Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and build trust through a personal touch. But getting your emails into recipients’ inboxes isn’t always as straightforward and easy as it may seem. Even if emails are technically delivered, they might end up in the spam folder instead of the inbox, which defeats the purpose.
This guide will break down the common issues that you may come across if your deliverability is degrading and share actionable tips that you can follow to fix these email deliverability issues and improve your email deliverability.
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability refers to the number of emails that reach the subscriber's inbox and don’t get filtered into the junk or spam folder.
While email delivery simply confirms that an email was accepted by the recipient’s server, deliverability goes a step further, focusing on whether the email actually lands in the inbox.
Maintaining good deliverability safeguards your sender reputation. This also increases the likelihood of your email campaigns achieving your goals, such as driving engagement, generating leads, and boosting conversions.
For a detailed understanding of email deliverability and why it’s important, refer to our guide below.
4 Deliverability issues and how to solve them
Poor email deliverability is often the result of various underlying issues that occur even before it starts to decline. Identifying and addressing these issues is key to improving your inbox placement. Here are four common deliverability issues that you can come across:
1. Email bounces are rising
Delivery errors occur when emails fail to reach recipients' mail servers, directly impacting your email deliverability. When delivery fails, the Mailer Daemon report provides clear and specific reasons for the failure, allowing you to identify and address the issues promptly if they’re fixable. Addressing these errors is essential for maintaining a good sender reputation and ensuring better inbox placement.
Common causes of delivery errors:
Temporary rate limits: Sending too many emails in a short time triggers ISP rate limits.
Authentication failures: Misconfigured DMARC, DKIM, or SPF policies.
Poor infrastructure: Issues with the sender's PTR (pointer) record or lack of reverse DNS.
Recipient mailbox full: The recipient's email inbox has reached its storage limit.
Temporary server issues: The recipient's mail server is temporarily down or overloaded.
Message size limits: Emails exceeding the size limits set by the recipient's mail server.
How to address delivery errors:
Fix soft bounce issues by verifying and updating email addresses.
In case of a hard bounce, remove the email address from your list to prevent future deliverability problems.
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2. Your reputation is suddenly dipping
A drop in your IP reputation or domain reputation can significantly impact email deliverability. Both reputations are crucial metrics that email providers use to assess whether to deliver your emails to the inbox or mark them as spam.
How to improve reputation:
Monitor your IP and domain reputation using tools like Google Postmaster, Yahoo Postmaster, and Microsoft SNDS. Maintain a strong reputation by regularly checking for authentication issues (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and avoiding large volumes of unsolicited emails. Warm up your domain and IP over time, and avoid spikes in email sending frequency and volume to build your overall reputation over time.
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3. Your IP or domain is blacklisted
Blacklisting is when your IP or domain is blocked from sending emails. Blacklisting occurs when your IP or domain is flagged for sending suspicious or spam-like emails. This can severely affect your email deliverability, as blacklisted senders are often blocked by ISPs, and their emails are sent straight to spam or outright rejected.
Common causes of blacklisting:
Huge number of spam complaints: Spam complaints from recipients can trigger blacklisting.
Spam traps: If your email lands in a spam trap, it gets marked and if it keeps hitting these spam traps beyond a permissible limit, it will get blacklisted.
Unauthorized access and malware infection: Emails sent through the infected systems will not pass the spam filters, thereby not reaching the desired destination and triggering the blacklists.
An unexpected increase in list size and bounce rate: The ISPs can suspect the companies purchasing the email list by the unexpected hike in their email list size during a short period.
Sending emails to inactive email addresses: Sending emails to outdated or non-existent email addresses increases bounce rates, leading to blacklisting.
What to do if you are on an email blacklist
Use a tool like MXToolbox to check if your IP or domain is blacklisted. Enter your IP or domain and click "Check Blacklist" to see if you're listed.
Usually, the ISPs maintain as small blacklists as possible to keep the emails flowing. So, there is nothing to worry about, even if your address appears on one of the blacklists. Around 15% of the email marketers said that their companies' email addresses had been blacklisted at least once in the last twelve months.
Well, most of the email service providers contact you and run you through the process of getting it fixed. They also reach out to the blacklisting services company to get your name removed from their lists.
Alternatively, you can contact those companies who have blacklisted you. You may even have to follow their necessary recovery/email blacklist removal process and follow some instructions like cleaning your mailing lists, etc.
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4. Your engagement rates are dipping
A sudden drop in engagement rates, such as open rates and click-through rates (CTR) may signal email deliverability issues. If recipients aren’t interacting with your emails, it’s either because they’re landing in the spam folder or being ignored due to irrelevant content.
How to address it:
Check your sender reputation using tools like Google Postmaster or Microsoft SNDS.
Avoid sending to unengaged or outdated email lists. Regularly clean your database to remove inactive users.
Personalize subject lines and email content to make them more relevant to your audience.
Avoid spam-triggering practices like using misleading subject lines or excessive images.
Segment your audience based on preferences, behavior, or location to ensure your emails resonate with them.
Final takeaway
Email deliverability is a critical component of email marketing, as it determines whether emails get delivered to the recipient's inboxes rather than being flagged as spam.
Maintaining a reasonable deliverability rate starts with addressing deliverability issues, as it helps keep up your domain & IP reputation and foster better engagement with your audience. Incorporate these best practices and taste the success of your email marketing campaigns.
