Email Deliverability Scores and How an Email Marketing Agency Can Improve Yours
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience, build relationships, and drive conversions. However, even the best email campaigns can fall short if they don’t reach the inbox. That’s where email deliverability comes in. Whether you’re sending promotional emails, newsletters, or transactional messages, ensuring your emails are delivered successfully is crucial to your success.
But how do you know if your emails are actually getting through? Enter the email deliverability score—a key metric that helps gauge how likely your emails are to land in your recipients’ inboxes. In this article, we’ll explain what an email deliverability score is, how it works, and how an email marketing agency can help improve your score. We’ll also look at some of the tools agencies use to ensure your emails are deliverable.
What Is an Email Deliverability Score?
An email deliverability score is a measurement of how likely your emails are to reach your recipients’ inboxes rather than ending up in the spam folder or getting blocked entirely. This score is usually calculated by analyzing several factors that impact whether or not an email is successfully delivered. These factors include:
- Sender Reputation: The reputation of your sending domain and IP address based on past sending behavior.
- Spam Traps: Email addresses set up specifically to catch senders who don’t follow proper email practices.
- Bounce Rates: The percentage of emails that are returned as undeliverable.
- Engagement Metrics: How recipients interact with your emails, including open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes.
- Blacklist Status: Whether your sending IP or domain has been blacklisted by spam filters due to poor sending practices or complaints.
Email deliverability scores are usually represented as a percentage or a rating (e.g., A to F), with a higher score indicating better chances of getting emails to the inbox. A score in the 90% or higher range is generally considered excellent, while anything below 80% might require attention and improvement.
Why Email Deliverability Matters
If your emails are not delivered, all the effort you put into creating engaging content, designing attractive emails, and targeting your audience will be wasted. Low deliverability means fewer opens, clicks, and conversions—ultimately reducing the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
A low email deliverability score can also damage your sender reputation, making it even harder to reach inboxes in the future. This creates a vicious cycle where poor deliverability leads to further poor performance, resulting in fewer people seeing your emails.
How an Email Marketing Agency Can Help Improve Deliverability
Email deliverability can be complex, as it involves a combination of technical setup, content quality, and list management. While the factors influencing deliverability can be tough to track and fix on your own, an email marketing agency can help improve your score and ensure your emails land in your audience’s inbox.
Here are several ways an agency can help you with email deliverability:
1. Monitoring and Maintaining a Good Sender Reputation
An agency will monitor your sending domain and IP reputation to ensure that they’re not flagged as suspicious or blacklisted. They’ll follow best practices to build and maintain a good sender reputation, such as:
- Sending emails at consistent intervals
- Keeping bounce rates low by maintaining clean lists
- Authenticating your emails using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols, which help verify that you’re a trusted sender.
2. List Hygiene and Segmentation
Sending emails to outdated or inactive email addresses can harm your deliverability. Agencies ensure that your email lists are up-to-date, removing invalid, unsubscribed, or inactive email addresses to reduce bounce rates. They may also use list segmentation to target specific groups of people, improving engagement rates and reducing complaints.
3. Avoiding Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses that are specifically created to catch marketers who aren’t following best practices. Agencies can help identify and remove these traps from your list to prevent them from affecting your deliverability score. By using tools to regularly clean and validate your email lists, they reduce the risk of hitting spam traps.
4. Optimizing Email Content and Engagement
The content of your emails plays a significant role in whether they are delivered to the inbox. An agency will help optimize your subject lines, email copy, and design to ensure your messages look professional and don’t trigger spam filters. They will also focus on increasing engagement (opens, clicks, replies), which can improve deliverability by showing email providers that your recipients value your emails.
5. Implementing and Monitoring Authentication
Agencies help ensure that your emails are properly authenticated using SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). These authentication methods verify that your emails are legitimately coming from your domain and prevent them from being marked as spam or phishing attempts.
Tools Email Marketing Agencies Use to Improve Deliverability
Several tools can help email marketers track, manage, and improve email deliverability. These tools give agencies the insights and resources they need to ensure that your emails are being successfully delivered. Here are some of the most common tools used by email marketing agencies:
1. Mailgun
Mailgun is an email delivery service that provides a suite of tools to monitor email deliverability, track performance, and troubleshoot issues. It offers tools for email validation, spam filtering, and bounce management, making it easier for agencies to ensure their emails are getting through.
2. SendGrid
SendGrid is another popular email delivery platform that offers tools to track deliverability, improve sender reputation, and monitor performance. It also provides robust analytics to identify patterns or issues with email campaigns, helping agencies optimize future sends.
3. Return Path
Return Path is a comprehensive email deliverability tool that helps monitor and improve email inbox placement. It tracks your sender reputation and provides feedback on issues that may be affecting deliverability, such as spam traps or blacklists. Return Path also offers a Certification program, which can help improve deliverability if your email campaigns meet their standards.
4. Postmark
Postmark focuses on ensuring the timely delivery of transactional emails. Its advanced tracking and analytics tools allow agencies to monitor bounce rates, spam complaints, and delivery speeds in real-time, helping improve email performance.
5. Sender Score by Validity
Sender Score is a service that provides a numerical score (0-100) that reflects the sender’s reputation and deliverability. Agencies use Sender Score to monitor how their emails are perceived by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and adjust their strategies to improve email placement.
6. G Suite (Google Postmaster Tools)
Google Postmaster Tools help agencies monitor email deliverability specifically for Gmail users. It provides insights into things like spam rate, authentication issues, and IP reputation. Since Gmail is one of the largest email providers, maintaining a good sender reputation with Google is key to ensuring good deliverability.
7. Litmus
Litmus is a tool used by agencies to test email deliverability across multiple email clients and devices before sending. It allows them to check if emails are likely to be flagged as spam, ensuring they appear correctly across all platforms and improving the chances of delivery.
Final Thoughts
Email deliverability is a critical component of any successful email marketing campaign. A low deliverability score means your messages may not be reaching your audience, which can hinder your ability to engage and convert leads. By partnering with an email marketing agency, businesses can improve their deliverability score through expert list management, content optimization, sender reputation monitoring, and the use of powerful deliverability tools.
With the right approach, your emails can land in your recipients’ inboxes, driving higher engagement and boosting the success of your email marketing efforts.
Here’s a list of providers that can help with email deliverability:
Brevo https://onboarding.brevo.com/
