Part VII: The Truth About Getting Into and Optimizing the Inbox

Truth 33. The basics of deliverability

Deliverability, the metric that measures your success at getting email delivered to the end recipient, has become a key component of email marketing and something that must be evaluated and adjusted on an ongoing basis. With the potential financial and legislative implications of spam, Internet service providers (ISPs) and businesses alike are constantly attempting to protect their users. Unfortunately, they also block and filter legitimate commercial email messages (called false positives) in the process.

If you don't think deliverability is something you should be concerned with, consider that permission-based emails are reaching consumer inboxes about 75 percent of the time.¹ The takeaway here is that your audience, on average, is not getting a quarter of all your emails. That is a significant amount of lost opportunity, and one that deserves attention. Ask yourself: What am I risking by ignoring deliverability issues and, better yet, what rewards might I be missing?

Do these things to ensure delivery.

 Stay proactively focused on ensuring that key communications are being received by arguably your most valuable audience: the people who gave you permission to market to them.

 Align yourself with delivery best practices, which the ISP gatekeepers will notice and, hopefully, reward you with a successfully delivered email.

 Know when, why, and where your emails are being blocked so you can adapt future campaigns.

When it comes to deliverability, there isn't an exact science behind the collective process. There is no to-do list or magic potion for perfect delivery rates, but the more you know, the better off you'll be. That being said, there are several reasons an ISP or corporate filter will block your message from being delivered.

 You have a poor reputation. (The sender IP address has a history of poor email sending practices.)

 Your content isn't deemed as relevant, which often leads to complaints issued about your messages. (Someone has clicked Report This as Spam.)

 You repeatedly send to hard bounces on your list.

 Your messages contain spam-like content.

There are some specific things you can do to improve and ensure deliverability.

Know where you stand

The first step is understanding if your messages are getting to the inbox. This is where you dig into your bounce logs within your metrics and utilize your email partner's knowledge and connections.

There are affordable deliverability monitoring services that have seed addresses at all major email providers and can tell you if your emails are getting through. Don't rely on the “delivered” metric in the campaign reports you get from your email marketing service or software. This number does not account for most of the emails filtered out or blocked. You can get some clues by looking at opens/clicks by domain. If you have a 30% average open rate but that rate is 0% for Hotmail addresses, you have a deliverability problem!

Consider these best practices

Email deliverability can be a complex topic, but remember that the most important thing you can do is to implement general email marketing best practices. In particular, do these things.

 Make sure you keep a well-maintained and clean list. Remove hard bounces from your database.

 Only send email to those who have explicitly requested it and offer a working unsubscribe process.

 Comply with all relevant antispam legislation.

 Send relevant emails at a responsible mailing frequency.

Get authenticated

One way the industry is solving the spam problem and helping legitimate messages make it to the inbox is email authentication. Authentication is essentially email's version of caller ID. Its purpose is to connect and validate email senders and ISPs who hold the “keys” to consumer inboxes. It is growing in importance (the Direct Marketing Association [DMA] guideline calls for email marketers to adopt and use identification and authentication protocols) and adoption and aims to do the following:

 Allow recipients to identify and reject email sent purporting to be someone it isn't and prevent rogue marketers from sending spam or phishing scams that misrepresent legitimate brands.

 Allow email users to better trust the legitimacy of the emails they do receive.

Implementing authentication might require some help from your IT department or email marketing partner. However, it is worth it as ISPs increasingly see authenticated email as a positive sign and are more likely to deliver your email than if you do not authenticate.

Review content and prevent spam complaints

If your email shares any common features with spam, it runs the risk of being filtered or blocked as spam. How do you know if you look like spam? Your email marketing partner or service should offer tools that flag any risky words, phrases, or coding in your email. If it doesn't, a quick search online will find some inexpensive third-party services that do the same job.

Maintain strong coding

Spam filtering of permission-based email often occurs as a result of poor HTML coding as opposed to the actual content. Therefore, the quality of email code and its compliance with the relevant HTML coding standards are important and worth reviewing frequently to prevent deliverability issues.

Regularly evaluate and follow email best practices

Email deliverability can be a complex topic. Remember that the most important thing you can do is implement and exhibit email marketing best practices. Make sure you keep a well-maintained and clean list, remove hard bounces from your database, offer a working unsubscribe process, comply with antispam laws, and maintain a responsible mailing frequency.