Glossary

Email Deliverability


Did you know that 20% of commercial email campaigns fail to reach their recipients’ inboxes? Rather than charming their audience, these messages are landing in customer spam folders or are blocked completely. 

Email deliverability is the rate at which your emails are reaching inboxes. Without a high deliverability rate, you risk decreasing your ROI. This return could be measured by audience engagement, customer registration, or previous sales. 

If you haven’t considered whether or not your emails are making it to their final destination, you should.  If you run an email marketing campaign, keep reading for our recommendations to maximize email deliverability. 

Email Providers and Deliverability

Email and internet service providers do what they can to keep spammy or irrelevant content from reaching their customers’ inboxes. Both types of providers build complex filtering systems that can detect:

  • Certain catchphrases
  • Fake email addresses
  • Non-reputable IP addresses

If your “reputation” is poor due to low-quality content and spammy send behavior, ESPs and ISPs are more likely to reject your messages. This will cause them to “bounce” rather than to be delivered successfully.  

What Could Affect Email Deliverability Rate

Email deliverability doesn’t need to be a mystery. There are six consistent errors that impact the odds of your email content being received successfully. These include: 

  1. Subject lines with special characters, spammy words, or a lot of caps
  2. Overly repeated text, spammy language, lots of special characters in the body of the emails you’re sending 
  3. Failing to include an unsubscribe link
  4. Inconsistent domain links 
  5. Poor image/text ratio
  6. Unauthenticated email addresses in your mailing list 

Tricking these systems is rarely beneficial. Creating high-quality content and cleaning up these mistakes will help you to see a steady ROI in your email marketing channels. 

How to Improve Email Deliverability Rate

Is your poor deliverability percentage reversible? Yes! Following these seven steps can dramatically improve your email deliverability rate over time: 

  • Authenticate your email domain to prove to ISPs that you are a legitimate service 
  • Maintain proper IP allocation by warming up your IP and allowing ISPs to trust your dedicated IP address
  • Improve your subject lines and avoid clickbait 
  • Provide a preference center for users to customize their experience 
  • Keep “clean” lists by removing inactive users
  • Avoid spam traps by using valid lists that you have built over time 
  • Send content that people want to engage with 
  • Implement deliverability monitoring into your marketing practices 

Trust us– if nobody is even receiving your emails, they won’t have the chance to open and consume the incredible content you have made. Improve the email deliverability rate and improve the user experience.  

Unlock Your Email Marketing Potential

When it comes to email deliverability services, you want a progressive, efficient, experienced, and automated solution that checks off multiple boxes. When implementing a communication channel as personal as email, ActiveTrail takes an equally personal approach with its client services.  

Looking to upgrade your email marketing? Browse smart marketing packages to find the best fit for your business size and marketing needs.