How Can Email Deliverability Test Boost Your Marketing Campaigns
Email marketers have to jump through a lot of hoops to ensure their messages successfully land in subscribers’ inboxes. When emails land in the spam folder, it’s a huge missed opportunity. But this issue is fixable — there are ways to achieve consistent inbox placement.
Performing email deliverability tests plays a pivotal role in this process, helping you optimize your email campaigns.
Spam filters today are highly intelligent and evolved; of all e-mails sent in 2022, nearly 49% were identified as spam. So, it’s going to take a lot of diligence and testing to ensure your emails do actually land in your customer’s inbox.
By evaluating various parameters, an email deliverability test can:
- Boost email delivery rates,
- Increase open rates,
- Improve email marketing conversion rates,
If you’re constantly asking yourself why your emails are going to spam, this guide contains the answers you seek. We will highlight the importance of email deliverability tests and help you understand how to run these tests to fine-tune your campaign.
Finally, we’re going to give you the ultimate play-by-play guide to take your email marketing chops to the next level.
What is Email Deliverability?
We define email deliverability as the ability of an email to reach the intended recipient’s inbox successfully.
High email deliverability is the ultimate goal for senders, as it signifies their messages consistently reach the inbox rather than being exiled to the spam folder or being undelivered.
Achieving strong email deliverability relies on numerous factors, which include:
- Your sender reputation,
- The quality of email content,
- Implementation of security protocols,
- The use of SSL in email transmission,
- Compliance with regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act.
Of these, your sender reputation plays a pivotal role, as it’s a trust metric that ESPs (and ISPs) assign to you to assess your credibility and legitimacy.
What is an Email Deliverability Test?
An email deliverability test is a thorough evaluation of features that influence whether an email reaches the recipient’s inbox. It evaluates various aspects to measure the likelihood of successfully delivering your email.
By identifying potential issues and optimizing these key aspects, the test ensures your emails are not flagged as spam and consistently reach the recipients on your email lists. There are various email deliverability services available online that help you with this task.
These tests are crucial for marketers as they empower you to navigate the complex landscape of spam filters and email service provider algorithms. Ultimately, deliverability tests can guide you toward maximizing the ROI of all types of email campaigns.
The Difference Between Email Deliverability and Email Delivery
Email deliverability and email delivery are related concepts, but it’s critical to understand the difference between the two, as they refer to different stages in the email-sending process. This is how they differ:
| Email Delivery | Email Deliverability |
| It includes the initial email delivery and the factors that influence whether the email is accepted and placed in the recipient’s inbox or the spam folder. | Email deliverability is a broader concept; it encompasses the entire journey of an email from the sender to the recipient’s inbox. |
| It involves the physical transfer of the email message through the Internet and email servers. | It includes the initial email delivery and the factors that influence whether the email is accepted and placed in the recipient’s inbox or the spam folder. |
| A successful email delivery means that the email has reached the recipient’s email server, but it doesn’t guarantee that it will land in the recipient’s inbox. | Email deliverability considers sender reputation, authentication, content quality, and recipient engagement, as well as where the email landed. |
As you can see, achieving good email delivery rates is the first challenge for email marketers, while consistently landing in the inbox — excellent email deliverability — is the ultimate goal.
Factors That Affect Where Your Emails End Up
Different bits and pieces come together to determine whether your emails will successfully reach your recipients’ inboxes or be flagged as spam (or even blocked!)
Here are 7 common reasons why your email deliverability rates are taking a hit:
- Sender reputation: Your sender reputation is probably the most crucial factor in email deliverability. It’s a measure of your sending history, including factors like email engagement, spam complaints, email bounce rates, and previous deliverability performance.
- Security protocols: If you have not added email authentication protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) to your domain, your deliverability will be quite poor.
- Email content: Your content, including email subject lines, body text, and attachments, can impact deliverability. Spammy content or using spam trigger words can bring down your deliverability rates.
- Email list hygiene: The quality of your email list matters. Non-maintenance leads to outdated or invalid email addresses, which then spikes email bounces and spam complaints.
- Email engagement: If your recipients don’t engage with your emails, and the ESP notices poor opens, clicks, and replies, it can negatively impact your deliverability.
- Spam reports: Recipient complaints about your emails being spammy can hurt your sender reputation, which in turn, affects deliverability.
- Regulatory compliance: If you don’t comply with email unsubscribe laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act, it will result in low email deliverability.
Understanding and addressing these pain points is crucial for optimizing email deliverability and ensuring your messages consistently land in the inbox rather than being flagged as spam.
How to Test Email Deliverability: Guide for 2024
Bet you’re curious to know how to run an email deliverability test now! We’ve listed steps below, but before you begin, remember to test your emails at different times of the day.
Also, ensure you run your emails through a spam checker before you send them.
- Set up your seed list: A seed list is a list of valid email addresses that you operate. You can use these addresses to test deliverability without sending emails to your real email marketing subscribers. The best way to create a seed list is to sign up for new email accounts with major email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.).
