Email Delivery To Email Deliverability: The Metrics

An email campaign is personalized with colors, fonts, and images that take hours of planning and strategizing. We target niche audiences and specific markets with custom-built messages that may also be well presented along with eye-catchy templates and call-to-action link redirection.

After the amount of work that goes behind every single email, the ultimate aim of an email is to reach the right subscriber address to get the results estimated, lest the email is of no use. Here the terms delivery and deliverability come into the picture. Even though these terms have different meanings, few marketers use these terms interchangeably.

What determines email delivery?

What do you think would decide the delivery of an email? Email delivery, just as the term sounds, means the ultimate acceptance of an email by its recipient.

What differentiates email deliverability from email delivery?

Email deliverability would refer to where an email lands finally- whether an inbox or spam folder or another folder. Once the email is delivered, you would want to consider what would help your email land into an intended inbox of the receiver:

• Email Domain or Address Existence

Along with the requirement for an email delivery success, comes the need for the right email domain or email address. Besides this, your IP address needs to be checked for acceptance by all servers. So, your email will be sent to the right email subscriber, but its landing to the inbox or the spam folder will be your next question.

• Know how your email will get to the inbox

Email deliverability or inbox placement is a concern at this stage as inbox is the correct destination for every email. See what confirms an email deliverability:

a) Authentication: While sending an email there are certain protocols that a sender needs to be identified with, namely- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). These protocols are like a passport necessary for the background check of an email and help to get your email through to the right destination.

b) Sender score: Sender behavior is rated by different organizations and ISPs differently on the basis of email subscriber behavior generation. High number of emails sent to your email subscribers will guarantee their your score as a trusted sender, raising your reputation as an email sender.

c) Content quality: It is better to refrain from using formatting everywhere in an email, and if you are sending the URL of your website, then it is better to use it as it is instead of shortening it. Your email subscriber will open your email only after reading the subject line, so create a subject line that addresses a subscriber's requirements.

There may be other ways to clear the way of your email to its destination point. You may need to clean your email list, replace outdated email addresses with the new ones or prevent your emails from being blocked by your ISP due to negative user interaction. Deliverability problems may also straight away indicate that the email list is not interested in your emails.

So, you may try the following to de-clutter your email list and keep addresses of contacts that show interest in your emails:

1) Clean your email list

If there are too many inactive email subscribers, your subscriber engagement metrics will not show good results in email deliverability. So, you may want to send an automated re-confirmation email to such contacts and after checking their activity you may want to remove or suppress the still inactive contacts.

2) The unsubscribe button may be helpful

Though unsubscribes mean less contacts on your email list, but it does not necessarily lessen the deliverability rate, in fact it raises the proximity of getting the most chosen contacts on your list and excusing your emails from being spammed. This further helps to increase open and click-through rates and decrease bounce rates. So, it is better to include your unsubscribe button in your emails.

3) Customize emails to make them relevant to your subscribers

A marketer benefits from personalized email content as customer relevant content raises the chances of an email traveling to the inbox directly. Email is one of the personalized marketing platforms and hence, customer-focused emails raise reader engagement and long-term subscriber relationship.

So, deliver emails with HTML, RSS feeds, landing page and call-to-action links to the right contacts at the right time with the right message by using the above mentioned techniques and pull in high organic traffic towards your online content.