What is a good email deliverability rate?
From the power of personalization to really cinching a great subject line, here are eight answers to the questions, “What are the best email deliverability rates, and can you share your most effective best practices for improving them?”
- Segment and Personalize Your Sending
- Try Email Warm-up Tools
- Check Your Score and Relevant Factors
- Practice Good Data Hygiene
- Use a Dedicated IP Address
- Avoid Spam Traps
- Rel on reCAPTCHA
- Write Great Subject Lines
Segment and Personalize Your Sending
For me, a good email deliverability rate needs to be at least 90%, with 95% or more being a prominent target to aim for. With e-commerce, in particular, having targeted campaigns is crucial.
We can do this through list segmentation, to ensure that your emails are more personalized to those receiving them. For example, are you looking to get some reviews of your products? Create a segment of those who purchased three or more times and only send it to them.
Having personalized emails not only improves the open rate but also the click-through rate, which ultimately will lead to a healthier sender reputation, improving your deliverability!
Tobi Chapman, Email Marketing Specialist, Everboost
Try Email Warm-up Tools
Email deliverability is no joke. If your emails aren’t reaching your audience, then what’s the point, right?
One trend that’s been making waves in the game is the use of warm-up tools. They work by sending out a bunch of emails from your domain to unique addresses, and then they emulate positive interactions like opens, replies, and clicks.
Plus, these tools are getting even better—some of them are even integrated with ChatGPT, so you can make sure your messages sound human and not robotic. That way, email service providers know your emails are legitimate and not just some spammy junk.
And here’s the kicker: when you send out emails to real users, you’re always going to be in their inboxes. So, if you’re just starting out with email marketing or you’ve been stuck in the spam zone, give these warm-up tools a try. They can help you avoid a lot of potential issues and keep your emails on point.
Rostyslav Krasnikov, B2B Full-funnel Marketing Specialist, Waverley
Check Your Score and Relevant Factors
To gauge your email deliverability, you can use online tools that score your email deliverability rate and measure where your emails land in the recipient’s inbox (primary, promotion, spam).
These tools have their own scoring systems, so it’s easy to determine if you’re on the right track. In my experience, a good and achievable deliverability rate is around 90-99 out of 100 or 90-99% with the vast majority of emails going to the primary inbox.
In addition, these tools provide valuable insights into what needs fixing in your email. For instance, they can detect if broken links or the use of “spam words” affect your deliverability rate in your email copy. They can also identify issues with your email template or determine which internet service provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) is labeling your emails as spam, so you know where the problem lies. Fortunately, there are plenty of such tools available, and they’re just one Google search away.
Naglis Rokas Starkus, Email Marketing Specialist, Better-Flows
Practice Good Data Hygiene
Data hygiene is key in securing a solid email deliverability rate of 95% or more, but ensuring back-end systems are churning to update your ESP with the most relevant and accurate data is only a starting point.
You must also look at the percentage of your list that isn’t engaging with your emails. It is important to know that the value given and received from your customer is an equal exchange. Are your unengaged users a missed opportunity that needs a little nudge or are they truly no longer target customers and are better off unsubscribing?
Email retention journeys help you to continue to nurture less engaged users. They can also give you insights on how to better serve your customer base and allow your customer to specify how they wish to interact with you. These efforts not only make for a positive customer experience but, if done strategically, also help you gain meaningful insights to fuel your business.
Farheen Gill, Marketing Consultant, Self Employed
Use a Dedicated IP Address
A good email deliverability rate is around 95% in my opinion. But it is necessary to put in place various actions to maintain this rate and improve it.
A good practice is to keep a good open rate: it should be between 15% and 25%. And for that, take care of your email subjects and use a dedicated IP address to have a unique IP address for your domain. This will give you more control over your deliverability rate.
Phyllis Gbango, Email Marketing Consultant, PhyllisOriane
Avoid Spam Traps
When onboarding new clients with bad (or outright terrible) deliverability, I usually see the same mistake being made—they’ve been sending to their entire list of contacts.
Now, you may think this is bad for email open rates and “domain reputation,” but there is actually something else much worse: SPAM TRAPS! Spam traps are inactive emails that Internet service providers use to tell if you’re sending spam or not—if you’re sending to these spam traps, your deliverability will SUFFER big time!
How can you avoid them? (If you’re not scraping emails) Spam traps can come from any emails that have been inactive for 180 days or longer, so an easy way to avoid them is to only email your “180-day engaged” contacts (contacts that have clicked or opened an email in the past 180 days).
And when reactivating your other less engaged contacts, be sure to clean them right before you email them. Doing this will help you avoid 99% of the spam traps you’ll come in contact with.
Lachlan Kuchel, Founder, Email Marketing Co
Rely on reCAPTCHA
Using reCAPTCHA has become a critical tool for improving the deliverability of email. reCAPTCHA helps to ensure that the sender of the email is a human and not a spam bot. This helps to prevent emails from being flagged as spam or blocked by email filters, which can be a common problem for legitimate senders.
Elita Freiberga, Email Marketing Manager, Elita Freiberga
Write Great Subject Lines
100% is ideal, but anything higher than 95% would be considered “good.” Writing non-spammy subject lines that grab your reader’s attention but don’t trigger the bots into bouncing your emails will go a long way to helping you get there.
You can do that by avoiding subject lines with excessive capital letters, and too much punctuation or special characters. Obviously, you still want attention-grabbing, curiosity-invoking subject lines that people want to open, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of risking low deliverability.
To achieve the holy grail of good deliverability and open rates, try using features like curiosity, fear of missing out, humor, and shortcuts to success in your subject lines-you’ll find they’ll make a big difference.
John Brophy, Email Marketer, The Email Gorilla
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