This document reviews the definition of deliverability, its history, and the impact on marketers. The current causes of how to measure and monitor and how to resolve deliverability issues are also addressed. It is important to recognize that the deliverability landscape changes multiple times per year and the best practices for monitoring and resolution change with it.
Why should I care about deliverability?
Deliverability challenges can cause your email messages to have images and links disabled, to be placed in a Junk Mail folder, or to be discarded before the recipient ever sees them. This means lower open rates, lower clickthrough rates, lower conversions, and lower revenue.
More than 20% of legitimate marketing messages are incorrectly identified as spam by server and client level spam filtering, so chances are that if you aren't watching it closely then you have deliverability problems.
Unfortunately, few marketers today can expect to achieve perfect deliverability. For many, deliverability can be a confusing and painful issue. But by configuring things correctly from the start, adhering to best practices, and monitoring industry trends you can feel confident that you are achieving the highest relative deliverability for your industry, brand, and type of messaging.
Deliverability Defined
Deliverability is a household term for email marketers today. But this has not always been the case. Before diving into the definition, it is important to look at the chain of events that brought us to today.
As popularity of email as a method of communication grew over the past 10 years, the volume of email being sent increased exponentially. Today over 60 billion emails are sent every day. This increase was accompanied with an increase in SPAM attacks. Between March 2001 and August 2003 alone, unique SPAM attacks increased over 700%. Today, approximately 80% of total email traffic today is SPAM. SPAM at these volumes created inboxes flooded with unwanted messages and subsequently lowered consumer confidence in email. Challenged to keep customers happy, ISP's implemented more strict and complex filtering logic on inbound message to block spam. Along with filters, new white listing practices, and new junk/bulk folders were created. Initially, ISP filtering logic and practices were not publicly available and did not come without impact on email. Early ISP filtering practices created a false positives challenge in which legitimate email was often marked as SPAM and subsequently not delivered at all. With little visibility of the exact details behind ISP filtering,
marketers started seeing negative trends in the performance of their email campaigns due to the change in ISP behavior. The impact observed included but is not limited to:
- missing messages, - lower open rates, - lower response rates, and - lower conversion rates.
As part of an effort to better understand the root of these delivery and performance changes, email marketers, ISP's, and vendors started working together to better understand SPAM volumes, ISP filtering, and their impact on email. In 2003, "Deliverability" was born.
Although the email deliverability landscape has started to stabilize, it is a constantly changing battleground that continued to change past 2003 and continues to change today. In 2004, CAN SPAM federal legislation was launched, and blueprints to solve SPAM issues were developed. 2005 represented a significant shift towards creating an environment that requires marketers to have more control over their deliverability. Specific movements such as adoption of authentication technologies, and reputation services have been the leading drivers.
Defined, deliverability represents the ability of an email marketer to consistently delivery email to recipient's inbox with full HTML of Text functionality as indicated by the recipient in his/her preferences. It is important to note that deliverability is not a metric, there are metrics that help you track your deliverability and delivery success that are covered later in this document. It is also important to note that Deliverability is relative. Marketers should focus on how are other people like "me" are performing.
Deliverability has grown into its own market within the email industry. A market that has its own experts, consultants, technology providers and following.
Main causes of Deliverability issues
It is important, though, to first understand what will get you filtered, and how you control those factors.
