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Email Marketing - Inbox Deliverability
What factors most affect the rate at which your emails inbox?
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5 Answers
ISPs and webmail providers rely mostly on a sender's email reputation, infrastructure, and content to determine inbox placement. Reputation is based on quantitative measurements of the desirability of email based on the reputation of the sending server’s IP address. They use this reputation to block, filter and throttle. This is far and away the most likely reason that email is not delivered to the inbox. Infrastructure items that they look at are having reverse DNS, not having a dynamically assigned IP, a server name or HELO response, authentication as well as how many connections you make to their server and the volume of messages per connection. Content filtering happens after reputation and infrastructure checks and is based on things like text-to-image ratio, keywords, content that's hitting spam traps, etc. These three factors affect both B2B and B2C email senders.
Sorry, Tom... I was quite busy this week running MAAWG in SFO.
If you look at the top ones
Complaints can happen for many reasons. For example, if the perceived email frequency is too much, the content is irrelevant, or the recipient cannot determine who sent the email. Complaints are the first thing to affect your reputation score, and are considered a more important metric than many others since they are based on the recipients’ perceptions of you.
I would also say that bounces, more specifically hard bounces (unknown users) are just behind complaints. Why? because spammers don't stick around to clean their lists and the typically have higher hard bounces rates.
Basically when you look at those two alone, you begin to see the bigger picture that list maintenance is vital to your successes. Send to bad email addresses or those who don't want your stuff? then you will be treated like spammers are.
Hi Thomas. I've asked our chief deliverability officer to answer your question. He should reply once he gets my email. In the meantime, I am sure the most useful answer isn't something that can be captured in a few quick sentences, so you might want to check out this free resource: Eloqua's Grande Guide to Deliverability & Privacy: http://www.eloqua.com/grande/Grande_Guide_To_Email_Deliverability_And_Privacy...
All my best,
Joe Chernov / Eloqua / @jchernov
Thomas,
Can you provide a little more information before I answer this:
1. B2B or B2C?
2. How have you obtained the email address in question?
3. How are you sending these emails?
In addition....are we talking about Deliverability or Delivery..which are 2 separate things.
Delivery are those messages accepted by the receiving server - the number of messages sent less bounced.
Deliverability are those messages delivered to the Inbox.
Andrew Kordek
Co-Founder, Trendline Interactive
A Cross-Channel Messaging Agency
Twitter: @andrewkordek & @trendlinei
Email: andrew@trendlineinteractive.com
Agree with Andrew, not sure what your real question is. But if it is in essence what do the ISPs look at to determine whether your emails are delivered to the inbox versus junk folder or blocked altogether, then the #1 factor is reputation.
What is your history in sending to that ISP. Spam complaint rate is a key determiant, but also increasingly are recipients engaging with your emails (opening, clicking); do you have a high bounce rate?; are you sending to old, inactive addresses?
These are some of the key factors ISPs look at, but there are literally 1000s of criteria in the ISPs algorithms. Content, which used to be a pretty important factor, still matters but much, much less than reputation.
Lastly, important to make sure your emails are authenticated: SenderID and DKIM.
PS: I believe Focus has a packaged paper on Deliverability from several months ago - you might check for that.
Loren
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