A Comprehensive Guide To Email Deliverability: What it is, How to Optimize, and Why You Should Care

As the world has shifted towards a more online and digital-centric approach, we have seen how we conduct every aspect of business change.

The days of old brick-and-mortar businesses are gone, and we are seeing the first frontier of digital marketing take place. It’s an “adapt or die” time in the business world, with companies that cannot adjust to this new way of life dying out.

The world has recently surpassed 5 billion people online, and this number will only go up as we put our foot down on the pedal of online technologies.

The collision of hyper-digitalization and new technology and software has opened up many avenues and opportunities for all businesses. Whether you are a small ‘Mom & Pops’ store or a multinational organization looking to increase the bottom line, the way we approach marketing and selling has been changed forever.

Now, all businesses can compete for millions of potential customers effortlessly, having a platform to sell their products or service quickly. This also comes hand in hand with the increased competition; it has always been easier to carry out successful digital marketing campaigns.

Email marketing has always remained at the forefront of digital marketing, a reliable, cost-effective, and measurable way of engaging with large amounts of people. Email marketing has the best ROI of all marketing channels and, when carried out effectively, can be the driver of the key results in your marketing efforts.

But if you are serious about achieving success, the critical result is making sure your emails go from your business into your audience's inbox. With this step, all is recovered - this is where email deliverability becomes so crucial.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the step to ensure your emails get to your subscribers' inboxes. It’s the key cog in the email marketing machine. If it is faulty, you will encounter issues like alarming open rates, few click-throughs, and a lot of bounces, which can significantly detriment your email marketing performance.

How to Optimize Your Emails for Deliverability?

You can take multiple actions to ensure that your emails are primed to be delivered to your subscribers' inboxes and not get bounced or unopened. Here are three key moves you can make:

Build a clean email list - A clean and engaged email list means you have scoured out inactive subscribers, email addresses that do not work, or spam email addresses.

Pay attention to your content - You need to check your email content to ensure it is relevant continuously and adds value to your subscribers' engagement. Always keep an eye out to avoid words or images that could trigger spam filters.

Find the right frequency - when you plan out when you carry out your email send, you need to make sure you have the right frequency, not so tiny that you lose engagement but not too soon that it becomes spammy.

Check your reputation - a sender's reputation is vital to having strong email deliverability. If you see lots of bounces, complaints, reports of spam, and poor overall deliverability, you will ultimately have a bad sender reputation.

What Should You Care About Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is crucial for your business because it is the critical aspect of your email marketing efforts - with this being in healthy shape, you will run into good email marketing results, impacting your business positively.

Email deliverability will result in low open rates, low click-throughs, and many bounces, all of which damage your brand reputation and the overall bottom line of your business.

The better your email deliverability, the more business opportunities you will create. Whether it is strengthening your brand image with existing or potential customers or even if you gain more leads for your sales pipeline, email deliverability is so important.

What are The Most Important Indicators of Email Deliverability?

When analyzing the essential indicators of email deliverability, you should focus on the bounce rate, the complaint rate, and the deliverability rate. Bounces refer to the number of emails sent back to the user's email address. The complaint rate gets marked as spam, either by spam filters, on the email inbox you’re sending to, or by the person who receives it. The deliverability rate is the number of emails that reach the recipients' inboxes.

The three key indicators are crucial when measuring your email marketing efforts and should be constantly checked to ensure you are achieving optimal results.

Email deliverability is an essential part of email marketing, and email marketing is a cornerstone of a holistic marketing approach. Businesses must pay attention to this, so you should be making sure you are enhancing and optimizing your emails for deliverability, making sure they reach your subscribers' inboxes and are driving success.

Keeping an eye on your sender's reputation and the indicators, as mentioned earlier, of email deliverability, are critical to ensuring your email marketing stays high.