What’s the Deal with Deliverability?

There’s a lot to learn just from reading a deliverability report: hard bounces, soft bounces, unsubscribes, spam ratings. And this is all just what you see in your ESP, before we even begin talking about the back-end and all the fun that’s to be had with DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and the like. Along with the total counts for each of these, rates come heavily into play as well. Both tell a story.

Let’s think about bounce rates first - did you know that there are multiple types of bounce? Soft bounces are when there’s a temporary inbox issue at play, while hard bounces are telling of a permanent delivery issue. Soft bounces frequently resolve themselves, whereas hard bounces are…..hard…..to deal with, and likely the result of a dead address. Be especially careful with hard bounces, as these accounts are most likely to be reclaimed as a honeypot for ISPs, and you’ll end up on blacklists all around the globe.

Unsubscribes - these are simple: a contact doesn’t feel that your content is relevant to them, and has no interest in receiving more. This is telling of poor segmentation or incorrect email focus.

Spam ratings are the worst - it’s akin to when your grade school teacher put a funny-shaped hat on your head and made you sit in the corner for the rest of the session. The more spam ratings you get, the further away from a proper email program you are. Your contacts are heavily unengaged, see no value in the message you sent, and worst of all - they actively don’t want to hear from you again, and think that nobody else should either. Ouch…

Want to hear about our dad-joke services package instead of our full-service email marketing packages? Yeah, we didn’t think so. We only send that to the 2 people that we know won’t unsubscribe from that (thanks mom!).

Imagine the same with your audience - if they are interested in one product of yours but not the other, or one service opposed to another, you’re only doing yourself a disservice by sending irrelevant messages to them. Using segmentation - whether it’s put together with hard or soft data - is a big leap in the right direction for keeping your emails as relevant as possible, and your unsubs/spam ratings as low as can be.

How someone reacts to your email will help influence how you send emails in the future. You want to hit the ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to how often you send out your content, and that’s where listening to the data becomes so incredibly important. We’ll help you adjust your campaign depending on how often you reach out to your subscribers while factoring in their level of engagement to help you achieve that sweet spot.

Being a trustworthy sender is key to improving deliverability. We want to make sure you’re on the whitelist or the ‘good’ list of approved senders. You don’t want to end up on any blacklist because if you do, you’ll have a heck of a hard time finding your way back into the inbox. To make it even more difficult, there are blacklists out there that do and don’t impact your overall inboxing scores for the biggest inbox providers, and they all play by different rules. By doing what’s right, though, you won’t land on any.

No, we don’t mean spending $2.5m on that lush villa with the Olympic-size pool. Like with many things in life, you’re sometimes associated with the people you spend time around. Similarly, an ISP will look at the IP pool you’re sending from and if it’s full of businesses with shady agendas that are spamming ‘subscribers’ more than bad ads on a free Spotify account, or send to bought lists, you’re going to automatically start out with a bad reputation.

Don’t worry, this isn’t as complicated as it sounds, and you won’t have to bake pies and go door-to-door to find out who’s around you (although we won’t say no to getting one of those in the mail if you’re in the mood for cooking). You’ll simply need to make sure that you choose a top ESP and as much as possible ensure that you get a dedicated sending IP.

If you see a spike in your spam rates, you’re miles past the right exit, and you’ve got to figure out what the cause is ASAP. Is it a certain domain that’s giving you issues? Maybe certain email addresses or one of your lists has become a dreaded honeypot, maybe your deliverability settings went awry when your dev decided to adjust something without asking you, maybe Mercury is just in retrograde (this last one isn’t usually it). If you know why your emails are ending up in the spam folder, you can prevent it from happening in the future. Your ROI will depend on how efficient you are with your resources, and as you know, ending up in the spam folder is a no-go.

Sometimes you think you’re sending an email to a proper email address but it turns out to be a spam trap. Sometimes only a handful of people will mark your content as spam, yet the whole mailbox provider will end up blocking you. You can’t afford to take that spam mark lightly because it can mean doom for your entire email marketing program, that’s why you need to know who’s giving it to you, why, and how to resolve it immediately.