Whether you’re constantly tracking your statistics or you’re just now hearing about this metric for the first time, remember that even the best email campaigns cannot be successful without following deliverability best practices.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email Deliverability is the ability to deliver the email to the recipient’s mailbox. This is not as simple as it might seem. There is an entire process an email has to go through before reaching the recipient’s inbox. The email has to move through different filters designed by various Email Service Providers, like SPAM filters, Content filters, etc. When it’s all done, the email lands in one of the recipients’ inbox folders, like Spam, Primary, Promotions, Updates, etc.

Email delivery is when an email is successfully delivered to the receiving server.

Email deliverability is when an email successful arrives in the person’s inbox.

It’s possible to have good email delivery but poor deliverability, because the email landed in a person’s spam folder rather than their inbox.

Delivery

Email Service Providers (ESPs) will be provided some information why a message was rejected (bounced), based on the details the receiving server sends back in the error message.

We can then accurately measure delivery rates to know how many emails are accepted and how many bounce. Examples of bounced emails include a temporary delivery error (soft bounce) because the server is unavailable, or a permanent error (hard bounce) because the email address is no longer valid.

Deliverability

Delivery, however, is only the first part of the email’s journey to successfully arriving in the inbox. Campaign Monitor has an overall delivery rate of 99%. Although we are unable to know what percentage of emails arrive in the inbox vs the spam folder, we can make inferences by analyzing some key metrics for our emails.

Bounce rates (tracked by the ESP), open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rates, and spam complaints give the marketer insight as to how people react to and engage with their emails. Monitoring these metrics over time reveals trends in audience activity and engagement.

Engagement is the most important factor in email deliverability since it directly impacts sender reputation (both for the marketer and the ESP). A stellar sender reputation is key to great email deliverability.

Our advanced email software delivers billions of emails worldwide, for companies like KBI Marketing. With all this experience, the number one issue prospective clients want to address is deliverability and inboxing. Are you looking for better answers here as well? Let us help.

Step One: Compile, Clean and Enhance Your Data

Collect all your customer and prospect data, including contact, transactional, online and digital. Sending bad emails can significantly reduce your deliverability, so it’s critical to standardize and clean your data file. Add intelligence to your file by appending third-party data with firmographics or demographics.

Step Two: Target The Right Customer

Use your clean, enhanced data and all your email and digital metrics to create targeted segments to determine specific customer profiles. Think about quarantining or eliminating contacts that have not engaged with your campaigns recently. Compare the profile of your best customers to lapsed customers and prospects to determine the best conversion options.

Step Three: Focus on In-Boxing

i-AutoResponder will help you create a successful in-box plan. Careful, systematic warm-ups, consistent campaign traffic, customer engagement and clean, error-free content are all essential parts of a successful in-boxing effort.

Step Four: Deliver The Right Message

Smart marketers know that delivering the right message, to the right person, at exactly the right time is the key to successful email marketing. Using automated processes and triggered mailings can help you to determine all these factors, and create successful campaigns. i-AutoResponder provides you expertise, strategy and support all along the way.

Contact us today to set up a demo of our powerful, intuitive email platform and tap into our extensive knowledge to help improve your email marketing.