The success of your marketing strategy hinges on one crucial element: email deliverability. Without a high delivery rate, you can’t hope to reach your customers and even worse, the messages will be filtered out as spam by the recipient’s email provider. This closes you in a cycle because undelivered e-mails reduce your deliverability rate. Once you enter this territory is extremely difficult to bounce back. This article will introduce you to everything you need to know about maintaining a good deliverability rate for your emails and don’t have to worry about them getting lost in a void.

What is E-Mail Deliverability?

First, let’s start with a definition. Email deliverability is the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered to the inbox of the recipient. A high deliverability rate means that more of your emails will reach their intended recipients, while a low rate could mean many of your emails never even make it to their target audience. 

Importance of Deliverability Rate

Your deliverability rate directly affects your open rates and click-through rates. If a recipient never receives or opens your email, they aren’t going to be able to read it. This limits the ability of your marketing strategy from being successful because you don’t have the opportunity to engage with potential customers who might buy your products.

When you send out emails to customers, they are received by the recipient’s email provider who determines whether or not it is spam. If the provider decides that the message is in fact spam, then it will go into a junk mail folder or worse, completely blocked from ever reaching its destination.

Testing Your Deliverability Rate

Before we start improving our rates, we must know where we’re at! There are many tools available online that allow us to test how well our emails are being delivered and what percentage of recipients receive them in their inboxes versus their spam folder or junk mail folders. The accuracy of an email campaign is determined by the percentage of emails sent that were received. To find your delivery rate, divide the number of delivered emails by the total quantity of emails sent. Then multiply that figure by 100 to obtain a percentage.

From there, you can identify any problems with your list management practices, like unsubscribing customers who no longer want to receive emails from you, or sending too many promotional messages without giving customers a chance to opt-out.

Outreach Campaign

Email deliverability is not only crucial when it comes to promotional e-mails. Marketers, who are responsible for the company’s outreach, often run into a wall of bricks when it comes to contacting new sources. They don’t get any answers and their e-mail messages often end up in the spam folder.

The reason for this is that recipients can tell the difference between a promotional message and a message from a friend or colleague. They might classify you as a bot therefore they won’t respond, because it’s just a waste of time.

Sending e-mails to addresses found on websites comes with great risk. If you’re not careful, your recipients may mark your email as spam, which will lower your deliverability rate and could get you blacklisted by email providers.

To prevent this from happening, make sure you follow the following tips when sending outreach messages:

1. Personalize your messages as much as possible. When you send a personalized message to a company, it is automatically more credible and less likely to end up in the spam folder. Personalizing your messages with information about what you’re doing or how you find them will make your emails seem less like a sales pitch and more personal.
2. Include a personalized message at the top of your email. A simple greeting isn’t enough anymore. If you know the name of the recipient, personalize the greeting to include the name.
3. Make sure your subject line is relevant to the recipient. If your goal is to increase your sales, you should include information about promotion in the subject line. If it is an inquiry, don’t be afraid to ask the question right at the start.

Before You Send the E-Mail

When you first collect an email address, it’s important to make sure that it’s valid. One way to do this is to verify the email address. Many applications run the verification process for you. One of the best services on the market is Bouncer. The service is not only extremely useful but also easy to use. You just have to type in an e-mail address and let the service do the work for you. Bouncer can also verify bulks and lists of e-mail addresses. 

Using the app you can expect three outcomes.

Deliverable

When the e-mail is deliverable there is no need to worry that it will lower your deliverability rate. You can safely send the message you want, but make sure to optimize it for the recipient as mentioned before.

Undeliverable

As stated in the picture, the e-mail does not exist. It can be listed on some abandoned websites. If you are determined to contact the website’s owner you can search for a contact form or a phone number.

Risky

There is no certainty if the e-mail exists. There are many reasons why e-mail can come up as risky. Some of the domains (especially the popular ones) list e-mails that will come up as risky, despite the e-mail existing. Their mailboxes might be full or have the catch-all/accept-all configuration on. This configuration means that all of the e-mails sent to that domain are caught, even if the e-mail is not legitimate. If the catch-all configuration is implemented, the deliverability of your message depends on your reputation.

There is an ongoing debate about whether you should send messages to risky addresses. The only answer is to use reason to determine if the risk is worth the price. If all of the addresses on your list are risky, it’s not the best idea to send them. If you looked for them manually and you have proven that the recipient exists (for example, if you found the e-mail in their Twitter bio), sending to a risky address is worth a shot.

Tracking

Be aware of other factors that can make your e-mail undeliverable. Tools that are often used to automatically send hundreds of e-mails can leave a trace. Some mailboxes have a function to block out such messages. E-mails are going directly to a spam folder or simply bounce. Check your tracking devices and you’ll find that almost all of them might lower your deliverability rate. You can ask an IT company for guidance on tracking tools, but sometimes is best to not use it at all.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of email deliverability and how it can impact your marketing strategy. If your emails are not getting delivered to the inboxes of recipients or caught in spam filters, then they’re largely ineffective. You need to make some changes if you want people to be able to see them! The tips above will help improve your email deliverability rate and overall improve your e-mail marketing strategy.