“How’s our deliverability doing? Oh, it’s really strong—we’ve seen a delivery rate of 98% for the last few email campaigns, with only a small handful of bounces.” If you’ve ever heard someone say this sentence, you’ve witnessed someone fall for the often-confused difference between email delivery rate and email deliverability.
Deliverability is not the same as delivery rate.
Even if the latter is healthy, you can still have issues with the former.
In this post, we’ll go over each term and cover what you need to know to optimize your delivery rate and deliverability so they’re working together for your email marketing program.
Email delivery rate vs. email deliverability
The biggest mix-up we see when we talk to customers is that deliverability is discussed in terms of delivery rate. But that’s not how it works. Delivery rate is a valuable metric to consider, but it is not the same as deliverability.
Let’s set the record straight:
What is email delivery rate?
Delivery rate tells you whether or not your emails were received by the servers of your subscribers’ inbox providers. An email counts as delivered if it did not bounce. So your delivery rate is the percentage of the number of emails delivered divided by the number of emails sent.
Your delivery rate is the first step in the journey an email message goes through after you hit “send.” It’s the equivalent of a mail carrier knocking on the door of your house with a package. You can either accept the package and bring it inside your house, or leave it out on your front stoop.
What is email deliverability?
Deliverability is where your message lands if your subscriber does receive your email, such as the spam folder or the Gmail Promotions tab. It’s based on your domain’s setup, authentication, and email reputation—so if something goes wrong, the burden is on your shoulders.
Your deliverability is what happens after a message gets delivered. The same way you decide if you put that new package on your kitchen table or leave it by the door, your ISP has additional processes in place to determine whether your message goes into the spam folder, one of your other folders, or the recipient’s inbox.
How does bounce rate relate to delivery rate?
Email providers actively monitor your bounce rates. If you consistently have high bounce rates from sending too many emails to fake or incorrect email addresses, then you may get blocked in the future.
There are two kinds of bounces to look at:
- A soft bounce is a temporary bounce due to email volume, a temporarily suspended account, or a receiving server outage. Though the delivery of your current message was unsuccessful, you may be able to deliver another email to that address at a later date.
- A hard bounce is a permanent bounce due to an invalid or incorrect email address or from being blocked. You won’t ever be able to email this address from your current domain.
We recommend removing any emails from your email list that hard bounce right away. Soft bounces you can try 1-2 more times before removing from your list, but definitely keep an eye on any email address that bounces, or you risk hurting your delivery rate and, thus, your deliverability.
The relationship between delivery rate and deliverability
So what does this all mean? Even if your delivery rate looks healthy—you see few bounces, and most of your emails are being delivered—it’s still possible that your emails never make it to the inbox.
Many marketers conflate delivery rate and deliverability because mailbox providers often tell you if they deliver a message (with metrics like bounce rate or delivery rate) but rarely give you any insights into deliverability (where your emails land.)
Even with a stellar delivery rate, you can still have deliverability issues.
Ensure your emails reach the inbox
Understand the factors affecting email deliverability. Implement best practices to make sure your emails reach your subscribers.
Why marketers should care about email delivery rate and deliverability
The average email takes about two weeks to produce, and at any given time, 46% of email marketers have up to five emails in production. Your team is spending a ton of time and energy getting the segmentation, design, and copy of an email just right—so why ruin all that work with a poor delivery rate or poor deliverability? If your email gets rejected from a mailbox provider’s algorithm, or if your email gets hidden in the spam folder, then none of your subscribers will see the email campaign you worked so hard to produce.
Not only that, but an issue with your delivery rate or your deliverability can continue a downward spiral that impacts engagement for the subscribers who do receive your email. All of this reduces the effectiveness of your email campaigns—aka reducing the revenue you receive. Email deliverability can make or break your email marketing strategy. It’s that important.
