Delivery Rate and Deliverability Definitions
Delivery rate and deliverability are two distinct metrics in email marketing. The delivery rate measures the proportion of sent emails that reach the recipients' Internet Service Provider (e.g., Gmail, Outlook, Apple), while deliverability focuses on the number of emails that successfully land in the recipients' inbox.
Managing Delivery Rate
The delivery rate is influenced by two key factors. First, Maileon handles the technical aspects to ensure emails are delivered properly - see the paragraph on subdomain setup. Second, practicing good list hygiene is crucial. This involves managing complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes correctly, which is monitored by ISPs and affects your sender reputation. Maileon's standard installations effectively handle list hygiene, and if you're migrating, consider using AddressCheck to assess the status of your existing mailing list and detect harmful addresses early on.
Sender Reputation
Sender reputation can be based on either IP or (sub-)domain. Maileon automatically manages IP reputation through a pool of thousands of sending IP addresses. On the other hand, domain reputation is influenced by the (sub)domains used for sending emails. Practicing good list hygiene and following the tips mentioned in this article can help improve both IP and domain reputation, leading to more effective email delivery.
Subdomain Setup
Subdomain delegation is a standard setup method that benefits from having the subdomain linked to the main domain, making it easier to manage domain reputation without interfering with regular email sending. By delegating a subdomain to Maileon, they can handle aspects like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC by industry standards, further enhancing email authentication and infrastructure.
Improving Deliverability
To improve deliverability and ensure emails land in the inbox instead of spam folders, focus on the following:
- Content: Ensure your content is relevant and personalized to engage recipients.
- Subject Lines: Use proper subject lines without spammy keywords or excessive special characters.
- Subscriber Behavior: Manage complaints and feedback loops to maintain a clean email list.
- Subscriber Engagement: Monitor KPIs (opens, clicks, conversion, and reply rate) to gauge recipient engagement. Encourage actions like moving emails from spam to the inbox (TINS) and requesting whitelist or contact list approval.
Warming Up Sender Reputation
For those migrating or looking to warm up their sender reputation, consider starting with a welcome campaign to attract positive interaction with relevant and personalized content. Actively asking recipients to interact with received emails, such as sending a confirmation or welcome email with instructions to reply and move the email from the spam folder to the primary inbox, can also help improve engagement and sender reputation.
Extra: Internal Deliverability
When implementing a subdomain setup without whitelisting, internal firewalls, or spam filters in place, emails may be blocked or content may not display correctly within the internal organization network. To address this, preapprove the subdomain by adding it to the internal whitelist or DNS configuration.
Source: Adapted from https://www.litmus.com/blog/27-deliverability-terms-every-email-marketer-should-know/