As an email marketer, monitoring your open rate is an essential part of measuring campaign success. However, focusing solely on open rates could lead to overlooking critical issues in email performance. A key metric you should also monitor is your email delivery score.
What Is the Email Delivery Score?
Your email delivery score reflects the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered to recipients' inboxes. Unlike open rates, which track how many people open the emails you send, the delivery score measures whether the emails even made it to their intended destinations. This distinction is important because open rates only include emails that were successfully delivered.
Emails blocked by spam filters or rejected by recipients' servers are excluded from open rate calculations, leaving you in the dark about potential delivery issues.
Spotting Delivery Problems
A consistently high delivery score—around 99%—is the goal for any email marketer. However, if you notice a sudden drop in this metric, such as a fall to 80%, or worse, 41%, this signals a significant issue: your emails or domain or IPs may have been blacklisted.
Steps to Address Delivery Issues
If you suspect your emails are being blocked, follow these steps to troubleshoot and resolve the problem:
- Analyze Blocked Recipients: Start by identifying which recipients are not receiving your emails. This can help you pinpoint whether the issue is isolated to certain email providers or geographic regions.
- Identify the Antispam System: Investigate which antispam systems are flagging your emails. Different providers, such as Gmail, Outlook, Proofpoint, Cisco Ironport, Mimecast or corporate email servers, may use distinct antispam measures.
- Contact the Postmaster: Reach out to the postmaster or support team of the blocking system. Explain the issue, provide details about your email practices, and request that they authorize emails from your domain and IPs. Often, postmasters can guide you through a process to restore your sender reputation.
- Resend to Blocked Recipients: Once the issue is resolved, consider resending your communication exclusively to recipients who didn’t receive the initial email. This ensures they receive the message while avoiding duplicate sends to others.
Staying Ahead of Delivery Challenges
To maintain a high delivery score and avoid blacklist issues, adopt these best practices:
- Regularly clean your email list to remove invalid addresses.
- Avoid spam-like behavior, such as excessive use of certain keywords or sending large volumes of emails in a short period.
- Authenticate your emails with protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to establish trust with recipients' servers.
- Monitor your sender reputation and delivery metrics proactively.
By balancing your focus between open rates and delivery scores, you can ensure your email campaigns achieve optimal results, reaching the right audience and maximizing engagement.