How to calculate email delivery rate and your deliverability
Most ESPs (or tools like Litmus Email Analytics, cough cough) can calculate KPIs like open rate, click-through rate, or conversion rate. But what about your email delivery rate? That’s something you can calculate yourself.
Delivery Rate = # of emails sent – # of bounces / # of emails sent x 100
Calculating your deliverability rate is a little trickier in practice because mailbox providers don’t have to actually tell you whether or not you’ve landed in the spam folder. In theory, you can calculate your deliverability like this:
Deliverability = # of emails delivered to the inbox / # of emails sent x 100
Your best bet is to use a deliverability platform like Google Postmaster or MX Toolbox (both free) or a pre-send spam testing tool like Litmus Spam Filter Testing.
So, what’s a “good” email delivery rate and deliverability rate?
In an ideal world, 100% of your emails would be delivered—and most email marketing programs get fairly close to that, with a goal of 90-98%. Here at Litmus, we aim for 95% or above, and any email delivery rate below 80% should give you cause for concern.
If you had to choose between the two, it’s important to prioritize your delivery rate first, since you can’t have deliverability without delivery. (And good news, working to improve one can improve the other!)
According to MailChimp, the average hard bounce rate was just 0.21%, with an average soft bounce rate of 0.79%.
Deliverability benchmarks are trickier to come by, but know that you’re not alone if you’re struggling to reach the inbox. 22% of email geeks who took our survey admitted they don’t measure their deliverability (or aren’t sure if they do). After analyzing thousands of emails, we found that 70% of emails show at least one spam-related issue. As a result, many really have no idea whether or not their emails are going to spam.
Here are a few things to look at if you need to fix your delivery or deliverability issues, stat:
3 factors that impact your email delivery rate and your deliverability (and how to fix them)
Too often, marketers only learn about an inbox placement issue when they start to see a drop in campaign performance. Litmus customer GasBuddy had this happen to them, and they only noticed it because a test email went to everyone’s spam folder. But what exactly went wrong?
Melanie Kinney, Email Marketing Manager at GasBuddy says, “The domain we use to send email through had expired. Imagine that? It’s probably the last thing I would’ve considered at the start of this whirlwind.”
Their expired domain caused GasBuddy to end up on a blocklist and, understandably, they were at a loss for how to fix the problem quickly. From blocklistings to issues with your infrastructure—like an expired domain—to content, there are a lot of things that can cause your email to be delivered to the spam folder, but it can be difficult to keep up with. Plus, many of the resources online can leave you even more confused. If you wait until after a problem arises, you might not have the ability or tools internally to handle the issue, and outsourcing to a contractor or other service might be a huge financial investment.
If you’re having trouble with either your delivery rate or your deliverability, here are the three steps you can take to evaluate the problem and find a solution:
1. Set up proper authenticated infrastructure
“The baseline is your authentication. It’s the first thing I would check if you’re troubleshooting deliverability issues. Make sure you have all of your details sorted,” says Jaina Mistry, Director Brand and Content Marketing.
Your infrastructure is the first thing to look at for both your delivery rate and your deliverability. For delivery rate, make sure you’re using a reputable email service provider (ESP) and have set up your servers correctly.
This includes domain authentication, which is also a prerequisite for deliverability. If you haven’t authenticated your emails, Gmail and Yahoo’s sender requirements mean you’re guaranteed to land in their spam folders, so using these security protocols to verify your company’s identity is the place to start.
You have four different authentication methods available—we recommend starting with these three:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): SPF indicates multiple IP addresses or domains that can send mail on your behalf via a DNS TXT entry. This way, mailbox providers know that if it’s sent from your company’s domain or IP address, it’s from you.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM allows your organization to claim responsibility for your email as part of the authentication process by matching a public and private key, like a digital signature.
- Domain Message Authentication and Reporting Conformance (DMARC): DMARC protects a domain from being used in phishing and spoofing attempts by defining how receiving inbox providers should handle messages that fail an authentication check.
