Myth 23: 100% deliverability does exist

Category: Email Marketing

Everyone would like to have a 100% open rate, but email marketers know that it's almost impossible because it's just as difficult to get 100% of emails into the inbox. The bigger the list, the less likely it is that any of these data will be met and the easier it is for the mailing to go to the spam folder. However, by knowing the secrets of deliverability, it is possible to take care of your campaigns so that they are as high as possible.

 

The path to the inbox

Between the time the sender clicks the ‘Send’ button and the recipient can see the message in his or her email manager, a few seconds may pass. But this path is not direct and passes through a series of filters that can lead to the inbox or elsewhere. Knowing what steps there are along the way, it is easier to understand why a campaign does not arrive or goes straight to the spam folder.

The path starts with preparing the mailing and taking precautions so that it ends up in users' inboxes, but first it will pass through the first filter: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block messages that they consider dangerous, so that they go completely unnoticed by recipients.

The second filter is made by the recipients' mail servers. Here each one determines whether it is a wanted or unwanted email and, depending on its own technical factors and other considerations that we will see later, will send it to the inbox or to spam. In both cases they are considered delivered, unlike those blocked by ISPs which are never shown to the recipient.

 

Deliverability and other “deliverables”

Deliverability is the ability of a mailing to reach the inbox, not other folders. Depending on where it is delivered, different percentages are achieved:

• Inbox placement rate considers those that do reach the inbox, in relation to the total number sent. According to a study by Validity, in Spain this percentage is 83%.
• Spam placement rate takes into account those that go to spam because the mail server marked them as unwanted. In Spain the average is 7%.
• Missing rate is the percentage of messages that are never delivered because they were blocked by the ISP. It is 10% of the total number of messages sent.
• Delivery rate is the percentage of messages delivered anywhere, i.e. campaigns that are not blocked.

With all this data we can get an idea that it is a myth to reach 100% deliverability because many factors are involved, both some that we can try to control and others that depend on the behaviour of each individual user.

 

Factors influencing deliverability

To measure the deliverability of a campaign, several elements must be taken into account and each one has a different impact on the total calculation:

• Complaint rate: when it is the recipients themselves who mark a message as spam, the impact is large and will cause the next ones to go directly to that folder. In general, behaviour is key for mail managers, for example Gmail marks as ‘Important’ in the inbox messages from senders that are frequently interacted with.
• Bounced rate: this is the percentage of bounces to the sender's server, typically because the inbox is full (soft bounce) or because the email address is invalid (hard bounce). It should be below 5%, although it is the factor with the lowest impact and shortest duration on reputation.
• Spamtraps: falling into one of these traps is dangerous because they are used by internet service providers to detect spammers. If sends to such an account, the sender will be negatively marked for longer than with any other factor. It is possible to detect them by verifying the contact list.
• Sender's IP: this may be because the sender is blacklisted or because the sender's IP has changed from the last few mailings and thus attracted the attention of ISPs.
• Authentication: protocols such as DKIM, SPF and DMARC confirm the identity of the sender and help to detect email forgery. They have a medium impact on reputation and have other advantages, such as being used for BIMI configuration.
• Content: All elements of a campaign can land it in the spam folder, from the subject line if negative words such as ‘free’ are used, to the HTML coding, to the layout if it has a single image.

All of this shapes the sender's reputation and is the way to mathematically measure the trust given to their messages to let them through or block them as spam.

 

Tasks to take care of deliverability

One of the secrets of deliverability is that the responsibility for a high or low deliverability rate lies with both the sender and the email marketing provider. So, each must take into account a number of tasks to help get messages into the inbox.

The sender must take care of his reputation. Considering what we have seen, it is important to comply with the GDPR, use double opt-in and always keep the possibility for the user to unsubscribe. If we also send targeted mailings taking into account their interests, it will be more difficult for them to mark us as spam and their interactions (open, click) will make ISPs look at us with good eyes. Even more so if they have added us to their contact list and we do not send from a no-reply address.

There are also other tasks directly related to the type of mailings, such as re-engagement campaigns to reactivate subscribers, cleaning the list of returned and inactive subscribers, verifying the links so that they do not give errors and are to trusted pages, and making sure that the content sent is of quality for the recipients.

On the other hand, providers also contribute to deliverability. For example, at Acrelia we perform several tasks, such as maintaining good relations with ISPs to request changes in the case of a false positive in a blacklist and offering tools within the platform to help our clients take care of their reputation, such as the anti-spam analyser to overcome email managers' filters.

 

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