Big Data

What is email delivery capability and why is important

Email marketing is still one of the best channels to reach your desired target audience, get conversions and maintain relationship with leads. On average, email has a low cost compared to other marketing forms. But that doesn't mean it's easy to reach good metrics. And one of the most important to measure a [...]

January 19, 2023 · Dudu Gentil · 11 min read

What is email delivery capability and why is important

But that doesn't mean it's easy to reach good metrics. And one of the most important to measure a campaign is the ability to deliver email or “delivery”.

In the challenge of fighting spam, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) impose more and more restrictions on access to the inbox of providers such as Gmail. This benefits users, allowing them to have a clean email delivery with the content they want to receive and the experience they expect.

See also:

However, many important messages lose users' inboxes due to sometimes foolish errors that senders commit when in a hurry or even due to lack of experience. Don't let that happen to you.

The aim of this article is to help understand the importance of email delivery capacity, to suggest what to focus on and some of the best practices applied by inbound marketing professionals and market email marketing tools.

Contents

Toggle

Understanding the ability to deliver email

The ability to deliver email is when your commercial and promotional emails arrive at the recipient's inbox. It is a complex metric that shows the quality of your email lists as well as the email campaigns sent.

You can measure your email delivery capacity by observing your positioning rate in the inbox. It's the number of emails delivered to the inbox of all emails sent, regardless of the number of leads. In the example below, from a client we serve at NVX, notice the delivery rate for a customer list, which in this case is great: above 95%:

The terms email delivery capacity and email delivery rate are not the same: an email can be delivered, but marked as spam and therefore discarded. The positioning rate of the inbox provides a more accurate image.

E-mail delivery capacity x e-mail delivery

Email delivery shows that the recipient's email server accepted the actual email file and delivered it to the user's inbox, regardless of the folder.

With the ability to deliver email, the server accepts the file and the delivery to the user, but the question is whether it was placed in the inbox or spam, social, updates or any other folder that is rarely verified by the recipient.

In other words, the ability to deliver email is the real ability to get the emails to the recipient's inbox.

The three key elements of the email delivery capacity:

Relevant and optimized email content: very large emails or clickbait have less chance of reaching the inbox and being opened.
Sender's security and reputation: e-mail services signal or filter emails from unauthenticated or compromised domains.
Engaged audience: Your recipients must express consent and be interested in receiving your emails. Otherwise, they will ignore or report your messages.

What's a good e-mail delivery?

When it comes to determining what a good email delivery rate is, the answer is not easy to define. Overall, to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, it is recommended to achieve a delivery rate of between 85% and up to 95%.

However, each business has its unique aspects, so this number may vary.

The most suitable is to search your business model to understand how competitors operate and analyze your current positioning rate in the email inbox and all the metrics related to it, such as engagement rates, and what can be improved to get better results.

Email marketing delivery fee

Generally, marketing emails tend to have a low engagement rate and are open from 20 to 25% of the time. The market considers 15% of opening a desirable rate. The good news is that for most sectors, a metric greater than 30% is already considered good.

So if you used a heating or email nutrition service to get an extra boost and got only a 5-10% increase in the opening rate, that's a solid result.

Why worry about the ability to deliver email?

It is frustrating at the very least to put your efforts into an email campaign just to find out that your target audience is not interested. But there's more to it than just getting upset. Improved email delivery capacity can benefit your business or business at many levels. Check it out:

Strengthening the relationship with customers

That's a killer tip we always apply here on Nvx. Have smooth and uninterrupted communication with your customers to increase their interest and loyalty to your business. Never leave your email base still, without updates and uploads. That's the easiest way to get disengagement.

Studies show that 37% of consumers prefer to listen to their favorite brands by email and follow the news. In addition, more than half of buyers say they are looking for perfect and personalized interactions with companies. And the e-mail is very efficient at this.

Combine these two factors and you will have a solid chance to generate recurring customers and dedicated brand fans who would like to receive your email campaigns regularly.

Facing competition

Email, in addition to its low cost to maintain as a marketing channel, is considered one of the most competitive and valuable channels, since nine out of ten marketers use it to distribute content.

So you can't afford to treat him casually. By working on the delivery capacity of your email, you prevent your competitors from overtaking you.

And contrary to what many think, mastering email delivery skills does not require great investments or highly technical skills: it is more about paying attention to detail. And by doing so, you can succeed where others may fail.

Increase marketing ROI

When the delivery capacity of your email is getting low, let's say the around 80%, it's time to turn the alert on. This failure slowly turns your email marketing into a money-sucking machine. You will spend energy (time and arm) developing and configuring campaigns, using email tools and content creation, but you will not recover your investments.

Improving the delivery capacity of your lead base emails means improving ROI (Return on Investment) and gradually releasing the resources needed for growth. You get a clearer picture of how your target audience or persona react to your emails and what you can do to monetize their interest.

What affects the email delivery fee?

There are some aspects that cause problems with email delivery capacity, some of which are key:

Number of spam complaints received. Avoid sending many consecutive and repetitive emails for the same segmentation. That's a very important thing. Closure the user's inbox forces spam marking.

The content of the email needs to be relevant. If it is a product email, for example, try to offer a lead solution, show benefits and that the reader wants to be directed towards some action. Sending monthly newsletters helps a lot in the nutrition of leads for engagement.

Sending volume of emails over a certain period of time. As already mentioned, the biggest cause of spam should be avoided with shipments that have a time interval of at least 4 days for new shootings, even if it is an e-commerce (where spam brings more problems).

The infrastructure used for this needs to be well-oiled, from shooting tools to server and domain settings, for example.

However, the problems of email delivery capacity can be significantly reduced if things are properly tracked and improvements are made.

Send emails only to users who wish to receive them

Very careful with purchased lists, this should be prohibited for those seeking to run for better deliveryability. And you should also be careful when sending emails to people who have not given you explicit permission to do so.

Just because someone joined one of their events a few years ago or signed up for their forms doesn't mean they'll like to be notified about the launch of their new product.

Otherwise, it is likely that they will mark your message as spam to remove it from the inbox. Even some of these requests are sufficient to significantly undermine your domain's reputation and block it in future campaigns, regardless of the DNS server you use.

Try to resist the temptation to contact random accounts that will probably be interested in what you have to say (but often they are not).

To close, I highlight four main factors that affect email delivery rates. I'm not going to go deeper on each of them, but try to search for more and try to correct where you're wrong.

Sender reputation: what email service providers “think” of their sending domain. Email services classify them based on their shipping volume, whether they were blacklisted and so on.

Authentication: How do you prove that your emails are authentic and not faked or falsified. Commercial emails may contain confidential customer information such as contact information, address or order details. To avoid email data violations, make sure that your choice of email software supports email encryption.

Logistics: How you deliver your messages. Use dedicated domains instead of free or personal email addresses. A custom domain immediately creates a professional impression, but not only that. If your company sends all types of messages from the same domain, your reputation will be impaired.

Public: How your recipients interact with your emails. Here good email marketing practices are fundamental. Segment email campaigns to avoid overloading your leads with information they may not need. Make the unsubscribe link visually accessible. This will help your recipients pause or interrupt your campaigns without having to block or report it.

Did you like this article? At NVX – National Vox Digital, we have the expertise of many years and customers satisfied with inbound marketing, the most experienced professionals and tools needed for their optimal performance with the delivery of emails. Get in touch with me HERE.

Dudu Gentil · Nacionalvox

Let's talk