Email deliverability measures how many of your contacts receive your email. Inbox placement and delivery is a complex subject. Mailbox providers consider many factors before placing an email into your subscribers’ inbox.

Email delivery vs Email deliverability

Email deliverability is when an email has successfully arrived in the person’s inbox.

It is possible to have good email delivery but poor email deliverability, as the email landed in the recipient’s spam folder rather than the recipient’s inbox. Good email deliverability ensures that emails are landed in recipients’ inboxes. 

Why it is important to track email deliverability

1. To know if subscribers received emails
2. To determine whether a lead is hot or not
3. To know what’s wrong
4. To determine if the content is working

To know if subscribers received emails. Senders will get to know when people have opened their emails and at what time they have opened them by tracking email deliverability. 

To determine whether a lead is “hot” or not. Tracking deliverability helps campaigners to identify qualified leads. In turn, they send the “hot” leads to the sales team and the “warm” ones to the marketing team.

To know what’s wrong. Analyzing helps marketers to understand the causes of unsubscribes. For instance, if there is a sudden spike in the number of unsubscribes, monitoring the email campaign can help the sender discover common causes such as broken links, problems with the email content, and so on.

To determine if the content is working. Email deliverability tracking enables senders to understand the way subscribers interact with their marketing material, by opening and clicking the relevant links and subscribing to the newsletters 

Why should a company care about email deliverability

Successful deliverability means successful email marketing campaigns

Email deliverability is the base on which email marketing is built. Email marketers ensure deliverability, and design the perfect email campaign for the success of a particular marketing event.

For a successful marketing campaign, marketers spend their time and effort on crafting the emails. Having ideal ratios of text to images, perfect spacing, and using eye-catching font are some factors of a perfect email.

Audience experience

For email marketing to be successful, recipients must open the email and engage with its content. Marketers must only send emails to the people who want. Sending emails to the non-permission-based list will result in low open rates, high unsubscribe rates, and high spam complaints.

What affects email deliverability?

1. Sender reputation
2. Infrastructure
3. Authentication

Email deliverability is affected by reputation, infrastructure, and authentication. Let’s discuss each of these factors.

Sender reputation

Sender reputation is a score that an internet service provider assigns to an organization that sends emails. The higher the score, the higher the delivery of emails in the inbox of the recipients.

Several factors define the sender’s score

• The number of emails sent by the organization
• How often do the organization’s emails hit an ISP spam trap
• How many emails are bounce due to any reasons
• How many recipients have  unsubscribe from the email list

Whenever marketers send email campaigns, mailbox providers run reputation checks. Senders with excellent reputations get their messages delivered to recipients’ inboxes, while those with poor reputations land in the junk folder or even get rejected 

Infrastructure

Here are some of the infrastructural aspects that affect email deliverability:

• IP address- For high-volume senders and time-sensitive email campaigns. A good IP address ensures that your sender reputation remains good and there are very few chances to get into the spam folder.
• Feedback loops for reporting complaints to email service providers (ESPs). After a user clicks “Mark as spam” or “Unsubscribe,” they should be removed from your mailing list. 

Authentication

It refers to the process by which mailbox providers verify if the IP address that a sender uses has permission to send emails. Setting up authentication tells mailbox providers that a marketer consented to an ESP sending emails on their behalf. The two main ways of setting it up are:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): It is an email validation system that prevents spam by verifying the IP address used by the sender.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): It indicates that a specific organization owns a particular email address.

SPF and DKIM should be used together to improve deliverability rates and reduce spam. One can easily set up SPF and DKIM in simple steps to achieve this.

Best Practices to Improve Email Deliverability

To wind up, let’s highlight some useful tips for email deliverability try zimails by zicorn.

• Never buy email lists;
• Use a double opt-in subscription method;
• Verify your mailing list;
• Segment your mailing list into groups to ensure their campaigns deliver optimal value;
• Send out email campaigns regularly based on subscriber preferences;
• Regularly monitor email campaign reports;
• Keep a clean subscriber list by periodically checking it for spam traps and invalid addresses;
• Create an SPF record and configure DKIM