Email deliverability is one of the most important things for every person who does email marketing for his or her business. The SalesNash team sends tens of thousands of emails on behalf of our clients every month due to the nature of our business. That`s why we need to monitor and control our deliverability precisely and we have a whole department dedicated to it. Now we want to share our thoughts on what email deliverability is and some ways to make sure your emails go to inboxes, not to spam folders or promotion folders.

The Importance of Email Deliverability

Firstly, email deliverability is so important because it defines the success of your email marketing campaigns or called outreach campaigns that you are planning to run. As soon as you have a 50 deliverability chances are that all the rates of your campaign, including open rates, response rate, and click-through rates, are going to be two times lower. Therefore, your main goal is to get your email deliverability to the 90 to 100 range which is not the case for most email marketers. 

Main Things That Influence Your Email Deliverability  

The domain DNS settings is the first thing that influences your email deliverability both for marketing and for cold outreach campaigns The second one is the content that you use for your outbound campaigns. The third point is the servers that you use for your outbound campaigns or so-called SMTP servers. And the last thing is the activities that you run through your outbound campaign, including the number of messages you send and the engagement you get from your target audience. Let’s discuss those things one by one. 

Domain DNS Settings 

The first and most important point is your domain DNS settings. SPF and DKIM are super important but super easy to configure. You can find the instruction on Google with a couple of clicks. As soon as they are not configured the vast majority of your emails are going to go to spam.

SMTP Servers

The second thing that is very important for your email deliverability. It is the type of SMTP server that you use for your outbound campaign. A portion of email marketers do not know how to use correct SMTP servers. They just land with the first ones they can find or they just use basic Google SMTP or mail service for their outbound campaigns. It influences deliverability dramatically because you are using a shared IP in most cases. You are not the only person who is using this IP and your email deliverability is being influenced by other marketers or even salespeople. They are going to drag your email deliverability down and your results are going to be much lower than you expect. Therefore, please research the topic of SMTP service for email campaigns and identify the ones that work for your team.

Content

The third point is the content you use for your outbound campaign. It is super important even though it is less important than the servers you use and the DNS settings of your domain. Basically, what content influences are spam filters different mail systems have like Gmail, Outlook, etc. All of those systems have a list of spam words or trigger words that basically drag your email to spam as soon as it contains a specific phrase or wording.

Therefore, you want to look into the list of those spam words and avoid using them in your email. Secondly, the engagement you get from your target audience is super important because as soon as your engagement is high your deliverability is going to be high as well. If it is low your deliverability is going to decline over time which you do not want. So, content is a very important part of your email campaign deliverable.

Engagement

The first thing is the level of engagement you get from your target audience.  The higher the engagement level, the more emails are going to be delivered to inboxes. Engagement means opens, responses, and click-throughs. Basically, your target audience has to engage with your email content constantly for your emails to be delivered to their inboxes. Therefore, it is a very important part of your email deliverability. The second thing is basically your email campaign edits such as the number of emails you send throughout, the day months, or weeks, the type of subscribers you have on your email list, and where the results are. It is called prospects or subscribers of your email list because that influences the deliverability dramatically and the type of the email campaign itself.

How To Track Your Email Deliverability

Now you can actually track if your email deliverability is low or high and whether your email campaigns are poor performers or top performers. There are actually a bunch of tools and a bunch of things you need to check to make sure your emails are being delivered to your prospect’s mailbox.

The first thing and the most obvious one is the open rate. You get it from your cold emails or from your marketing emails. You can double-check the internet’s information on the average open rate in your industry and basically multiply it by two because the vast majority of available marketers don’t know a thing about email deliverability. Therefore, average industry open rates are usually pretty low. They are usually anywhere between 10 and 20. In general, you would want to achieve an open rate of anywhere around 30 to 40 percent. As soon as you are within 30 to 40 percent or higher, your email deliverability is definitely high.

Takeaways

If you are playing in a high volume campaign, we advise you to use a bunch of mailboxes for those campaigns. As soon as you would like those emails to be delivered, we recommend not sending more than a couple of hundred emails per day from each individual mailbox. Therefore the best practice is to have a bunch of subdomain systems. You can run any kind of campaign like called outreach campaigns where people haven’t subscribed to a list marketing campaigns, where people subscribe to a list reaching out to your clients, or where people definitely subscribe to your list and are engaged with you in real-time. Therefore, you need to pick an email server that works for you and for the exact purpose of the campaign that you run.