What is email deliverability
Email deliverability is the ability of emails to reach the recipient's inbox — rather than the spam folder.
When brands send emails to their clients, whether promotional, transactional, or newsletters, they often assume that they land in the inbox. Essentially, they believe that sending an email coincides with its delivery in the recipients' inboxes. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It is estimated that 1 in 6 emails sent to opted-in contacts does not reach the inbox, and, even more so, that 1 in 10 sent emails is not accepted at all by the receiving Mailbox Providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook.com). This is because the successful delivery of an email to the inbox is the result of a delicate balance of various factors and also because Mailbox Providers require senders to comply with increasingly stringent sending rules. Think of the new necessary requirements introduced by Gmail and Yahoo! starting February 2024, aiming to make their users' mailboxes even more secure and free from spam or other abuses, distinguishing good and reliable senders from spammers, keeping the latter's emails away from their users' inboxes.
Read the blog article Gmail and Yahoo! changing rules from 2024: Will your emails be blocked?
What is the difference between email delivery and email deliverability
Email delivery and email deliverability are terms that might seem synonymous but actually have two very different meanings.
Email delivery
Email delivery refers to when an email is successfully delivered to the recipient's mail server.
When an email is not delivered or is rejected by the recipient's mail server, it registers a bounce.
Factors affecting delivery include:
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The validity of the recipient's email address
Sending to a recipient whose email address is non-existent will result in an error classified as a hard bounce.
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Temporary issues in accepting incoming emails by the recipient mail server
Temporary issues like the recipient's mailbox being full, the recipient mail server temporarily unreachable, poor sender reputation, IPs or domains being blacklisted, or the email content being classified as spam, can lead to the email being rejected with an error classified as a soft bounce.
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Email authentication
Mail servers use email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify that incoming emails come from legitimate senders and can reject emails if these protocol checks fail, resulting in an error classified as a soft bounce.
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Throttling
Sending a large number of emails to a mail server in a short period of time can cause them to be rejected.
Magnews uses EmailSuccess, our proprietary MTA, which aims to deliver emails as quickly as possible, but adapts to the rules imposed by each Mailbox Provider on the number of messages that can be sent per hour and per single SMTP connection to optimize delivery.
When an email is successfully delivered to the recipient's mail server, it is registered as a delivered email. Magnews reports allow for monitoring the delivery rate, or the percentage of sent emails that are delivered and not registered as bounces.
Read the article Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce
Email deliverability
When we talk about email deliverability, we refer to “where emails end up” once they are successfully delivered to the receiving mail server.
It's not always the case that the final destination of an email is the recipient's inbox. Emails could be delivered to the junk mail folder or blocked by the mail system in quarantine or trashed.
It is possible to have an excellent delivery rate but poor email deliverability if the majority of delivered emails do not reach the inbox but the spam folder.
The fundamental difference between email delivery and email deliverability is that the latter is not measurable. Once an email is correctly delivered by the receiving mail server, it is not possible to know its final destination because it is not a shared piece of information.
Good email deliverability is achieved when emails reach the recipient's inbox, including delivery to secondary tabs, such as Gmail's Promotions tab or Outlook.com's Other tab.
The main factors that influence deliverability and your sender reputation are:
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Who you send to
The quality of the contacts you send to and their level of interest in the emails you send them. -
Your sending habits
How many emails you send at the same time to your contacts and how often. -
Your brand's recognizability
How recognizable your brand is to the contact. Recognizability determined by multiple elements of the email such as the sender name, sender email address, sender email domain, the logo, text characters, colors, fonts, and images. -
Adoption of technologies and configurations to protect your brand
The more these configurations are complete and correct, the more positive the impact on deliverability, thus the ability for your emails to reach the inbox of your contacts. -
The content of your emails
Mailbox providers use spam filters to determine whether your emails can reach the inbox or junk mail based on their contents, such as the subject, images, links, words, and phrases. -
The sending infrastructure
The sending infrastructure used to send emails, including IPs and the sending domain (known as Return-Path/EnvelopeFrom/SPFdomain)
Best practices to optimize email deliverability
By following these simple best practices, you will build a good sender reputation and keep your emails away from the junk mail folder.
