Flowium Guest Blog: Why Deliverability Matters

Here at Orita, we know that email deliverability matters - but why is the conversation so loud now, and what has changed? We invited our partners at Flowium, a top-tier full service email marketing and SMS agency, to contribute to Orita's blog!

Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is the most important aspect of email marketing. It represents the ability for your emails to reach your subscribers’ inboxes. Without it, your information or marketing strategies would be meaningless, because people won’t see them! Making sure the emails are not just properly sent but also properly received, is an essential part of email marketing.

Increase of the importance of deliverability in the last few years

Email marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most effective marketing tools, and with it, the rules are increasing and getting stricter. New requirements are implemented often to make sure that recipients of those emails are not being spammed with a lot of messages that they are not interested in, measured by:

• Click rate: what percentage of people are clicking on emails

• Open rate: what percentage of your emails are opened

• Bounce rate: ensuring that the emails on your list are going to actual recipients

• Unsubscribe rate: the percentage of unsubscribes received when sending out a message

• Spam rate: percentage of spam complaints

In the past, brands were able to message their entire mailing list with minimal repercussions - a tactic known as 'batch and blasting'. Now, inbox providers (ex. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) are becoming stricter with ESPs (Email Service Providers), the platforms used by brands to send emails to their customers and their mailing lists, to have strong deliverability metrics, otherwise their emails will be sent directly to the spam box. For an email marketing agency, this may be viewed as either a positive or negative change, but in general, we believe this is a big positive for the email marketing industry. If the bad email marketers (i.e. spammers) are being filtered this way, good senders' emails have a higher chance of being spotted by the recipients.

Since it has become one of the most important tools of communication, ESPs are introducing new rules to match the inbox provider requirements. With this, they are making sure they keep good relationships with the inbox providers and making sure their customers who send emails from their platforms are going to be delivered into subscribers’ inboxes.

Why wasn't this a big deal before?

Email became a valid marketing tool only recently with the introduction of smartphones and people having their emails on hand all the time. According to a 2023 Techreport overview on email statistics,

• Out of 5.3 billion active internet users, 4.37 billion will be active users of email services in 2023,

• 58% of mobile phone users check their email when they first wake up, and

• 99% of people check their email every day.

This explosion in email, along with the rising costs of social media advertising, quickly made email promotions the most efficient way of marketing, and with it, a lot of bad actors got introduced to the scene. As with everything, people who abuse the system are faster than the people who regulate it, so spam proliferated, and inbox providers deployed teams of data scientists to create controls for what content landed in our email inboxes. Advanced spam filters were introduced, new requirements were set, stricter privacy regulations were implemented, etc. With all these changes, deliverability as we know it now became the most important aspect of email marketing.

The result of this regulation is what we now call 'deliverability,' or the ability for an email to land in the inbox versus spam. Now, if you receive an email in your inbox, there is a high probability that the content is something you are interested in, but brands are now facing the challenge of being caught in spam because of their sending habits.

So, as a brand marketer, how do you ensure that your emails are landing in the inbox, where they belong?

Engagement tips for strong email performance

To ensure that you are meeting the deliverability requirements, do not forget to do the following:

• Make sure your domain you're sending from and the email are authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC;

• Clean your list often (at least once a month) by removing subscribers who are unengaged for 100 days or longer, or subscribers whose emails often bounce;

• Make sure you are only emailing your engaged group of subscribers;

• Send to the whole lists only once in a while to try to re-engage some of the passive subscribers, but make sure this is not often than once every few months;

• Create relevant, creative and personalized emails.