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What is email deliverability?

In this article, we'll explore best practices for marketing strategies and technical setup, starting with the question: What is email deliverability?.

To start with, take a look at our dedicated video that explains what email deliverability is and how it works 🚀.  

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability refers to an email's ability to reach its recipients without being discarded by the webmail, filtered, or sent to spam.

When sending emails to a friend, your email will most likely be delivered straight to your friend's inbox since it is one-to-one communication. However, when sending emails to a larger database of contacts, getting your emails delivered to all recipients is more difficult, since it is one-to-many communication (also known as bulk emails).

To help with one-to-many communication, marketers use Email Service Providers, like Brevo, as they enable them to send emails outside their own servers.

Why is it more difficult to have one-to-many communications delivered to the inbox?

The popularity of emailing comes with consequences like spam. Many players in the emailing ecosystem are working hard to prevent bad practices.

As spammers develop new techniques, mailbox providers and spam filtering solutions develop advanced algorithms to try to stop them. Some email marketers who send legitimate emails to subscribers are collateral victims of the anti-spam war. They could see their emails blocked by the Inbox Service Providers or webmail providers.

What factors affect email deliverability?

Email deliverability is key to the success of your campaigns. We count every email that has reached its destination as a delivered email. For this reason, our engineers are constantly monitoring our sending servers to ensure the best deliverability possible.

However, Brevo cannot guarantee that all your emails will be delivered to the inbox, as this also depends on several factors:

  • User complaints, such as when a contact requests to stop receiving your emails or marks your email as spam. Brevo helps you improve your deliverability by adding these contacts to a blocklist. They will no longer receive your emails, and they won't be considered in your statistics.
  • The content of your emails, which includes the quality of your HTML, the wording of your email, the type of links you include in your email, and the subject, can determine if your email is marked as SPAM, etc.
  • Your reputation, which means that your domain name and your IP address must have a good reputation of positive engagement with your subscribers.
  • The routing of your emails and your electronic authentication systems (DKIM).

How to improve email deliverability?

Think about your marketing strategy

Too often, marketers send emails to serve their own interests. They forget to think about their contacts’ interests. This is a huge mistake.

Email deliverability is flexible, and the marketing strategy around it varies by business and organizational goals. There is always one constant factor though, recipient behavior. Sending emails to recipients that don't show positive engagement is considered spamming and will be treated as such.

All email marketing strategies should consider the following factors:

  • Permission
    • Who is your audience?
    • Have they subscribed to your content?
  • Frequency
    • How do you keep your audience engaged?
    • What are the right sending habits for your audience?
  • Segmentation
    • Are you sending the right content to the right contacts?

Build a strong technical setup

There isn't a lot of wiggle room when it comes to technical setup for emails. On top of having a great marketing strategy, marketers need a solid technical framework:

Senders also have to contribute to the technical setup by choosing wisely which domains to use and how to use them.

💡 Good to know
Technical setup is great for good deliverability, but it can be totally inefficient without a proper marketing strategy.

Choose the right technical infrastructure

For a good delivery, it's essential to use a solid infrastructure that can:

  • Monitor and regulate the flow of emails sent
  • Handle bounces, unsubscriptions, and complaints
  • Provide default and custom domain authentication
  • Enable advanced monitoring and segmentation

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.

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