Import only clean contact lists into magnews
Before importing your existing contact lists into magnews, remove invalid email addresses that have recorded hard bounces or the email addresses of contacts who have reported your emails as spam. The previous email service provider used should allow you to identify them easily.
It is essential to perform this cleaning process before starting to send with magnews to preserve your sender reputation, that of our sending infrastructure, and to prevent possible deliverability issues.
Send only to contacts who have given consent
Make sure to send emails only to contacts who have given consent. Sending emails to contacts who have not authorized you to do so will lead to unsubscribes or, worse, spam reports, low opens, and clicks that will strongly negatively impact your sender reputation.
Keep the sign-up promise
Send only the type of content your subscribers have chosen to receive. Be clear in your subscription form about the type of emails you will send and the frequency.
Use clear language on your subscription forms to avoid disturbing your contacts with unwanted emails.
Protect your subscription forms from list bombing
List bombing is a cyber attack caused by bots that, in an automated and fraudulent way, subscribe multiple email addresses — which can be legitimate, obtained from public lists, or randomly generated — to numerous subscription or registration forms, leading to the sending of unsolicited messages (spam).
If your subscription forms are subjected to a list bombing attack, your database will be filled with fake or legitimate contacts who did not give consent, and sending emails to them risks seriously compromising your sender reputation or even causing the blacklisting of our sending infrastructure's IPs and domains.
For this reason, securing your forms from this attack should be a priority. To do so, add a CAPTCHA and prioritize the double opt-in subscription method.
Learn more about the topic by reading What is List Bombing and how to avoid it.
Set a sender related to your brand
The sender of your emails should lead contacts back to your brand, making them more confident and incentivized to open them.
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Set the sender name as your brand's name;
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Set the sender email address and reply-to as an existing email address with a monitored mailbox to receive and manage potential requests from your contacts;
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The domain of the sender email address should match the brand's domain or one of its subdomains.
You can define the email sender from both the journey setup and the email settings.
Configure the sender domain correctly
The sender domain must be consistent with your brand, existing, properly configured, and must implement DKIM and DMARC email authentication technologies.
Make sure to follow these steps for proper configuration and avoid delivery and deliverability issues:
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define your domain in the account as a sender domain
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configure DKIM for the sender domain
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ensure that the sender domain publishes an MX record
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ensure that the sender domain publishes a valid DMARC record
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associate the sender domain with a web domain for click tracking aligned
Plan a ramp-up strategy for your sending domain
The ramp-up allows your domain to build a good sender reputation with Mailbox Providers. It is a fundamental process whether your sending domain is new (e.g., new brand) or if it is an established one already used for email marketing activities. Since you are starting to use magnews, the connection between your domain, brand, and our sending infrastructure is still unknown to recipients and Mailbox Providers. Ramp-up will enable you to make this new connection known and, above all, to send a larger volume of emails without damaging your reputation.
Start sending with very low volumes, initially involving the most active contacts, and then gradually increase the volume over time until you have sent at least once to all your contacts.
Create high-quality content
The content of emails is one of the many factors that influence deliverability. Although sender reputation and contact engagement are now the most influential factors in spam filter decisions, it is always crucial to create engaging and high-quality content for your contacts.
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Pay attention to words, phrases, and elements typical of spam emails
The use of certain specific words, excessive punctuation, or capital letters in both the subject and the body of the email can trigger spam filters.
Avoid:
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SUBJECT IN ALL CAPITALS
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subject with too many emojis and punctuation !!!!!!!!!????
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excessive use of words and phrases suggesting free offers, exaggerated discounts, creating a sense of urgency, or guaranteeing profit and assured benefits
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“100% FREE“
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“SUPER DISCOUNT“, “EXTRA DISCOUNT“
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“HURRY UP”, “HURRY UP, ONLY THIS TIME”
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“GUARANTEED PROFIT“
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No to emails composed solely of images
Emails that consist exclusively of images (or that are very image-heavy) can trigger spam filters because this is a typical characteristic of emails sent by spammers. Emails should contain a balanced portion of images and text but preferentially more text. Remember that even just contact information in the footer, the unsubscribe link, and the ALT text for images help to increase the text portion. Additionally, ALT text is important to include so that contacts can read a description if the images do not load correctly and to ensure email accessibility. -
Avoid incorrect and unnecessary HTML code
If you use our templates to create your communications, we take care of it. But if you are creating communications from your own HTML, make sure there are no errors, that the code adheres to international standards, that there are no unnecessary special characters, and optimize the code so that it is responsive for both desktop and mobile. -
No to heavy emails
Be cautious with gifs, embedded images, and attachments. Keep the email weight below 100 KB or safely between 50 KB and 70 KB. -
Do not set URLs as clickable link text
Set text or images as clickable link text, never a URL (for example, https://example.com).
