Email deliverability refers to the rate at which your emails successfully land in your recipients' inboxes rather than being blocked by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or relegated to a spam folder. Maintaining high email deliverability is crucial for the success of your email campaigns and communication efforts.
We have developed a number of Knowledge Base articles in this section specifically related to email deliverability. There are many factors that you can control, from picking good subject lines, to designing good content, to ensuring the list that is being emailed is clean, up-to-date, and free of invalid email addresses.
Factors influencing deliverability
Several elements contribute to your overall email deliverability. Understanding and managing these factors is essential:
- Email sending reputation: ISPs assign a reputation score to every sender. This score is based on the volume and quality of the emails you send, the ratio of delivered to rejected emails, and recipient engagement. A poor reputation can lead to filtering or blocking.
- Bounce rates: This refers to the percentage of emails that an ISP rejects and returns to the sender. High bounce rates signal issues with your mailing list quality or potential spam-like activity, negatively impacting your sender reputation.
- Complaint rates: This refers to the percentage of recipients who mark your email as spam. High complaint rates are a strong negative signal to ISPs and will significantly harm your deliverability.
- Email content and formatting: Content that is overly promotional, contains excessive capitalization, too many images, or broken HTML can trigger spam filters.
- List hygiene: Ensure you use clean email lists by removing inactive, invalid, or unsubscribed addresses before using them in the platform.
Best practices for high deliverability
To ensure your emails consistently reach inboxes, adhere to the following best practices, paying close attention to critical metrics like bounce and complaint rates. This is particularly important for recruitment distributions and list uploads where members have not opted in.
1. Start with a clean list
When distributing to non-members (for recruitment or other surveys), it's critically important to use a clean list. The best practice is to use a list of addresses where the person has interacted with you via that address within the last 3 months. If you find misspelled domains (for example, gamil.com), that indicates that the whole list is likely low-quality and you should find another list. Simply removing known bad addresses can leave behind addresses on the list that are likely old or bad, resulting in bounce back and decreasing deliverability for future sends. These old or bad lists may also include spam trap addresses.
2. Monitor and manage bounce rates
A high bounce rate indicates that a significant portion of your emails are not being delivered, signaling to ISPs that your list is outdated or poorly managed.
- Maintain a hard bounce rate less than 2%.
- Bounce rates exceeding 2% are often flagged by ISPs and email services, leading to increased scrutiny and decreased deliverability.
- If you need to send more than 10,000 emails to a new list source, try a soft launch of 1,000. If you see a higher than 2% bounce rate, stop further sends to that list and try to find a new list with validated emails.
3. Minimize and respond to complaint rates
A high complaint rate is the most damaging signal to your sender reputation, as it directly indicates that recipients find your content unwelcome or unsolicited.
- Maintain a complaint rate less than 0.2% (2 complaints per 1,000 emails).
- When recipients mark your email as spam, ISPs track this action. A complaint rate above the industry standard of 0.2% can lead to immediate filtering, throttling, or account suspension.
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Actionable Steps:
- Alida ensures that all emails include a clear, prominent, and easy-to-use unsubscribe link.
- Deliver content that is relevant and expected by the subscriber. Avoid sending irrelevant or excessive emails.
- Segment your audience and personalize content to increase engagement and reduce the likelihood of a complaint.
- If you receive a complaint, Alida will immediately remove the complaining user from all future email communications.
4. Maintain a healthy sender reputation
Your reputation is the single most important factor in deliverability.
- Authentication: Alida will work with you to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to prove to ISPs that you are who you say you are. This reduces the chance of your emails being marked as spam or phishing attempts.
- Consistent sending volume: Avoid sending massive spikes of emails after long periods of inactivity, as this looks suspicious to ISPs. Gradually increase volume if you are a new sender.
- Always send high-quality email: Sending just one large blast of emails with a high bounce rate can decrease your deliverability for months. This is particularly important if you send ad hoc emails and member emails from the same address.
5. Focus on engagement
ISPs monitor how recipients interact with your emails (opens, clicks, replies). High engagement proves that recipients value your content.
- Re-engagement campaigns: Target subscribers who haven't opened an email in 6-12 months with a specific re-engagement campaign.
- Remove inactive subscribers: If re-engagement fails, suppress or remove subscribers who have been inactive for over 12 months. Sending to unengaged users negatively affects your overall engagement rates and signals low content value to ISPs.
6. Compliance
To ensure the continued success of your community and maintain the high performance of the Alida platform, adhering to these guidelines is essential. Consistently managing your email lists to minimize bounces and complaints will significantly contribute to a healthy ecosystem. Continued non-compliance with these guidelines may result in corrective action being taken.