The Truth About Email Deliverability

You may know these definitions or find glossaries incredibly tedious (we get it, we’re detailed). If so, skip to 3. Email Deliverability Metrics.

As we go through the necessary information below, it helps us get on the same page. It's the boring bits for sure, but if you want to hang out with email geeks, you gotta speak the language. If you read through the below, it will help you understand why our best practices exist.

ESP - Email Service Provider

These are the software platforms that send email for you. The top five are: 

• HubSpot
• MailChimp
• SendGrid
• Constant Contact
• Mail Gun

Why do you need a good ESP? An ESP ensures that your emails are sent from high-quality IP addresses, which helps avoid getting flagged by spam filters. Pure and simple, the first step to getting your emails delivered is by using a high-quality ESP. Pick from the top of the list vs. cheapest.

ISP - Internet Service Provider

An ISP (Internet Service Provider) is a company that provides individuals and companies access to the internet and other related services such as website building and hosting. An ISP feels it is their responsibility to prevent spam emails from getting through. Of the 270 billion emails that get sent every day, it is estimated that more than 50% are spam. A good ISP will ensure that spam does not make it to the spam folder, and you can forget about the inbox. Who are the big ISPs? Companies like:

• AT&T Wireless
• Verizon
• T-Mobile
• Spectrum
• Earthlink
• CenturyLink

And so on. There are currently 2,830 internet service providers in the United States alone. If they block your email, they feel they are the hero.

Email Services or Email Client or Inbox Providers

Apple iPhone or Apple Mail, Google Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook are the top three email services bar none in B2B. Nothing else counts. What role do these three gorillas play in email deliverability? They can become mega gatekeepers to spam, and each of these providers has its sophisticated techniques for labeling your email as garbage.

Email Client Litmus.com June 2021 Stats

Email Opens by Environment Litmus.com June 2021 Stats

Graymail

Graymail is solicited bulk email messages that don't fit the definition of email spam (e.g., the recipient "opted into" receiving them). Recipient interest in this type of mailing tends to diminish over time, increasing the likelihood that recipients will report graymail as spam.

Over time your opt-in email list converts to graymail. And guess what? Apple, Google, and Microsoft know this and somehow are smart enough not to deliver emails they know your potential recipient won’t open. Awesome.

Sending Email IP Address

Email is sent from IP addresses, which serve as unique identifiers of email streams. Some companies send from a shared IP, which means multiple companies use the same IP address to send their email. When you use HubSpot or MailChimp to send your email, even though you provide your Sending Domain, the underlying sending email IP is theirs. If you do bad things, the ESP will shut you down to protect their IP Address and all the other companies that use it.

Sending Domain

Your email sending domain reputation is based on your sending domain instead of your IP address. ISPs are starting to use a combination of IP and domain reputation to identify spam. Your brand’s reputation is also part of the spam decision. And with domain reputation, you can’t change an IP address to fix spam deliverability problems.

Sending "From Email"

This is the email address your recipient will see in the inbox associated with your Marketing Email. Ours is hello@orangemarketing.com. The “Friendly From” is the sender’s name, such as “Marketing” or “Rebecca Gonzalez.”

Corporate Email Servers

Large companies run email servers, which come with arbitrary rules imposed by corporate messaging teams, who live to block your email. They are even sneaky enough to automatically tag your email as "open" before stopping it. When a corporate email server is involved, there is no guarantee that your email gets to the inbox, the promotions box, or even the spam folder. Many can stop email at the front door and do. Think pharmaceutical companies, banks, anything old school. If that is who you sell into, we are sorry. It will impact your email effectiveness.

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You may be familiar with email metrics already or find percentages hard (math class is tough). If so, skip to 4. Technical Steps to Increase Overall Email Deliverability.

How do you define success? Let's keep it simple and not go through EVERY SINGLE EMAIL METRIC known to man. Here are the important ones:

Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email out of those were delivered your email.

ISPs, ESPs, and Email Services can cause deliverability issues if you have bad open rates. Inbox providers, such as Gmail or Outlook, keep track of when a recipient is opening emails. When you have a low open rate, a recipient’s inbox provider may penalize you by sending future emails into their spam or junk folder, which will cause lower open rates. The skinny on open rates:

• A 20% or higher open rate is your goal; HubSpot encourages you to get 25%+ (2,500 out of 10,000)
• A 15% to 19% rate can cause deliverability issues
• With a 10% to 14% rate, you'll encounter a lot of issues
• Below 10% and your mailing list, your content, or both need significant improvement

Bottom line, open rates are becoming fake news as the ISPs, ESPs, Corporate Servers and Email Services play games with us. Click-through rates are about the only thing you can trust for performance ROI. Read on.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email out of those who opened your email.

