What is email deliverability?

Deliverability measures how frequently your contacts receive your emails into their inbox. It’s 1 of the most important factors for email marketing success, as it’s the ultimate metric that everyone cares about because landing in the inbox is how your messages get opened.

Common email deliverability problems

There are several factors that might negatively impact email deliverability, including bad list quality, missing email authentication, or low engagement. Improving your email deliverability often starts with identifying what’s wrong, which can often be a combination of two or more of the above. Here is an attempt to simplify this:

• Engagement rate – inbox providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.) look at how users engage with the content of your emails. Open rates and click rates are both positive engagement signals that inbox providers will look at when determining where to send your emails.
• Email list quality – Bad email list quality can cause deliverability problems. If too many of the recipients block your emails, your domain could end up on an email blocklist like Spamhaus, causing inbox providers to send your emails straight to the spam folder, if they accept your message at all.
• Domain reputation – Blocklist providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keep a list of spam traps – email addresses that aren’t operated by real users – that are designed to catch senders with poor sending practices. If your email domain ends up in on these databases, your emails will be blocklisted and won’t reach their intended destination.

Tips to improve your email deliverability

So, what can you do to ensure your emails end up in your subscriber inboxes? Here are a few tips:

• Tip #1: Keep your mailing list up to date – Older mailing lists contain outdated, abandoned, and uninterested recipients that can have a negative impact on your email deliverability rates. Avoid the Spam folder by validating your subscriber emails regularly and removing inactive subscribers.
• Tip #2: Have new subscribers verify their address – We’ve all mistyped our email address or perhaps we deliberately gave an incorrect email address to avoid being spammed. For a variety of reasons, it is important to request new subscribers to validate their email before being placed on your mailing list. The simple solution to verify the email address at the point of interaction using a double opt-in tool.
• Tip #3: Adhere to subscribers’ expectations – Recipients’ expectations are at the heart of email deliverability. Don’t invade your subscribers’ inboxes with your content on a daily routine. It might improve your brand relevancy today, but will hurt your sender’s reputation in the long term. Why? Because these subscribers didn’t request to receive regular emails and may ignore the message, mark it as spam, or unsubscribe. ISPs will also pick up on this low engagement and downgrade your sender’s reputation, hurting your overall deliverability rate.
• Tip #4: Monitor engagement metrics and spam complaints – One person may not care if they receive several reminders or new home offers from you, but another may protest about their full inbox. But how exactly do you know if your subscribers still want your communications and are engaging with them? Open and click-through rates, as well as unsubscribes and spam complaints, can help you understand whether your audience is finding your emails valuable or not. BuildTopia Marketing’s integration with Mailgun, ensures your emails reach their intended destination. This is made possible through using Mailgun’s proven sending infrastructure, IP warmup, reputation management and more.
• Tip #5: Don’t attach PDFs to your emails – By attaching a PDF to your mail, you may think you’re making things easier for the intended recipient, but this could give yourself a one-way ticket to the spam folder and a lower delivery rate. Instead, offer a link to where it can be downloaded, and if they’re really necessary, find a way to send them within the body of your email. This leads to less spam and better deliverability.