Deliverability is the art of getting emails into recipients’ inboxes. It’s a measure of how well emails reach their intended recipients, depending on the messaging services they use.
😈 Obstacles to deliverability
Certain factors can penalize deliverability. For example:
- Shipments without proper configuration ❌
- Sending from a free email domain (such as Yahoo or Gmail)
- A lack of engagement (few openings or clicks) 🚫
- Using URL shorteners
- The difficulty for Internet users to unsubscribe 🔄
📈 The Ediware emailing platform accurately measures the rate of successful mails, i.e. the proportion of rejected mails (bounces) in relation to the total number of mailings.
🚫 What is an email bounce?
Mails can be rejected for two reasons.
Hard bounce: The permanent error
The address is invalid or incorrect.
An e-mail address is made up of a user and a domain name. In the address test@example.com
- there’s the user: test
- and the domain name: example.com
For a mail server, the first step when sending an e-mail is to identify the domain name of the recipient’s address; to see if it exists and to retrieve the mail server managing this domain name by querying its DNS. If one of these steps fails, sending stops and the e-mail is rejected directly by the sending server, which cannot contact the remote mail server. This is a hard bounce 🚧.
If all has gone well, the second step is to send the e-mail to the recipient’s mail server. For this, an SMTP transaction is established. If the user doesn’t exist (what’s in front of the @), the remote mail server will reject the e-mail. Either immediately during the SMTP transaction, or subsequently, by sending an error e-mail to the sender’s e-mail address. This is also known as a hard bounce.
Soft bounce: The temporary error
We’ve reached the second stage: the domain name of the recipient’s address exists, and there’s a remote mail server up and running. However, the recipient’s mail server refuses the message during the SMTP transaction, indicating that the user certainly exists, but that it cannot accept the message. There may be several reasons for this:
- The remote server is too busy 🔄
- The message is rejected as “spam related” 🚫
- The message does not respect the conditions imposed by the recipient’s mail server (“policy-related”). This can happen, for example, if the remote server imposes a limit on the number of messages a sender can send.
- The recipient’s mailbox is full 📬
📈 How to assess the deliverability of an email campaign?
t’s impossible to know exactly what proportion of successful e-mails reaches the inbox and what proportion ends up in the spam folder.
Nevertheless, it is possible to detect a drop in deliverability by comparing the engagement rate (opens and clicks) of a campaign with previous ones.📉
Other factors may indicate a drop or risk of a drop in deliverability rates: an increase in unsubscribes, an increase in the rate of rejected e-mails, and an increase in the number of spam complaints.🚩
Here’s an example 📝: Your email campaign has an open rate of 14%, whereas the previous one had an open rate of 20%. This drop can have two causes:
- A drop in deliverability: a larger proportion of your messages went into the recipients’ spam boxes, so fewer of them opened the message 📤
- Your content was less relevant. The recipients who received the message in their inboxes were not as numerous as in the previous campaign, but they didn’t find the subject interesting enough to open it 👀
A slight variation such as this does not provide a definitive answer. It’s worth checking whether the bounce rate has increased, which could support the suspicion that deliverability is down. 🔍
If the opening rate had been halved, a deliverability problem is very likely. 🚨
🎖The importance of a campaign sender’s reputation
An email campaign is sent by a mail server and is identified by two characteristics:
- The sender’s email address (including the domain name indicated after the @ in this address) 📧
- The sending IP(s) used by the mail server to send messages 🌐
These two components, sending domain and sending IP, have a certain reputation with recipients’ mail servers. A sender generating few complaints and good engagement (clicks or opens) will have a better reputation than one regularly provoking a large number of spam reports and little engagement.
Deliverability and recipient engagement therefore directly determine the reputation of an email campaign’ s sender. These two factors do not depend on the emailing platform used. Certain technical parameters must of course be managed correctly by your emailing service provider; but as long as you have your own dedicated IPs, it’s your emailing campaigns that largely determine the reputation of your sending parameters.
🚀 How to get a good reputation for your emailing sender?
There are a few general principles to follow in order to maintain or improve your reputation:
- Good list hygiene 🧼
- Use correct shipping parameters: especially IP authentication and sender domain 🎯
- Simplify the unsubscribe process. Making the unsubscribe action difficult for the recipient of a campaign is not only unethical, it’s counter-productive for the deliverability of an email campaign. There’s a good chance that a web surfer who can’t unsubscribe will report the message as undesirable. 🔄
- Avoid using public services to shorten URLs (such as BitLy) ⛔️
- Send interesting messages. This is one of the most important factors. Sending quality content with high added value for the recipients of an email campaign naturally increases engagement rates and minimizes reports as spam. 📚
- The subject line, the sender’s name and, incidentally, the pre-header are the only elements on which recipients base their decision as to whether or not to open an e-mail. An effort on this point can yield good results in terms of open rates, and therefore engagement. ✍️
- Beware of sending volume: a sudden increase in sending volume is a bad signal for e-mail services. If, for example, you’re sending mailings to 5,000 recipients a week, increasing your volume to 50,000 could have a negative impact on your deliverability. The best thing is to gradually increase your sending volume so that it seems natural. 📈