- Send a test email: Now that you have your seed list set up, send a test email to your addresses. Be sure to include all of the elements you would typically include in a regular email, such as a subject line, preheader text, body content, and images. Between HTML vs plain text emails, the latter typically has better deliverability, so maybe send an all-text email first.
- Check your results: It’s time to examine the results and evaluate email performance. There are a few different ways to do this — one option is to manually check all your email inboxes and see how many of your test emails were delivered. Another option is to use the online tools mentioned in the table below.
- Analyze your results: Here’s the fun part! Analyzing the results will tell you how good or bad your deliverability rates are. The three metrics you need to pay attention to are the number of emails that were delivered to the inbox (inbox placement rate), the emails that went to spam, and the number of emails that weren’t delivered at all.
Testing your email deliverability regularly is a good way to verify that your emails are reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. Remember to periodically check your domain reputation as well.
Online Tools to Help You Run Deliverability Tests
Numerous services can help you test email address deliverability if you want a quicker solution. Here are the most popular ones:
| Tool | Link |
| MX Toolbox | https://mxtoolbox.com/deliverability |
| Mail Tester | https://www.mail-tester.com/ |
| GlockApps | https://glockapps.com/ |
| Testi.At | https://testi.at/tools/spamtest |
If you use any of these tools and discover that your inbox placement rate is low, know that there is a way to fix it.
Improve Email Deliverability: Tips to Ensure Your Emails Reach the Inbox
If you want to improve email deliverability, implement the 7 points below.
- Authenticate your email domain: At Campaign Refinery, we stipulate that our clients implement email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for good reason. Adding these to your domain helps verify the legitimacy of your emails and enhances trust with ESPs.
- Consider a dedicated IP address: You could use a dedicated email IP address to send emails instead of shared IPs. This can help to improve your email deliverability because it gives you more control over your IP reputation. If you must use a shared IP, ensure the other email senders are as diligent and implement the same best email practices you do!
- Keep your email list clean: This means removing inactive and unengaged subscribers from your list. A clean email list will help to improve your open rates and click-through rates, which are two important factors that ESPs use to determine deliverability. At Campaign Refinery, our clients don’t worry about manually cleaning lists — we offer our clients automated list cleaning, which removes all invalid emails, spam traps, and dormant email addresses.
- Write your content carefully: Avoid using all caps, excessive punctuation, and spam trigger words in your subject lines and copy. Instead, focus on writing clear and concise content that accurately reflects the intent of your email.
- Segment your email list: Having a solid email segmentation strategy helps you reap the benefits of targeted email marketing.
- Send emails at the right time: Figure out the best time to send emails; experiment with different send times to see what works best for your audience.
- Test and preview: Regularly A/B testing emails across different email clients, devices, and browsers help ensure compatibility and readability.
Following these tips can help you to improve your email deliverability and ensure your emails avoid the spam folder!
Campaign Refinery: The Best Email Deliverability Solution
One of the most critical factors in ensuring excellent email deliverability is your email service provider. And you deserve a platform that delivers top-notch results because what is the point of burning money on campaigns if your emails aren’t making it to your customers’ inboxes?
Campaign Refinery offers the best deliverability on the market today, helping all types of businesses reach their target audience and achieve their marketing goals. Our platform is powered by state-of-the-art software that helps you analyze and understand your email data and identify potential issues. This gives you actionable insights, which you can use to improve your email campaigns.
Here are the top 5 benefits of teaming up with Campaign Refinery:
- A user-friendly editor that makes it easy to create beautiful and engaging emails,
- An automated email list management system that helps you to keep your lists clean and up-to-date,
- Advanced email automation features that allow you to send mass personalized emails to your subscribers at the right time,
- A rewards program that will raise your engagement rates significantly,
- Powerful analytics and reporting tools that help you to track your email performance.
And you don’t have to take our word for it! Here are a couple of customer testimonials:
“If you’re fed up with poor deliverability, definitely check out Campaign Refinery. It might just change your open rates forever.”
— Troy Ericson, Copywriting.org
“Switching to Campaign Refinery immediately increased my stats 4x, and revenue followed suit. I really wish I had made the move sooner.”
— Dave Miz, The Email Experience
The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability — The Inbox Formula!
The secret to our excellent deliverability rates lies in our decades of experience. Campaign Refinery has been in the email game long enough to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. And we took all of this knowledge and wish to offer it to you in a compact guidebook — for free.
It’s called The Inbox Formula, and it includes everything an aspiring email expert would want to learn — tons of knowledge, industry insights, best practices, and tips to make your sender reputation skyrocket. This guidebook is packed with actionable tips and advice you can use immediately. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced email marketer, The Inbox Formula will help you take your email marketing to the next level.
Grab it here: The Inbox Formula.
And if you’d like to understand better how Campaign Refinery can help your business specifically, check out our packages and apply to become our client!
