control their own?
Probably not very often. Sending emails may seem as simple as clicking send and orders start flowing into your online store, but it's much more complicated than that. From preparing to send, avoiding block lists and being flagged as a spammer, there are many elements that can affect your email deliverability.
Factors affecting delivery
These are some of the main factors that affect email delivery, which we will cover in more detail in the next sections of this course:
- Sender reputation
- IP and Domain Reputation
- Interaction with emails
- Exclusion lists
- Cleaning your email list
- Email content and creativity
- Email sender authentication
Financial consequences of poor delivery
Still not convinced of the importance of the email delivery feature? So let's break it down in financial terms. The consequences of overlooking the delivery feature can be extremely damaging to your revenue. For example, if you send 500,000 emails a year and each email sent yields an average of one cent of revenue, this is 5.000€. But if only 70% of these emails actually reach your inbox, that 5,000€ you had estimated and expected as revenue suddenly becomes 3,500€! Oops, the poor level of email deliverability just cost you 1.500€.
So now you know that for email senders in all industries, deliverability is a big deal. Time for the second lesson on the deliverability of your emails where we'll look at how important your reputation as a sender plays a role.
If you need help to see what level your domain is at in terms of deliverability, we can we do it for you completely FREE.
In the next section we will show you all the best practices for how to avoid the spam folder.
