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The deliverability of emails is one of the most important metrics for your email marketing strategy.

Open rates and click rates are important factors. However, if your emails can't get into your subscriber's inbox, you can't get openings or clicks.

Let's take a look at what email deliverability is, what you should aim for, and what you can do to improve your deliverability.

What is email deliverability?

The deliverability of emails indicates how well an email sender can send emails to the recipient's inboxes.

The sender of the email is you and the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is the third party that prevents you from sending your email to your subscribers. ISPs are Gmail, Yahoo! Outlook, etc. and want your subscribers to interact with your emails and not mark them as spam.

This is where deliverability comes into play. ISPs prevent spammers from reaching your inbox. If you find that YOUR emails have been marked as spam, your deliverability rate will drop.

That sounds more scary than it is. As long as you handle your list properly, you can maintain a high deliverability rate and positively influence your email marketing strategy. We'll go into the details in the third section, but first let's find out what your email deliverability is.

How to calculate the deliverability of emails

To determine your email deliverability rate, take the number of emails that reach recipients' inboxes and divide by the total number of emails sent. Then multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

Assume that you have 10,000 subscribers on your email list and send a broadcast email to all 10,000 of those subscribers. The next day, check how many people have received the email. You will find that 8,000 subscribers out of 10,000 have received it.

Take 8,000 and divide it by 10,000. You get 0.8. Multiply this by 100 to get your percentage and you have a deliverability rate of 80%.

You want your email deliverability rate to be as close as possible to 100%. If not, practice some bad habits that will get your subscribers to complain about your email.

Let's go through some of these habits.

How to improve your email deliverability

Here are some ways to improve your email deliverability or keep your email deliverability at 100%.

# 1: Authenticate your email domain and use the same IP address

Authenticating your email domain is like meeting your ISP for coffee and proving that you are a real person. ISPs like authenticated email domains because they trust you are not a spammer who tries to convince people to give you their bank details so you can transfer the millions of dollars you just got from them inherited from a distant relative. You can do this through third parties and learn more about authentication here.

Imagine that the ISP you met for coffee wanted you to send them a secret 4-digit code every time you send an email so they know you weren't hacked. Sending your emails from the same IP address corresponds to the 4-digit code of your ISP. If you send emails from a different IP address, your ISP will find that you haven't given them the secret 4-digit code and you will be hacked, which will lower your deliverability rate.

# 2: Send subscribers content that is important to them

If you are a nut butter company, you should not currently email your subscribers about the best sofa deals. You want to send them information about how to use your nut butter to make delicious family recipes. This is an important part of the registration process. You want to make sure that subscribers know exactly what types of email you want to send them when they sign in to be added to your list.

Subscribers will be happy to receive emails from you as long as they can read your subject and see what content they want you to see.

# 3: Spread your promotions

At DigitalMarketer, we create advertising calendars to ensure that we don't send too many promotions at once. Nobody (including us) wants to be overwhelmed with product advertising after advertising. Your subscriber feels that they can never buy everything and water down your offers (knowing that there is always someone else around the corner).

To avoid overwhelming your subscribers with too many emails for promotional items, create a 90-day calendar and find out when you will start product campaigns with accompanying promotional emails. Then make sure that your promotions are spread out so that you can offer valuable content between the promotions that the subscribers are interested in your emails.

# 4: Don't email too often

We've talked about sending too many promotional emails, but there's also something like sending too many emails in general. This can reduce many of your email metrics. The number of emails you send "too often" with depends on your list and subscribers.

For example, if you are a daily newsletter, it makes sense to send emails every day. Subscribers asked you to email them every day by signing in. However, if you're a nut butter company, they probably don't want to see you in their inbox every day. If you select a day and add your company to it, such as B. Nut Butter Recipe Monday, you can better send consistent content without overdoing it.

# 5: Use list hygiene to clean your list

List hygiene has its name because it is like giving your email list a bath. It removes all unnecessary email addresses that bounce on a consistent basis or subscribers that are not fully activated. This is an important part of maintaining an email list. Although this will lower your subscriber count, your opening rates will increase as you send to a higher percentage of dedicated subscribers after cleaning.

The general rule for list hygiene is to clean up your list every 6 (ish) months. This gives you the opportunity to segment your inactive list and re-engage it.

You want to put your subscribers into the conversion phase of the customer value journey. This is not possible if they never receive your emails. If your subscribers don't receive your emails, they never learn about your offers, products or content.

For this reason, the deliverability of emails is an important part of any email marketing strategy.