Email Deliverability: The Complete Guide to Owning the Inbox

Have you noticed that fewer of your subscribers are opening and engaging with your emails? Is your deliverability low and you don’t know what is causing it?

Email deliverability is a much debated yet still misunderstood concept by many email marketers.

By the end of this guide you will have a clear understanding on why your emails may not land into your intended recipient’s Inbox and how to change it.

You will also learn that common beliefs marketers have about email deliverability are simply myths and have little to do with reality today.

1. Common Email Deliverability Myths

Let’s start by debunking some common beliefs that are prevalent today but far from the truth.

Including keywords like “Free” will automatically land your email inside the spam folder

Content filtering is only a minor deliverability factor today as filtering algorithms have gotten much smarter. Although it is true that an email heavy on HTML and images will raise a few flags a good sender reputation will bypass content filters.

Landing into the primary inbox of your subscriber instead of the promotions tab is better

Gmail introduced tabs that separate content by category into a users inbox. Although many marketers actively try to fight being placed into the promotions tab there is credible data that suggests promotional content performs better in the promotions tab.

A bigger email list is always better

You have worked hard to gather the contact details of over 100,000 individuals in your industry. Yet, your email marketing efforts have yielded little success. The plain truth is that 55% clickthrough rate in a 10,000 person contact list is often much better than 2,5% of 100,000.

Switching to a new email service provider impacts your open rates and deliverability

You may have seen a drop in your deliverability when switching to a new email service provider. Although many people are quick to blame the ESP they are rarely the one to blame. When you move to a new provider you typically get a new sender IP. Without properly warming up and following email best practices your deliverability will suffer.

Deliverability and delivery rate are the same

Many marketers believe that deliverability and delivery rate are the same metric. This is not the case. The delivery rate indicates how many emails did not bounce or got rejected by the receiving server. Deliverability one the other hand is a complex cocktail of different variables.

Are you surprised by any of these myths?

Let us take a deep dive into everything regarding email deliverability and how you can build, grow and strengthen the relationship with your subscribers the right way.

2. Understanding How Email Works

To understand deliverability, we need to understand how email works.

Let’s take it from the top

In 1971 when Ray Tomlinson made history by sending the first email ever via ARPANET, the father of the internet as we know it today.

Back then there wasn’t much need for SPAM filters or complicated algorithms that protect users from phishing, scam or other malicious emails.

Their primary concern at the time was simply to make email work

Not even in their wildest dreams did they consider that about 40 years later over 90% of all emails sent would be phishing, malware or spam.

According to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report 93% of social attack-based data breaches involved phishing, with email being the most common social attack method.

Email is today used by billions of people, but until recently email’s biggest flaw was the inability to authenticate and validate a sender’s true identity.

Major flows in how the system worked allowed for major exploitation of email in the early 2000s.

Any user could impersonate anyone

Entering any valid email in the visible to the receiver ‘from’ field and a different email in the hidden ‘return path’ field. This allowed users to send unauthorized emails from any valid email.

This and other security vulnerabilities enabled criminals to steal information from individuals and corporations alike through hard to detect exact domain spear phishing attacks.

As a result, the reputation of email marketing and its effectiveness suffered, a ripple effect of which we can still see today.

However, email was here to stay, with over 270 billion emails were sent every day in 2017, there was an urgent need to enhance the security of the communications medium and protect users with enhanced authentication.

A new era for email authentication

In 2003, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) the first of the three new security standards was established, with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) following.

Email continues to grow

Email remains the most effective way of communication both for personal and commercial purposes. Up until recently, it was difficult to know whether any received email comes from who it claims to be from.

With authentication, however, senders’ identities are easier to verify, restoring consumer trust and making email one of the most profitable and cost-effective communication means for brands.

Emails go through a long journey across servers throughout the internet and through each step they need to pass various authentications.

To successfully complete this journey from a sender to receiver it is crucial that your email passes authentication checks throughout all stages.

Most emails should take only a few minutes to complete this journey. If it takes longer, then you are most likely missing some essential component in the email deliverability mix.

Continue reading this article on Platformly blog: https://www.platform.ly/blog/email-deliverability-guide/