Click-through rate shows real email recipient engagement. If they clicked on your email, they were interested in it, even for only 2 seconds. A clicked email tells the ISPs, ESPs, and Email Services that yes, the recipient likes you for the moment.

Good click-through rates vary depending on industry and organization — even the content of the email you sent.

• A 7% and above click-through rate is a good goal depending upon your industry (17 5 clicks out of 2,500 opens)

Hard Bounce Rate

A hard bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered because the email address was invalid or no longer in use or your email was marked as spam by the recipient’s email server.

Inbox providers, such as Apple, Gmail, and Outlook, keep track of bounce rates. When you have a high bounce rate, a recipient’s inbox provider may penalize you by sending future emails into their spam or junk folder, which can then cause lower open rates. And the never-ending cycle goes on and on and on until your email list becomes essentially undeliverable.

We’ll ignore soft bounces. A soft bounce is a temporary deliverability issue instead of a hard bounce, a permanent deliverability problem. There are many causes for a soft bounce, some of which include: The recipient's inbox is full.

If you bounce a bunch of emails with one email send, HubSpot or MailChimp may suspend your email capability immediately. We call this delightful process “email jail.” And you’ll have to answer questions, fill out forms, and beg forgiveness to be let out of jail. You will still be on double-secret email probation, and they will be watching your next moves closely.

Bounces do happen, especially when warming up a send list. However,

• Below 0.3% hard bounce rate per send is a good goal (30 out of 10,000 sent)

Unsubscribe Rate

Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who unsubscribed out of those who were delivered your email.

We don’t track this as closely, and we sure don’t sweat it. Unsubscribes happen with every single email send. Unsubscribes are an argument for being careful with your frequency as you lose a certain percentage of your email contact list with every send. Eventually, your inbox providers may penalize you for having a high unsubscribe rate by sending future emails to the spam or junk folder.

Spam Report Rate

Spam report rate is the percentage of people who marked an email as spam out of those who were delivered your email. Not all inbox providers give information about when a contact marks an email as spam in their inbox. If you are getting reported as spam frequently, you are doing something wrong with your content or contact list and should evaluate your practices immediately.

• Below 0.1% spam rate is okay (10 spam out of 10,000 delivered)

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At this point, you can Google for millions (literally) of articles on creating emails that deliver. The following are our best practices that we have culled through time, research, and a great deal of experimentation.

Email Subject Line

• Shorter is better, especially for those reading emails on mobile devices. Some recommend you use no more than nine (9) words and 60 characters. Other articles suggest under 44 characters. You get it. Short.
• Make your subject line catchy, using high-interest words to prospect.
• Avoid all CAPS
• Limit punctuation but don’t be afraid to use exclamation marks
• Limit special characters like * % & and ^
• Avoid spam word triggers like FREE, ORDER, EARN $, MONEY -- you get it.
• Do not use a misleading subject line, like: “Did I leave my jacket at your place?” or “re: our last conversation” and other weird, annoying tactics.

Email Length

• Welp, it depends on the email - in general your email templates need to be SLIM and TO THE POINT (yelling)
  • Focus on one topic and one goal per email.
  • Make sure the email is only two screen lengths of scrolling
• Sales email - Between 50 and 125 words has the highest response rate of 50%. A similar study found emails with approximately 20 lines of text, or about 200 words, had the highest click-through rates. When in doubt, keep emails short and under 200 words.
• Marketing email - 50 to 200 words. But they say the ideal length is not a hard and fast rule depending on the value of the content
  
  
  
  
  Snippet of the ReviewPoint email Newsletter. There are several more stories following
  picture/copy, picture/copy format.

Images

• Ratio Image to Text - As a general guideline, we recommend a ratio of 80% text to 20% images in an email. However, all spam filters use different criteria for what is a healthy balance of graphics and text.
• Image Size - The best image size for email is still 600px to 650px wide. We generally use 600px. However, you can play around with the length.
• Do not use one large image for your entire email.
• Use relevant, and interesting ALT text in case subscribers have the image download disabled.
• Watch out for images with tiny text. They just won’t display on mobile correctly.

Test on Different Browsers

Test your email on different browsers, in other email clients, and on various screen sizes. HubSpot includes a Litmus integration out of the box, which allows you to do just that.

