Email marketing deliverability is an essential part of having a successful email campaign.

Delivering emails to your subscribers is a challenge. This is especially true if you run an online business that relies on email marketing as part of your marketing strategy. If emails are delivered, it can help your company’s reputation with your customers.

In this article, we’ll introduce email marketing deliverability best practices for improving your deliverability or marketing emails.

What is Email Marketing Deliverability?

Email marketing deliverability is the percentage of emails that reach the inbox of your recipients.

Deliverability rates are typically expressed as a percentage and are calculated by dividing the number of emails in the inbox by the total number of emails sent.

Of all the emails sent, only 81 out of 100 are in the right place – someone’s inbox. The rest get lost because of spam filters, mistakes in writing email addresses, or other obstacles that stop them from being seen and read.

Email marketing deliverability can be measured by looking at three key metrics:

Delivery rate: The number of messages delivered out of all those sent. You want this number to be as high as possible.
Open rate: The number of recipients who opened your campaign divided by the number of recipients who received it. You want this number to be as high as possible.
Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks on links in your campaign divided by the number of recipients who received it.

What is a Good Email Marketing Deliverability Rate?

Deciding on a good email marketing deliverability rate is complex. Usually, aiming for a rate between 85% and 95% is smart for your marketing.

But the exact number can differ based on your business.

It’s a good idea to look into your industry and see how others do.

Check how many emails get into inboxes, and see what people do with them.

Then, set a goal for your team to hit that mark and improve your emails.

Common Email Marketing Deliverability Issues

Email marketing email deliverability issues can be caused by several factors, including the content of the message, who sent it, and more.

Here are a few common email marketing deliverability issues that can impact your marketing, sales or link building campaigns:

Spam Filters

Spam filters are designed to prevent spam from reaching subscribers’ inboxes. The problem is that many companies also use spam filters that block legitimate emails.

This is especially true if you send many emails or are new to the market.

Bounces

Bounces occur when an email server receives an invalid address from a recipient’s ISP (Internet service provider).

When this happens, it’s common for the ISP to automatically return the message as undeliverable without any notification to either the sender or receiver. This can result in lost sales and wasted time for both parties involved.

Blocklists

Email blocklisting is when an email provider blocks an entire domain for sending spammy messages or sending too many emails at once.

If this happens, all future emails from that domain will be blocked from reaching inboxes until the issue is resolved.

Sender Reputation

Sender reputation refers to how well-known you are as an email sender among all major ISPs.

If your sender reputation is poor, then most ISPs will block all future emails from you to protect their users from receiving spam in their inboxes.

Content Triggers

Many email clients will scan the contents of your email and automatically determine if they think it’s spam. This is especially true if you regularly use an email template generator for sending out communications.

If they do, they’ll block your message from being delivered and usually let you know by putting it in their junk folder — where most people never look anyway.

Authentication Issues

If you send an email from an address different than what’s listed on your domain’s WHOIS information, recipients might flag it as spam even though it isn’t.

This can happen if you use a third-party service that sends emails on your behalf.

Difference Between Email Delivery & Deliverability

Though it might sound like a simple concept, there are a number of factors at play when it comes to deliverability.

Let’s have a look at their differences:

Aspect	Email Delivery	Deliverability of Email
Definition	Whether an email reaches the recipient’s server.	Whether the email successfully lands in the recipient’s inbox.
Focus	Technical aspect of sending an email to the server.	Overall success of the email reaching and being seen by the recipient.
Measure	Count of emails sent minus bounces.	Percentage of emails delivered to the inbox out of total sent.
Factors	Server availability, connectivity issues, bounces.	Spam filters, sender reputation, content quality.
Result	Indicates if the email reached the server.	Indicates if the email is seen and read by the recipient.
Goal	Getting emails to the recipient’s server without errors.	Ensuring emails are not only sent but also read and engaged with.

Best Practices to Elevate Your Email Marketing Deliverability

Email marketing deliverability best practices are the key to improving the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Here are some of the most important email marketing deliverability best practices:

Protect Domain with DMARC

The DMARC standard protects brands against phishing attacks and fraudulent messages sent from their domains.

It also helps ISPs determine whether an email sent from a company’s domain is legitimate. If they find out the message is fraudulent, they will reject it immediately.

This way, only legitimate messages from your domain will reach subscribers’ inboxes and increase your chances of having higher engagement rates.

Segmented Audience Targeting

Targeting specific audiences with personalized content can build trust, increase engagement, and improve conversion rates. Selecting the best email builder is essential for businesses seeking to elevate their email marketing efforts by creating personalized content and precisely targeting specific audiences. Businesses may also consider implementing user journey analytics software to improve audience segmentation and targeting strategies.

Engagement-Driven Content

When it comes to creating engaging content for your emails, there are no hard and fast rules. It all depends on what kind of message you want to convey and how you plan on doing it.

However, we recommend including a few things in every message — images and videos being the most important ones. Also, it’s easy to add custom content to your email campaigns, and there are lots of tools to do so in an efficient way that’s also engaging. Tools like an AI email generator can help streamline the process, ensuring your content is both efficient and engaging. Using a collage creator to combine multiple product images or snaps from a recent event is just one example

Authentication and SPF/DKIM Setup

Authentication is an important part of any email marketing strategy because it helps protect your brand from phishing attacks by ensuring that only authorized senders can send emails from your domain name.

Setting up DKIM and SPF also helps prevent spam filters from flagging legitimate messages as spam.

Responsive Design for Mobile

More than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices. To ensure your emails look great across all devices, it’s important to build responsive HTML emails that adapt to different screen sizes.

Pruning Inactive Subscribers

If someone has not opened or clicked on an email in over six months, they are probably no longer interested in receiving your messages.

This means that you can save money by reducing the number of users who receive these messages by removing them from your list.

In addition, you can free up space in your subscriber database so that new subscribers can be added easily when needed.

Optimized Sending Frequency

The first thing you need to do is optimize your sending frequency. Sending too many emails daily can prevent your messages from being filtered out by Gmail and other email services.

To prevent this, send only one newsletter weekly and ensure all other messages are sent at least once a month. And if you’re looking for ways to organize your email, check out some Gmail hacks to help you manage your workflow like a pro.

Personalization and Dynamic Content

Another tip for improving deliverability is personalization and dynamic content in your messages. This means adding the recipient’s name into the subject line or body of the message so they will open it more often than if there was no personalization involved.

For example, instead of “Top 10 Tips for Small Businesses,” try “Top 10 Tips for Jim Smith from ABC Company.”

In addition to adopting best practices for email marketing deliverability, exploring email flow ideas and gaining inspiration from top brands can further intensify your campaign’s impact. Understanding their approach allows you to refine your own strategies by benchmarking against successful examples

Final Words

As email marketing grows in popularity and volume, any marketer must use quality deliverability practices. If you want your emails to land in your subscribers’ Inboxes, you first need to start with your email lists.

With best practices in place — as outlined above — you can be confident that your recipients will see your emails from the first email you send.
Although it’s optional to follow all of the tips above, you should ensure that everything is sent from within your domain.

With the right combination of techniques, you can avoid deliverability issues that create a poor user experience for readers and can even cause spam filters to flag your emails.

About
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Ahona Rudra

Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC

Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.

Email Marketing Deliverability Best Practices