Only after you’ve successfully reached your recipient’s inbox can you encourage them to take action. Whether you want them to download your ebook, book an appointment, or buy one of your products, your message won’t help you achieve that if it’s stuck in the spam folder.
If you already know this much – great! In that case, you don’t need more convincing. ☺
In this post, we’ll tackle two important topics: what is email deliverability and how to measure it.
And if you’d like to learn about improving email campaign profitability, consider reading these two posts – on email marketing best practices, and how to improve email deliverability.
News: Gmail and Yahoo! have both announced major changes to their email authentication requirements and spam prevention policies, set to take effect in February 2024. One of the announced changes is the requirement that bulk email senders start using custom domains for their email campaigns. Learn more about these and other changes in our blog post covering the Gmail and Yahoo authentication announcement.
What is email deliverability
Also known as inbox placement, the deliverability rate tells you how many messages reach your recipient’s inbox – or one of their folders/tabs (other than the dreaded spam folder).
You can calculate your email deliverability using the following formula:
[(# of emails delivered to the inbox/tabs/folders (excl. spam folder))/(# of sent emails – # of emails that generated a bounce)] * 100%
Looks complicated? Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you’ve sent out an email campaign to 100 recipients. Out of those messages:
60 ended up in the recipient’s inbox
30 landed in the promotions tab
5 landed in the spam folder
5 generated a bounce
In this case, you’d say your deliverability rate is 95%!
Here are the exact numbers we’ve used to arrive at this number:
[(60 + 30)/(100 – 5)] * 100% = 95%
Before we go any further, we’d like to make a small note first:
There’s a whole argument of whether inbox telegram database placement is the right term to use when referring to deliverability since we’re also counting other tabs and folders in the equation.
We think that the promotions tab (and other similar ones) was developed to help email recipients manage and consume content they’ve subscribed to more efficiently.
Learn more about email deliverability from our marketing podcast:
Although some marketers try to get their emails out of the promotions tab, given the latest developments from Google (leader in the market), we suggest that you think twice before you follow that path.
We believe that happy recipients make happy customers. And Google has some pretty cool plans for the promotions tab.
Opportunity for marketers – this is what the Gmail promotions tab look like with annotations.
Opportunity for marketers – this is what the Gmail promotions tab look like with annotations.
Problems with measuring email deliverability
The theory looks simple, but measuring email deliverability isn’t an easy task.
When you look into your email analytics dashboard, you’re usually missing one key element from the equation – the number of emails that ended up in your recipient’s spam folder.
Why is that crucial piece of information missing? That’s because the email servers your messages are sent to don’t return this information. They may inform you about the fact that the email address you’re trying to reach is inactive, or its mailbox is full, but not what happened after the message was received.
Here’s the exact response you or your email service provider would receive regardless if your message was placed in the inbox or the junk folder:
smtp;250 Ok
As you can see, there’s no information as to how the message got filtered, i.e., whether it landed in the primary inbox, the promotions tab, or the spam folder.
This is because how your emails get filtered within your recipient’s mailbox depends on various factors – including how they interacted with your previous communication.
In other words, if your message ends up in the subscriber’s X spam folder, it doesn’t mean it won’t show up in the primary tab for user Y or any other user, for that matter.
So, if it’s not possible to know when your emails end up in the spam folder, how on earth do email deliverability tools work?
