Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for reaching and engaging with target audiences. But, with the increasing competition for inbox attention and evolving ISP rules and regulations, email deliverability has become more challenging than ever. Our recent webinar hosted by Caroline Henno and Emmet O’Flaherty, Account Directors from the Acoustic Professional Services team with special guest: Lisa Vongphachanh, Email Marketing Manager at Travel Leaders, an Acoustic customer for the past 10 years, focused on best practices and strategies for email deliverability success. Here’s a sneak peek at the highlights.

What is email deliverability?

 

Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to subscribers’ inboxes instead of being blocked or marked as spam. The better your email deliverability, the more your emails reach their intended recipients. Deliverability is different from email delivery, which only refers to how many emails were delivered.

Why is deliverability so challenging and why is it such a hot topic right now?

 

Over the past few years, the deliverability landscape has changed significantly. Three big reasons deliverability is more complex: 

1. The huge volume of emails sent has made the inbox a very crowded place where the chance of getting emails open is getting smaller. The volume of emails sent globally has doubled since the pandemic.
2. Engagement data is not as reliable as before, making it very challenging for marketers to segment their audiences and avoid spam traps. False opens have also become a real issue with recent changes in open tracking data, especially since Apple rolled out the Mail Privacy Protection feature, and the false clicks coming from bots. 
3. The rise of spammers who use AI to move quickly, easily creating emails in multiple languages, adjusting the tone of voice of an email to fit the target. Earlier this year, the head of email security at gmxandmail.com said that in 2023 they registered an average of 1.5 billion spam or phishing emails every single week. In the same period last year, the figure was 1.2 billion messages showing that spam messages have increased by 25%. Therefore, anti-spam vendors don’t hesitate to penalize the bad senders. Email senders with high spam trap volumes are getting blocked far more frequently than before. Mailbox providers have also put strong restrictions in place to give their subscribers the best experience possible (see more about the new sender requirements from Google and Yahoo).

A good email deliverability rate begins with monitoring

 

Marketers are expected to monitor some of the basic deliverability metrics such as delivery rate, bounce rate, spam complaint rate, volume of spam traps, and block list status. If you couple those metrics with engagement metrics such as, open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates, it gives you a good idea of where you are in terms of deliverability. Sender reputation and inbox placement rate complement these metrics to gauge good email deliverability across mailbox providers.

It’s essential to make sense of these metrics and put them into context. Metrics will be different depending on the number of emails you send, the frequency, the cadence, the type of emails you’re sending, and the content within your campaigns. This is why it’s so important to monitor metrics on a daily and weekly basis, to review trends on a monthly basis, and compare month-to-month and run quarterly audits.

Acoustic customer: Travel Leaders improves sender reputation and email engagement by 700% with Acoustic

 

COVID hit the travel industry hard completely disrupting Travel Leaders’ email frequency and their active list size. Aggregate numbers looked good as well as their reputation score, opens, clicks, and email delivery rate. However, after taking a closer look, they did notice a deliverability issue with Yahoo. Travel Leaders chose to take advantage of the Acoustic deliverability offering so that their experts could take a look into this issue and figure out how to increase engagement.

Travel Leaders worked with the Acoustic professional services team taking a test and learn approach. Right away, they saw a significant decrease in bounces and their engagement jumped by over 700%. To maintain these results, Travel Leaders have modified their email sending steps with an emphasis on deliverability in the email sending process. Instead of just looking at opens and clicks and received, they now also look at inbox placement, spam traps, and do domain level bounce checks as well to catch anything that may come up. They’ve set alerts to monitor issues. And they use Inbox Monster and Insights to quickly check in after an email is sent. If anything doesn’t look like it’s following the typical pattern, Travel Leaders can quickly reach out to Acoustic for assistance.

Inbox monitoring can tell you: Was it delivered to the inbox, delivered to the spam folder, or not delivered at all?

 

An effective inbox placement monitoring tool will have a seed list including email addresses that are monitored, as well as other predictive features like a spam test to estimate whether an email will be delivered. With the insights from this inbox placement test, you can monitor your email performance more accurately.

Acoustic has partnered with the best deliverability monitoring platform on the market called Inbox Monster to give our customers access to inbox placement testing, allowing them to send unlimited seed tests across 90 ISPs worldwide to get a true picture of how different mailbox providers handle specific messages.

To watch the webinar replay, visit here. Contact us to learn more about Acoustic’s deliverability offering.