Richard Gibson, Director of Client Services at Return Path looks at why email deliverability has hit an all time low and what marketers can do to get more emails into the inbox and boost ROI.
It’s all too easy to hit ‘send’ on an email and simply assume that it will be delivered directly to the inbox of the intended recipient. When it comes to email marketing campaigns, can we really assume that message sent means message received and, if not, to what extent are emails, and the marketing budgets funding them, disappearing down black holes?
A recent study from Return Path, which tracked the delivery, blocking and filtering of more than 1.1 million email marketing campaigns, found that nearly 1 in every 4 emails sent was never delivered to the inbox. Almost 15% of emails going undelivered represents a record industry low at the bottom of a continuing downward trend. It’s clear there is a fundamental problem at the heart of email marketing, but by understanding what’s causing that problem, email marketers can make informed decisions on the straight forward and practical steps to help buck this trend and start to see greater ROI from their campaigns.
What’s driving the deliverability downturn?
The equation for email marketers is a simple one. No inbox = no click = no revenue. With successful email deliverability at an all time industry low, it’s no surprise that alarm bells are starting to ring as marketers seek to improve campaigns and results. But there’s no need to panic. What marketers need to do is assess and understand the root causes behind the diminishing inbox placement of emails. The two biggest factors that determine good and bad email deliverability are sender reputation and the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) themselves.
The good news is that, to a certain extent, the two are connected, meaning that if you take care of the former that will, in turn, take care of the latter. This rings particularly true when we consider that poor sender reputation is the cause of 83% of all email deliverability issues with ISPs according to Return Path.
What’s your sender score?
If email marketers understand what makes a good sender reputation and they achieve it and protect it, their emails will get into the inbox and stay in the inbox. The first step is knowing how your reputation currently looks, a sender reputation is similar to a credit score and a healthy ‘sender score’ is as equally vital to a business as a healthy credit score.
A sender score measures the sender’s reputation and represents it numerically, assessing and understanding the strength of your sender score the vital first step to improving it.
Then understanding the factors that affect the sender score is the next step in being able to improve the score. There are six key elements that contribute to a sender’s reputation or sender score which are:
1. Complaint rates – when email recipients mark a message as spam
2. List hygiene – make sure email lists are up to date, and unsubscribe requests are being processed quickly
3. Infrastructure – authentication tools used to make sure content sent and content received are the same and the IP address a sender claims to be sending from is what they are sending from
4. IP permanence – using a single IP address, and using it consistently contributes to a good sender reputation
5. Message content – ensure it’s of a good quality, the image to text ratio is appropriate and subscribers want to receive the content
6. Subscriber engagement – ISPs are looking for positive engagement, they can see this behaviour and use it to inform decisions on sender reputation
Senders and receivers can register with senderscore.org for free to gain access to detailed reports and visibility into these critical metrics that influence sending reputation. Once problem or low scoring areas are identified, smart email marketers can focus on taking positive action to improve their sender reputation and email deliverability.
Return Path has compiled a recent study of 130 million IP addresses and almost 20 trillion messages and found that a worrying 85% of the messages were classed as spam. Interestingly, businesses with a sender score above 90 saw, on average, the successful delivery of 95% of their emails. There’s no denying it’s a key element of successful email deliverability and understanding and improving your sender score is pivotal in maximising email campaigns and ROI. But having a good sender score is dependent on understanding ISPs and the factors behind their filtering decisions and measurement metrics.
ISPs are casting a wider net with smaller holes
With the global levels of spam messages rising sharply, it’s of little surprise that ISPs are evolving how messages are filtered and how senders are measured. In an effort to curb and control the current tidal wave of spam, ISPs are using more stringent metrics and measurements, making inbox placement all the more difficult.
New data and criteria is helping ISPs to sort spam from legitimate email, this includes subscriber engagement data which looks at how recipients respond to emails. Opening an email, forwarding or replying to an email or simply moving it from ‘junk’ to the inbox are all positive subscriber engagements and form part of the measurement metrics for ISPs.
This measurement process is taken one step further when we consider the advent and role of ‘smart’ or ‘priority’ inboxes, which enable ISPs to position and rank emails in the inbox. So now, positive subscriber engagement has the potential to reward email marketers not only with successful deliverability, but also favourable and priority positioning within the actual inbox. Therefore, if marketers tailor email campaigns using the right data and analysis to make the content and format of their emails relevant and compelling to their recipients, subscriber engagement will go up and drive deliverability and even placement within the inbox.
It’s evident that ISPs are keen to reward to ‘good’ emails with successful deliverability and priority inbox placement where possible. However, ISPs are still punishing bad behaviour and practices from email marketers by catching emails in wider but tighter nets and filtering emails into spam and junk folders.
List hygiene is one example, where, if an email marketer does not regularly cleanse the database to remove ‘bad’ email addresses that include unknown or inactive addresses, an ISP will score this negatively against an email marketer as they can track when a marketer communicates with this type of address.
Helping to deliver ROI
It is no coincidence that deteriorating sender reputations are occurring as the levels of spam are spiralling upwards. Improving sender reputations, will improve deliverability which in turn will reduce spam levels. To achieve this, email marketers need be acutely aware of and understand the key metrics that drive sender reputation and underpin ISP measurement and filtering criteria.
Accessing and analysing email programme data across the short, medium and long term enables marketers to assess trends and evaluate practices. This provides the insight behind informed decisions on how to improve sender reputation, deliverability and inbox placement. At a time when budgets are under heavy scrutiny and being reduced, smart email marketers that take these steps to improve deliverability not only stand to get ahead of competitors but also will be set to generate greater results from their budgets.