Email Deliverability
The ability of marketing emails to successfully reach recipients inboxes rather than being filtered to spam, bounced, or blocked by email service providers.
In-Depth Explanation
Email deliverability measures the success rate of emails reaching their intended recipients' inboxes. It is influenced by sender reputation, email authentication, content quality, list hygiene, and recipient engagement patterns.
Deliverability factors:
- Sender reputation: IP and domain reputation scores based on sending history
- Authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records proving sender identity
- Content quality: Subject lines, body content, HTML quality, image-to-text ratio
- List hygiene: Removing invalid, inactive, and bounced addresses
- Engagement: Open rates, click rates, and spam complaint rates
- Infrastructure: Sending IP, dedicated vs. shared IPs, warm-up processes
Email authentication protocols:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Specifies which servers can send email for your domain
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Cryptographic signature proving email authenticity
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication): Policy for handling unauthenticated emails
Deliverability metrics:
- Inbox placement rate: Percentage reaching the inbox (not spam)
- Bounce rate: Hard bounces (invalid addresses) and soft bounces (temporary issues)
- Spam complaint rate: Recipients marking emails as spam (keep below 0.1%)
- Unsubscribe rate: Rate of opt-outs (keep below 0.5%)
- Blacklist status: Whether your IP/domain is on spam blacklists
Deliverability best practices:
- Authenticate all sending domains (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
- Warm up new sending domains gradually
- Maintain list hygiene (remove bounces, inactive contacts)
- Use double opt-in for new subscribers
- Monitor sender reputation regularly
- Avoid spam trigger words and deceptive subject lines
- Include clear unsubscribe mechanisms
Business Context
Poor deliverability means marketing emails never reach customers, wasting campaign effort and budget. Improving deliverability from 80% to 95% effectively increases your email audience by 19% without adding a single new subscriber.
How Clever Ops Uses This
Clever Ops audits and improves email deliverability for Australian businesses by implementing proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), cleaning email lists, optimising sending practices, and monitoring reputation. We ensure marketing emails reach the inbox where they can drive engagement and revenue.
Example Use Case
"A company discovers 30% of their emails are going to spam. After implementing DMARC, cleaning their list of inactive subscribers, and warming up a dedicated IP, inbox placement improves to 97%, increasing email revenue by 45%."