Email Deliverability

Email marketing email deliverability is the term used by eMarketers for describing all the issues involved with getting your email delivered to the intended recipient. Essentially, anything that affects your outgoing email:

1) Reaches the inbox
2) Is actually seen by the recipient, describes the scope of email marketing email deliverability.

Email deliverability therefore encompasses not only the creative, structural and strategic format of the email itself, but also the technical mechanism(s) in place for ensuring it reaches the destination after you hit the send button.

Basically, and this may sting, no matter how good your creative and copywriting skills are - the dominant factors governing emails actually getting into inboxes are technical. Why? The war on SPAM.

Any bulk mailer is subject to far greater scrutiny, whether you’re selling Viagra, or BMW motorcars. In fact, recent Jupiter Research estimates that anywhere from 10% to 40% of all bulk email sent never even reaches the destination.

So how can this happen?

To put this in context, it’s a bit like creating a really fantastic direct mail campaign. You take your 10,000 Envelopes to the Post Office, pay the Post Office for stamps and then once you leave, the post master looks at your 10,000 Envelopes and decides it’s too many to send out all at once. So the post master sends through 5,000, but sets fire to the other 5,000.

That’s pretty much what technical filters do to your email marketing campaigns. Nobody can click on a call to action in an email they never see.

Which is why email deliverability is so important. The worse your email deliverability, the less productive your email marketing efforts really are.

So what are some of the technical factors that can help you better understand email deliverability?

List cleanliness and bounce management

Ensuring you have proactive bounce management in place goes a long way to preventing you from being blacklisted in the way SPAMer’s are. If you’re repeatedly sending your campaigns through to hard bouncing (no longer valid) email addresses, then ISP’s can block you from sending any further emails to anyone at the domain that belongs to the email address you send to. 

For example, if mike.mckell@mail.com no longer exists, and you don’t take me off your list or suppress my email address, an ISP can blacklist you or flag you as a SPAMer and ensure your domain and IP address can no longer send to anyone at mail.com.

This is a significant contributor to the 10% to 40% of email not being delivered. Keep your list clean and upto date after each and every send!

Content/SPAM Filters

Having a SPAM assessment tool run over your design, content and coding is also crucial to getting your email marketing campaigns through filtering. Tools like SPAM Cop or SPAM Assassin are third party filters you can subject your campaigns to before launch, to verify the emails’ potential to get through.

Email authentication protocols

As the war on SPAM progresses, SPAMers have adapted. ISP’s are locked in a perpetual game of one-up-manship with SPAMers. In a bid to go beyond content filtering methods, major ISP’s like Hotmail and Yahoo, have created a number of verification methods.

Legitimate email marketers and their service providers can utilise these methods, that are typically cost prohibitive to SPAMers’. Sender ID, sender policy framework and domain keys are all such technical methods, which form the basis of a good “white-listing” policy.

Increasingly, these measure will become more heavily weighted in ‘scoring’ email validity, as invariably SPAMers will be able to get around even the best content filters.

Technical Filters

These are factors that most CRM’s and inhouse systems struggle to deal with. For example, the capacity of your mail transfer agent. Smart MTA’s are able to throttle send’s via domain- if you were to send 100,000 messages to the Hotmail domain, Hotmail ‘chokes’ their server to limit SPAMers from sending all those emails through at once.

The ‘choke’ is varied to continually trip SPAMers up. Other technical applications such as Edge Networks- which sit on the receiving ISP’s also filter incoming traffic for PAM and other potentially malicious emails.

User Filters

This is the tricky part. Finding out which domains are blocking you will also assist your email deliverability. Analysing which domains are less ‘friendly’ to your campaigns will point you in the direction of which companies or ISP’s you may like to contact to be verified by their white-listing policy. Some things will be though, as browsers are often set to block images by default.

An ‘open’ is actually the sending server receiving back information that the image in the email has been downloaded. Certainly makes it hard to get a true picture of open rates – as your recipients can delete without opening your email.

So, the BIG question is: deleted without being opened- or not even getting there in the first place- which is it?

Well, this is where you go back to your design, creative and content. If you’ve put together a pretty damn hot electronic direct mail campaign you’d back to be opened, chances are that you have one or more technical issues on your hands.

It’s likely it’s the way you’re sending, not what you’re sending that really impacts your true email deliverability.