Ask a Deliverability Expert: Which Metrics Do I Need to Monitor When It Comes to Deliverability?

We are in the midst of an ongoing deliverability discussion at my organization. One camp says we’re not experiencing deliverability issues as the bounce rates are low (between 1-2%). The other camp insists that bounces are only one stat to monitor, and that sending to large groups of unengaged audiences will hurt your reputation and could land our emails in the spam folder instead of the inbox. Who’s right?

Deliverability is complex but still remains a straightforward concept. Deliverability isn’t an exact science and many details are unknown, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have control. If you send valuable content at the right time to subscribers who expect and want to receive your emails, your deliverability will be fine. Just like when it comes to credit scores and maintaining good credit, you know exactly what type of email marketing habits you need to maintain in order to get into the inbox.

Let’s bounce right in

High open and click rates don’t equate to good sales, just like low bounce rates don’t mean your deliverability is doing great. These statistics only give you a general idea of how your email program is doing. The devil is in the details. Dig deeper and you might be surprised!

You might get a soft bounce letting you know that your subscribers’ mailbox is full. Not the end of the world, right? Some let you know that an email address isn’t valid. But if you realize a provider like Microsoft or Yahoo is bouncing all your emails or you get the following bounce, it might be time to start investigating further and implementing some changes before mitigating the situation:

550 5.7.1 Rejected. This message has been marked as spam.

Spammy Spamerson

Spam complaints are the worst. It doesn’t matter if it is only one person who complains. It shows the inbox providers that your email is not wanted or, at the very least, that there is something you need to change. If you haven’t heard it from someone in the email community before, let me be the first one to tell you: I’d much rather a reader unsubscribe than mark my email as spam. Spam complaints take only one click, so make sure you also offer a one-click unsubscribe option.

Unsubscribes are a sign that there might be an issue with your email strategy, but it does so without alerting the mailbox providers that your communications are undesirable. If your audience members are consistently telling you that there is an issue, even if it feels like it’s from a tiny amount of people, take it seriously. If you can see your spam complaints, so do the inbox providers, and they will penalize you one day. Better safe than sorry.

Try to use segments to target specific readers with specific offers, and avoid blasting out emails to your entire database — especially during big events like Black Friday. Those mass emails will result in high spam complaints. Which will result in issues. And the four weeks until Christmas will not be enough to salvage your reputation. Send to people who expect your email. Always. In a non-annoying way.

No one is safe. Especially if you don’t authenticate your domain.

Authenticating your sender domain helps keep your brand and audience safer. First set up SPF and DKIM for every tool you send emails from, and then set up DMARC. With DMARC — which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance — you can monitor what’s happening inside or outside of your infrastructure. DMARC is an email authentication, policy, and, most importantly, a reporting protocol. 

Many businesses believe they are too small to have their domains spoofed or used for phishing. Beware. The smaller the business, the lower the chance that it even uses authentication, let alone DMARC. Matthew Vernhout recently shared a great example of a spoofed domain — they saw 2,600 emails reported as failed or rejected in the span of two weeks! 

The actions others perform using your domain affect your deliverability, the same way your credit score would be affected if someone stole your credit card information and went on a shopping spree. DMARC gives you an insight into what is happening and helps protect your reputation by remaining proactive. There are many tools out there that can help you monitor your DMARC reports, such as Valimail or RedSift. You can also receive your DMARC reports right into your inbox — just make sure you read the XML files you’re getting. (Quick tip: Upload them here to read and understand them more easily.)

If you don’t have the technical knowledge to authenticate your domain on your own, feel free to sign up with Let’s Authenticate the World. It’s a free service I created to help all businesses send emails safely. There is no solicitation or selling. We authenticate your domain — and you get the chance to have an email geek talk your ear off about newsletters while they help you!

Your list might need a detox or, at the very least, a bit of fasting

If your list has grown a ton, you don’t have reCAPTCHA set up, or haven’t cleaned your list in a while, there’s a good chance that you’re going to see an impact on deliverability. Who you send to says a lot about you. The inboxes know which of their customers you are sending your emails to. They also know who actually opened them and exactly what they did with it. 

There are two main categories of list cleaning. You can pass your whole list into a tool such as UseBouncer or FreshAddress, which can let you know which contacts are valid email addresses and which are not. These tools can help you get rid of audience members who might be affecting your reputation, but it can never help you as much as the second type of list cleaning, which is my personal favorite: Cleaning your list by using engagement metrics.

Let me be clear: List cleaning with engagement doesn’t mean you have to remove records and never email them again. Sure, if someone’s been receiving your emails every day for the last decade and never engages with your brand, yes, they should probably be removed. But in most cases, your subscribers just need to receive only certain emails from you. You can always benefit from preference centers or subscriber lifecycles in order to automate this process.

Sending to old lists or to unengaged subscribers easily shows the inboxes that you don’t care about your audience. Whatever it is you are trying to make your subscribers do, it will always work better if you focus on your engaged subscribers. Consistently uploading old lists or buying lists (don’t do this!) might make you money for a while, but it will ruin your reputation in the long run. Fixing deliverability can take time — just like it takes time to fix your credit score after not paying your bills for months on end.

Magical insight and numbers

A great way to see how your deliverability is doing is by simply monitoring it with various deliverability tools that already exist in the market. I remember the first time I got to play with 250ok at Cakemail. For an email geek like me, it felt a little like magic!

The amount of data deliverability tools can provide allows you to remain proactive in reducing deliverability issues and helps you investigate when they do happen. From EmailConsul to Validity, there are many tools out there that will help you monitor your deliverability and the overall health of the email world you have control over. 

Have you ever done a seed test before?

They are a great way to see how you are currently inboxing and with which providers you have issues that you might need to resolve. (EmailConsul, where I work, offers a variety of tools to monitor deliverability.)

Do you check daily if your domain is on any blocklist?

Sometimes, your domain gets listed on a blocklist, and inboxes will let you know with a bounce, or will make an email land in spam. Different blocklists penalize you for different reasons. Read up on the most common to ensure you don’t end up one of them and know exactly what to do when you do.

What about looking into your Google Postmaster and SNDS account?

Google Postmaster and SNDS are free to use. You do need to be sending enough volume for them to let you know how they see you and your sending habits. In most cases, subscribers on your list comprise of Gmail/G Suite and Microsoft/O365 inboxes. 

If you find the data hard to work with or don’t know how to transform the data into actionable tasks because the information is scattered or not easily understandable, you can always use monitoring tools like Validity and EmailConsul to help you aggregate the data easily in one place.

All these are great ways to monitor your overall reputation.

So… now what?

To answer the original question: Deliverability is based on a mix of hundreds of factors, and fixing one issue is just not enough. There’s a lot to monitor, and all best practices need to be implemented correctly in order to have a good domain reputation and deliverability. It’s like how maintaining good credit means you have to pay all your bills, not just a couple of them.

Bounces are only one part of monitoring your deliverability. Data is power. So make sure you get as much as you can before you miss out on valuable information that can help you stay proactive in the email world.

Have a question that you’d like Yanna-Torry to answer in a future edition of Ask a Deliverability Expert? Submit it here.

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