Table of Contents
Introduction
Email deliverability refers to the likelihood of your email being successfully delivered each time you hit “send”.
Healthy email deliverability means your emails will usually deliver without problems, whereas poor email deliverability means your emails are likely to end up in spam or junk mail.
It is a reflection of your sending habits as an email marketer, and is characterized by the following 3 metrics:
- email bounce rate
- fail to deliver rate
- spam report rate
To maintain good email deliverability, your goal as an email marketer is to keep these 3 numbers as low as possible.
Good Sending Practices
In email marketing, your list is your life.
Treating it with respect will guarantee a reliable source of revenue for a foreseeable future.
To do this, email marketers practice good sending practices ✅ this requires:
- a segmentation strategy, especially using an engaged segment
- regular list cleaning
- complying with email regulations and data privacy laws, such as CAN-SPAM or CASL
Maintaining these good sending practices will prevent most email deliverability issues; people with poor email deliverability usually have terrible sending habits and spammy behaviour.
Email Bouncing (Soft Bounce)
When an email has failed to deliver, it is either due to a soft bounce, or a hard bounce.
A soft bounce is caused by temporary issues such as a server error or a full inbox.
With soft bouncing, your email can be successfully received in the future.
Emails that soft bounce have small chance of hurting your email deliverability, but it is still recommended to exclude or purge any segments who frequently soft bounce.
As a rule of thumb, you should exclude segments that soft bounce 3 or more times.
Purging these profiles can also save you money in the long run, because ESPs usually bill you for the number of active profiles on your list, as well as the number of emails you send per month.
Fail To Deliver (Hard Bounce)
In contrast, hard bounces are emails that fail to deliver due to permanent issues such as a non-existent recipient address, or because your IP has been blocked/blacklisted.
Hard bounces are much more serious, because in these situations your emails will never reach the recipient.
To maintain healthy email deliverability, you should avoid sending emails to profiles that have ever hard bounced.
Frequent hard bounces is a sign of poor sending practices.
Spam Reporting
Your spam report rate is the number of people who receive an email from you and mark, report or flag it as spam.
An acceptable spam report rate is about 0.1%, so if your spam rate is higher you should reconsider:
- who you send your email to
- how often you send emails
- the quality of the messages you send
A high spam report rate will also hurt your email deliverability; future emails are more likely to end up in junk/spam folders, and may even be blocked from delivering at all.
Here are some common reasons why people report emails as spam:
- the message is irrelevant
this can be fixed through segmentation or optimizing the tone/voice in your email copy - recipients did not consent to your email marketing
this often happens when businesses purchase their email lists, or if people are opted into a newsletter via implicit consent - you are emailing your list too often
nobody likes getting their inbox flooded, so think about how often you should email your list, or give your subscribers an option to lower their email frequency by adjusting their email preferences
Sometimes your ESP will warn you if your spam rate is too high, and in extreme cases they may even restrict your ability to send emails until you fix your sending habits.
Summary Notes
- having good email deliverability means your emails are more likely to be sent without any issues
- email deliverability is characterized by how often your emails bounce, fail to deliver, or get reported for spam
- practicing good sending habits will maximize your email deliverability
- ESPs such as MailerLite have built-in features to help monitor your deliverability, and maintain good sending practices
Deliverability isn’t complicated, but it can be a lot to manage for small teams.
That’s why marketing agencies use our white label email marketing services to deliver high-quality messages while following the best practices.