Poor email deliverability can make a major difference to your campaigns. While creating engaging email content and thinking up killer subject lines seems like the most important thing you can do to engage your subscriber base and turn opens into clicks and clicks into orders, it can be all for nothing if your emails are not hitting inboxes at the rate they should.
If you think you might have poor deliverability, then don’t panic! Here are some steps you can take to get to the bottom of it.
Identifying high bounces
- One way to detect poor deliverability is to notice high bounce rates. Best practice is to maintain a delivery rate of more than 98%, with best in class senders aiming for greater than 99%. Within your bounces will be a combination of hard and soft bounces, and working out what mix you have is essential to taking remedial action. Here’s our guide to troubleshooting a low delivery rate for broadcast campaigns.
Find a benchmark with you in mind
- Your open rate, as a key measure of your subscribers’ engagement with your campaigns, is a strong indication of inbox placement health. Without access to an inbox monitoring platform, your open and click rates should be your go-to metrics to check if anything is amiss. Find a useful – and reliable – benchmark for your industry. Here are our performance benchmarks for retailers.
Check your spam complaint rate
- Your spam complaint rate and unsubscribe rate are also useful indicators of your sending health and how you’ll be being viewed by the mailbox providers. Typically, your spam complaint rate should be below 0.01%, and your unsubscribe rate below 0.2%. If it’s any higher, this could be causing issues for you and you should consider why this is occurring to reduce for the future.
Check your open rate
- Inbox placement can degrade over time. Your open rate is good now, but has it started dropping over time? If your open rate now is within the range of the benchmark and it has stayed consistent or improved, your inbox placement is unlikely to be a cause for concern.
- Given Apple may be changing how it responds to opens, you won’t be able to rely on open rate forever. Instead look at other engagement metrics such as clicks-per-sends. This will vary from email to email, but if you are seeing a general downward trend this could be a cause for concern.
Send only to engaged contacts
- It’s important to work on the health of your lists, ensuring that the people receiving your emails are engaged, and that you are managing unengaged subscribers properly. Are you using double opt-in on your contacts? Are you following best practices for segmenting your contacts?
- If you are looking to re-engage contacts, we have put together this helpful guide for you before you start.
Make sure your list acquisition is secure
- Re-captcha on your site prevents bots adding email addresses into your sending list and asking customers to enter their email addresses twice reduces the number of spelling mistakes and typos that might damage your list hygiene.
Speak to your deliverability team
- If you’re still really not sure, speak to your deliverability team. They will have access to similar tools that the salesperson is quoting and will be able to help you if there are issues with your sending.
If you’re an Ometria customer, make sure to take a look at our help pages about Deliverability to learn more about how you can tackle it.
