Hi friend,
What is email delivery and email deliverability?
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not actually the same thing.
EMAIL DELIVERY is the email metric that is usually reported on when you’ve sent out an email campaign. “We had a 99% delivery rate” for our email campaign. Incidentally this is good as far as delivery rate goes.
EMAIL DELIVERABILITY is talking about inbox placement. In other words what percentage of mails have been delivered to the inbox (and not the junk folder).
Here’s a bit more of a technical explanation:
Delivery is where the mail server of your subscribers confirms that the server received the mail. That is not to say that it was received in the inbox. The mail server is only confirming receipt of the mail. The mail could be in the junk folder and still count as “delivered”.
While deliverability is referring to your mail actually landing in your subscriber’s inbox.
Basically, if your message hits the spam folder, it still has a high delivery rate (because it wasn’t bounced) but a low deliverability rate (because it hasn’t landed in the inbox).
Why does it matter to marketers?
Understanding these distinctions is helpful for us to optimise our strategy, ensuring not just the delivery but the actual visibility and engagement of our emails.
The thing is that it is difficult to report on. Most ESPs report on campaign delivery rates. It takes a different set of tools to report on where the mailbox is placing your newsletter (inbox or junk).
This is why I was pleased to discover that Zerobounce offers a free test to see if you’re landing in the inbox or spam. Sign up for a free account and try it out. You get one test included per month.
Want some help?
You might be super-busy, but you still want to know. Hit reply if you want some help doing the test.
Also, if you’re scoring badly, we can help you fix that.
Here’s to hitting the inbox,
Stay curious,
Melaina Gross
PS: Sign up here for your own subscription.