Malicious senders camouflage dangerous links in their phishing and spam emails this way. For this reason, links with URLs as clickable text are viewed suspiciously by Mailbox Provider spam filters and by the contacts themselves.
Allow your contacts to unsubscribe without difficulty
If one of your contacts no longer wishes to receive your emails, make it easy for them to opt-out. The method for unsubscribing should be noticeable, simple and effective.
Otherwise, the contact might report your emails as spam with the intent of no longer receiving them. A simple but harmful gesture for your sender reputation and the deliverability of your emails.
Always add a visible unsubscribe link in the footer of your emails.
Magnews also adds the List-Unsubscribe header to emails, used by some Mailbox Providers (e.g. Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo!) and operating systems (e.g., iOS) to display an additional unsubscribe button or link, usually near the sender, on which the contact can click to communicate their desire to unsubscribe.
Complementing the List-Unsubscribe, magnews also supports the one-click unsubscribe feature, where clicking the unsubscribe button/link results in immediate unsubscription without prompting a confirmation page.
Send regularly
Regularity is another important factor to improve the engagement of your contacts. Finding the right time and frequency for sending helps to:
- Deliver your email to the inbox of readers when they are most active;
- Create a sense of anticipation. Your contacts know that your new campaigns are coming and will wait for them eagerly;
Sending at the right time and with the right frequency increases the likelihood that contacts will open and click on your emails. And remember, anything that improves engagement also improves deliverability.
Magnews's “Send Time Optimization” feature eliminates any doubts and chooses the best time to send to each recipient, based on their past behavior.
Avoid sending spikes
Keep your sending volumes as constant as possible and avoid sudden volume spikes as they are viewed with suspicion by Mailbox Providers, which might classify the emails as spam or reject them, causing soft bounces.
If you need to send to a significantly larger number of contacts than usual, stagger the sending over different times of the day or multiple days. Easily done in magnews with "Distributed in phases" sending.
Build an audience of active and engaged contacts
You not only need to send to consent-given contacts but also to those most interested in your emails. They are a fundamental driver for your sender reputation.
Identify the contacts with the best engagement and create an audience to target with your initial sends using magnews.
Keep your contact lists clean from non-existent email addresses
There are two types of non-existent email addresses:
- Emails that contacts enter with typographical errors
- Email addresses that are non-existent because they are no longer in use
To prevent contacts from subscribing to your services with incorrect email addresses, set up a double opt-in process. Before subscribing, the contact will receive an email with a link to confirm the email address. Double opt-in is highly recommended.
Non-existent email addresses generate hard bounces. Hard bounces damage sender reputation and email deliverability, hence it's critical to prevent, identify, and eliminate them.
Magnews makes this cleansing task simple:
- Automatically blacklists email addresses that record hard bounces. This means they will no longer receive emails from your nagnews account;
- Via the Subscriber Check functionality, it allows you to detect and unsubscribe email addresses with incorrect or obsolete domains, as well as other risky email types impacting sender reputation and deliverability;
- During import, it automatically discards contacts with syntactically incorrect email addresses (lacking @; containing spaces, etc.).
Another good reason to remove incorrect or inactive email addresses is the possibility that some may be hidden spam traps.
Develop a strategy to reactivate inactive contacts
Contact engagement is one of the main factors Mailbox Providers use to determine whether an email is spam or not. If a high number of emails are consistently ignored, Mailbox Providers assign a low reputation to the sender and classify future emails as spam or block them.
To preserve your sender reputation and avoid negative consequences on deliverability, always monitor inactive contacts and develop reactivation strategies that involve periodic reviews and database cleanups. The goal of reactivation campaigns isn't solely to "reconquer" the contact; it's equally useful and important to unsubscribe from the database those who clearly and definitively show disinterest in your emails. It's better to let go of these contacts than to compromise your deliverability.