Personalization

If you can include any dynamic content personalization in your marketing, the email will achieve better results. Even a “Hello First_Name” is better than nothing.

Nice short and sweet email from Cyrano.ai.

Animated Gifs

In B2B, we don’t use them at all. We have seen discussions that say they increase opens/clicks and discussions that say they detract. Be careful, professional, and appropriate.

Frequency

Grammar and Spelling

For the love of all that is holy, please slap your email copy into Grammarly and check it for spelling and grammar errors.

Address and Unsubscribe

Any legit ESP will force you to have your physical address and unsubscribe links in the email footer.
You should have a prominent privacy policy in your website footer.

Test Subject Line

• Consider A/B testing your subject line, your header image and or your content. Tools like HubSpot make this incredibly easy.
• B2B caveat - Look, don’t make us give you our favorite statistics lecture. When dealing with a new B2B with, say, a list of 759 emails (no lie, it happens all the time), testing gives you non-statistically valid results. You can get directional but not statistically significant answers to your questions. It is not worth the time in most cases. You have to make your best guesses based on experience and prior results taken from other businesses and marketing experiences.

Grasp Technologies’ Email Newsletter in HubSpot Mobile Render.

An excellent example of email from the experts at Litmus

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Contact List Hygiene

Why Remove Perfectly Good Emails?

Remember, at the beginning of this ebook, we discussed graymail. Here is where it comes into play. Contact list hygiene, purging your list of good emails who don’t engage, is a relatively new subject, necessitated by the increasingly punitive ISPs and ESPs. It is best to cull your email list before your sending reputation gets damaged. Email hygiene is an ever-evolving topic, and it is somewhat art and not science at this point.

It is kind of black magic behind the scenes at the ISPs and ESPs. They don’t tell you the rules. They just quietly punish you. Suffice it to say, if you see your emails stop delivering reasonable open rates or click-through rates, and you feel your list is correct, and your emails are excellent, it may be that, for some reason, your ISP or ESP has ceased delivering to your email list.

Says HubSpot, “Without taking action, low open rates of your marketing emails can often worsen over time. Email service providers like Gmail or Outlook will move emails with low engagement to the spam folder, which can lead to open rates dropping further since fewer users will see your emails once they're filtered out of their inbox.”

How to Purge Lists of “Unengaged” Contacts

Here is what we recommend and what we have implemented across our client base. It comes from this article on contact list clean-up from HubSpot. Essentially you have to segment your email list and clean out people who are not interacting with your email.

• Temporarily suppress contacts who have received 10+ emails and never opened them or may have previously opened a marketing email from you but haven’t opened the last ten (10) emails you have sent
  
  • Stick the temporary suppressions in a pile by themselves and send to them quarterly with a unique “open me” type of email or offer.
  • Before sending to these colds, revalidate them using NeverBounce
  • Create a sunset policy to manage these disengaged contacts
  • Consider a re-subscription campaign (last chance)
• Permanently suppress contacts (non-marketing in HubSpot) who have hard-bounced and unsubscribed. Suppression will happen automatically in most ESPs, but it is good for you to move them away from your active marketing campaigns so you will stop attempting to send to them.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

A lot to think about, right? We don’t deny that email marketing has gotten a little cray-cray. Over the years, things have changed. But, B2B email remains a relevant and essential channel in your marketing strategy execution. The ISPs and ESPs have become sophisticated, working on the email receivers’ behalf and going above and beyond to block emails they deem to be spam. Yes, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all conspiring against your business. What else is new?

The trick is, how do you avoid becoming the recipient of this unwanted attention?

It’s straightforward (8 steps):

1. Pick a popular ESP.
2. Setup both your sending domain and sending email address perfectly.
3. Understand the email metrics that matter in this game (primarily open rate and click-through rate).
4. Be selective and picky about where you get your email lists; don’t engage in unscrupulous practices; you’ll get caught and punished.
5. Make sure you clean contacts before you begin sending email to a new list.
6. Engage in best practices ESP IP and sending domain warm-up procedures.
7. Create top-notch, highly engaging, quality emails. 
8. Implement ongoing automated contact list hygiene.

Now go win the inbox. 

Resources

We have linked the HECK out of this ebook to our sources. Click and explore any topic in depth. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Course has invaluable information and a ton of links to additional resources as well.

Source Attribution
And if you happen to be one of the sources for this ebook, THANK YOU. If you have changes to your attribution, please send us a note.

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