The Breakroom: Email Deliverability Explained

Summary: Email Deliverability changes are coming for bulk senders and email marketers need to be aware of these changes and adjust their best practices accordingly. But what actually is email deliverability, what changes are coming and how do you cater to them? This blog will break down all of these questions with actionable outcomes.

Over 4 billion people worldwide use email to connect with the world around them. For marketers, email is a fantastic way of communicating directly with customers by sharing information straight to their inbox about events, offers, status updates and more – the potential email has is almost unlimited. However, since the 90s email has changed considerably, not only in the ways in which emails are rendered in different inboxes, but also in terms of their content and most importantly, their deliverability.

What is Deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to an email’s ability to deliver into your contacts’ inboxes, and not get caught in spam or blocked entirely. Deliverability can be measured in a multitude of different ways, for example, is your email being sent to an engaged subscriber? Does the content or layout automatically place your email into spam boxes? And finally, what is your sender reputation like? The two key players who decide if your email has a high deliverability rate are Yahoo and Gmail. In fact, Gmail alone blocks roughly 100 million emails a day due to their low deliverability score!

There are three main areas contributing to a sender’s deliverability score: authentication, unsubscribes and engagement. Let’s break them down here:

Authenticate your email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC:

You will need to make sure your email/s have been sent from an authenticated and trusted IP address, and that your email has its domain authenticated within the email header (for instance for ClickDimensions the domain would be clickdimesions.com).

Find out more about authenticating your email’s, SPF, DKIM and DMARC by watching our recent Ask the Expert webinar with our resident deliverability guru, Charles Meigh.

Get the webinar on demand here: Ask the Expert: Deliverability webinar.

Enable Easy Unsubscribe Options

The movement toward one-click unsubscribes is increasing in adoption by Gmail and Yahoo, and will become a core best practice for any bulk email sender who wants to improve their deliverability score. (if you’re a ClickDimensions customer you already have access to this).

If you are already using one-click unsubscribes, then also make sure that the link is in your email body, not the footer.

Remember: It’s better for your customers to unsubscribe rather than report your email as SPAM!

Send Relevant Emails that Foster Engagement

For marketers, this area of email marketing is in no way unknown territory. However, as new deliverability rules launch there is a movement towards ‘cleaning-up’ marketing lists and only sending to engaged contacts.

Marketers now need to begin sunsetting contacts that are not engaging or perhaps moving them onto a ‘buy-back’ marketing list, as a way of improving their deliverability score. A good way to measure if your marketing list is clean and full of engaged contacts is to maintain a spam rating of 0.3% and below.

These are just three simple ways you can improve your deliverability score, aligning to the new guidelines provided by Gmail and Yahoo. If you want to find out more about any of these topics, get our Ask the Expert: Deliverability webinar on demand now by clicking the link here.

To read our Email Deliverability Q&A blog, click here.