If you’re feeling ~up for it~, you can also go for Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI): BIMI allows you to display a sender logo alongside your messages in the inbox after completing authentication.
2. Subscriber engagement and email content
The second factor for your delivery and deliverability is how your subscribers react to the messages you’re currently sending. That means positive engagement metrics like open rate and click rate, but it also refers to negative signals like unsubscribers and spam complaints. Use Gmail and Yahoo’s benchmark of a 0.3% spam complaint rate, or no more than three spam reports for every 1,000 messages.
Every email marketer has to deal with unsubscribes and spam complaints. The best way to avoid them? Send emails that your subscribers want to read, at a cadence that they prefer. The more you can send emails that your subscribers open, click, reply, or otherwise engage with, the better off your delivery and deliverability will be.
“When it comes to spam filters, it’s much more about user behavior,” says Mistry. “Yes, you want to get your authentication right, and you want to make sure you’re sending great emails, but it also comes back to what’s relevant to your subscribers, and what they’re going to engage with.”
Start by identifying which campaigns you send—and which audience segments you send to—perform the best and which needs improvement. Then, take a look at your email list and work on a re-engagement campaign for folks who haven’t opened or clicked your email marketing campaigns in a while. This email is a great example of a simple re-engagement campaign (the subject line alone, ‘Ghosting us?’ makes you want to click.)
If you still don’t see any engagement, remove them from your target audience.
For the rest of your email list, you can increase engagement with your existing audience by gathering more data about what they want to receive, as well as eye-catching tactics like dynamic or interactive content.
3. Sender reputation
Your email sender reputation is a measure that ISPs assign to organizations that send emails, which ultimately determines your email deliverability. There are three main elements to your sender reputation that ISPs evaluate:
- Sender behavior: ISPs are closely watching the volume of emails you send and your consistency. Sudden spikes can make it look like you’re engaging in spammy behavior.
- Subscriber behavior: Your subscriber engagement doesn’t just matter for spam filters, but for your overall sender reputation. The more you can encourage subscribers to open, click, or reply to your emails, the better your sender reputation will be.
- Email list hygiene: Here’s where your email delivery comes in. Keeping a clean email list with minimal bounces is crucial for maintaining a good reputation. Hitting spam traps—those sneaky addresses designed to catch spammers—or being listed on a blocklist can seriously damage your standing.
Both email delivery and deliverability play a role in your success as an email marketer.
Spam folder no-more
Implement best practices to keep your emails out of the spam folder. Improve your deliverability rates and reach more inboxes.
Take a preventative approach to your delivery and deliverability
But nobody wants to wait until something goes wrong to find out you have a delivery or deliverability issue. Our team does regular check-ups each quarter to make sure that we’re monitoring both delivery and deliverability as part of tracking other success metrics like opens, clicks, and conversions.
To help prevent issues with the spam folder, consider:
- Running infrastructure checks to make sure your authentication hasn’t expired or otherwise run into issues each quarter
- Evaluating your email volume and send frequency
- Practicing good list hygiene, like removing bounced email addresses and unsubscribes immediately
- Switching to double opt-in for your email address acquisition
- Testing your emails against common spam filters on a regular basis with Litmus Spam Testing
Even if you aren’t a deliverability expert, pre-send deliverability tools can help you take control of your deliverability and take the necessary steps to improve it if you find yourself in trouble.
Make it to the inbox—not the spam folder—with Litmus Spam Testing
Using a tool like Litmus Spam Testing can help flag these issues and give you actionable advice to fix them before you hit send.
“It took us less than 48 hours to identify and fix our issue, and to get removed from the blocklists. Without Litmus, we wouldn’t have known where to start.”
Take control and own your emails’ deliverability health. Identify issues that may prevent emails from being delivered—discover if you’ve been blocklisted, validate your email authentication, and get actionable advice on how to fix issues before you send.
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Kayla Voigt
Kayla Voigt is a freelance writer