Email Deliverability: What Decides Whether Your Email Lands

When your emails stop working, it could be a warning sign that email deliverability is off. Before we get into the nitty gritty of email deliverability scores and how to fix it, let us first understand what is email deliverability anyways.

What is email deliverability, actually?

Think of email deliverability like a postal service delivering a letter to a destination. If the post service hits a roadblock, the letter won't get delivered.

Likewise the email account you use for sending marketing emails carry your message to the recipient's inbox. Now if the email account is hit by an issue, it's ability to deliver the message is impacted.

That's what deliverability is all about.

Stated plainly, deliverability is whether your email reaches the inbox. Just to be clear, email deliverability isn't same as emails being delivered.

A message can be accepted by the receiving server, counted as delivered by your platform, but it still land in spam folder.

The deliverability of an email is a function of where it lands in your subscriber's inbox.

If it lands in the primary Inbox, the deliverability is great. Nothing like it.

But even if your emails land in subscribers promotions or updates folder, it is still okay.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo decide deliverability based on the score of the sending domain.

For example, if the email address you use to send a marketing email is - yourname@acme.com, then in this case, acme.com is your sending domain.

Mailbox providers score every sending domain.

If the score is above 90 then your mail generally reaches the inbox. If the score is less than 90, it is a warning sign. And if the score drops below 70 your emails usually end up in the spam land.

Here is what that score is made of, and what to do about it.

The thing that decides it is reputation, and reputation belongs to your sending domain rather than to any individual campaign.

Reputation accumulates and decays. It is not a pass or fail event. A handful of spam complaints will not collapse your score overnight. Equally, one good send will not repair a damaged one. This is the part people get wrong. They send a careful campaign after a bad month, see nothing change, and conclude deliverability is not their problem.

So let us come back to the big question.

Why did my emails suddenly start going to spam?

Your emails going to spam folder doesn't usually happen suddenly. In most cases it is a gradual decline in your email deliverability score.

And the one fateful day, the score finally crossed a threshold at your mailbox provider.

Here are a few factorts that negatively impact your deliverability score:

1. A substantial pool of subscribers start marking your email as spam
2. A significant chunk of your email subscribers not opening your emails for a long time.
3. A lead magnet that pulled freebie seekers who never engaged after getting the download
4. A sudden spike in email sending frequency or volume

Each of those degrades reputation slowly, and the spam folder is the final sign.

So how do you improve sender reputation and boost email deliverablility? That's what the next section is all about.

How do improve your sender reputation?

In the previous section we touched upon what damages the sender reputation (and your deliverability). In this section, we will talk about the positive factors that improve your sending reputation.

It is important to note that improving sending reputation is also a gradual process. It doesn't happen overnight.

Here are four actions that sends out positive signals to mailbox provider:

• Subscribers open and read your emails
• Subscriber reply to your email
• Subscriber forwarding your email
• Marking your email not spam

Here is what most technical deliverability advice misses: Writing email people actually want to read is a deliverability tactic, not just an engagement one.

An email that invites a reply is doing technical work. So is one that is genuinely interesting.

How do you fix email deliverability?

If your email deliverability is compromised, here are a few things you can do to fix it:

1. Change your sending domain

If the impact is serious and you're short of time, simply change the sending domain. The reason is - if the sending reputation of domain is badly damaged, it makes more send to use an alternative domain (matching or similar to your main sending domain) for sending emails.

2. Delete purchased list.

A purchased list risks getting your sending domain blacklisted, and a blacklisted domain is a much harder problem than a low score.

3. Remove anyone who has not opened in a year.

Try a re-engagement campaign first, then delete the ones who ignore it. Those subscribers are actively costing you inbox placement with everyone else.

4. Keep your sending volume consistent.

Providers filter on sudden spikes. Never fire a one-off blast into a list that has not heard from you in months, which is exactly what most reactivation attempts look like from the outside.

5. Then the hygiene work.

Remove hard bounces. Remove role accounts like sales@ and info@. Remove obvious fakes and typo domains. Check blacklists at mxtoolbox. If you send at volume, turn on Google Postmaster Tools, because it shows you what your reputation looks like from Gmail's side rather than from a third party's estimate.

6. Use double opt-in.

It lowers your signup numbers. It also produces a list with fewer complaints and better inbox placement, and under stricter anti-spam regimes it is not optional. If your signup rate falls by a third and your inbox placement rises, you have made money on the trade.

7. If you are on a new IP, warm it up.

Start low and ramp gradually. Sending a full list from a cold IP is the fastest way to start from a bad score.

Does sending to fewer people improve deliverability?

Yes, and this is the argument to use when a client resists shrinking their send audience.

The usual case for segmentation is relevance. Send against what someone actually did and response goes up, conversion goes up, unsubscribes go down. All true, and all about revenue.

The third benefit is technical. When you stop pitching to people who were never going to buy, you get more opens, more clicks and fewer complaints. Those are the exact signals that build sender reputation. So segmentation lifts deliverability across your entire programme, including the campaigns you did not segment.

Sending less, to better-chosen people, makes the mail you do send more likely to arrive. Most owners find that counterintuitive right up until they see it work.

What this looks like when it is actually broken

One client came to us stuck at $3,000 a month. Good product, real audience, and email that was going to spam. Not underperforming. Going to spam.

The deliverability work came first, because nothing else was going to matter until the mail arrived. New welcome sequence after that, then the offer and pricing. Six months later the business was at $8,000 a month.

The deliverability fix did not create that growth on its own. It was the thing blocking everything else from working, which is the pattern almost every time. People arrive convinced they have a copywriting problem or an offer problem. Sometimes they do. But check the score first, because if the mail is not arriving, nothing you write next matters.