Inbox deliverability rates in the email marketing industry are alarming low. Global email deliverability benchmarks find that as many as 15% to 20% of marketing emails never reach the intended recipient.
A small percentage of those end up in customers' spam folders and the rest simply go missing. You might say that you have a 'delivered' metric from your bulk mailing provider, but this figure simply tells you how many emails accepted by the ISP or mail server rather than how many were placed in the recipients' inbox.
Email's centrol role in marketing
Given the central role that email has in marketing strategies today, the importance of ensuring that your messages get through to the people who need to see them cannot be stressed enough. So where has it all gone wrong?
One of the major problems is that senders and certain email marketing outsourcing firms are not following global best practices in their online marketing strategies. Too many companies still think that it's ok to send unsolicited emails, to bombard customers with too many emails, and to send unpersonalised (or badly targeted) bulk messages to their customers.
Even some of the leaders in e-marketing fail to put effective opt-in and opt-out processes in place or to make some effort at segmenting their markets and targeting their messages to ensure they are relevant to the receivers. And many companies don't do a good job of maintaining their databases, meaning that customers get emails even after they opt out.
The end result is that their emails are shredded by corporate and Internet service provider (ISP) spam filters because their customers report the messages as spam. That is why you should partner with a reputable email service provider and put sound processes in place.
How to improve deliverability
To improve the deliverability of your messages, you need to understand the factors that ISPs use to filter messages.
In the past, filtering was done based mostly on the content of the message. Today, it's your reputation as a sender that really matters. Sender reputation is a rating attached to your sending domains and IP addresses.
A few of the factors that influence sender reputation include the volume of emails sent, how many emails bounce back, and the number of spam complaints received about your messages. Sender reputation is combined with methods such as content filtering and blacklisting for the ISP to decide whether to accept your message or not.
The vast majority of email deliverability problems relate to reputation issues. For that reason, understanding and improving your reputation is the key to improving the deliverability of your mails. This is something you must address in partnership with your email service provider.
Your responsibility lies with issues such as email database hygiene, the quality of your content, the personalisation of your emails and the frequency with which you make contact.
Your service provider will take responsibility for infrastructure standards, bounce handling and ISP relationship management.
Closing words
Email is a strategic part of the enterprise's customer relationship management and marketing programme. It can play a valuable role in driving sales and building customer satisfaction. If your emails are not reaching the people they are meant to, it can undermine your marketing efforts. That is why making the effort to follow best practice will ultimately pay off for your business.
