Imagine it like having two
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 4:35 am
Email marketing remains a tried-and-true marketing channel that businesses of all sizes can leverage to forge meaningful connections and foster engagement with their audiences. However, the success of any email campaign is determined by one critical factor: email deliverability . And while clicking the “Send” button seems straightforward, the journey an email makes to your subscribers’ inboxes is fraught with challenges—and as a committed sender, it’s your goal to navigate it carefully.
This is where we come to the rescue by helping you understand how email deliverability works, breaking it down into its main components, describing the role and actions performed by email service providers and your tasks as a sender, and finally, giving you the right formula to successfully reach subscribers’ inboxes.
Understanding Email Deliverability
Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach your subscribers’ inboxes, not spam folders . It plays a critical role in the success of any email campaign and encompasses technical and strategic processes that ensure your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes. This capability is the cornerstone of email marketing , as it is the first critical step in a sequence that leads to customer engagement and ultimately drives conversions and sales.
Why is email deliverability important?
In the world of digital marketing, the journey of an email from sender to recipient is plagued by many hurdles, including server responsiveness, changing algorithms from email service providers, strict spam filters, and the constant battle to maintain a good sender reputation. These challenges make email deliverability an important factor to consider in your marketing strategy.
Imagine the situation where you’ve spent a lot of time designing an email campaign: you’ve polished the subject line, tailored the message to resonate with your audience, segmented your audience for maximum relevance, and added a good CTA. However, these efforts depend on one critical factor: whether your email is successfully delivered to your audience. An email that doesn’t reach subscribers’ inboxes is like a billboard in the desert: it may be a masterpiece, but if no one sees it, opportunities for engagement and interaction are lost.
An undelivered email, whether lost in the spam folder or bounced entirely, wastes the potential of your campaign and reflects negatively on your sender reputation, affecting future deliverability efforts. Therefore, a combination of a solid, reliable email infrastructure and adherence to email marketing best practices are essential to ensure your messages reach your current and potential customers.
Factors that influence the success of your email delivery
There are several important factors that influence the deliverability rate of your emails, each of which plays a crucial role in the overall success of reaching your subscribers' inboxes.
Email infrastructure
Sender Reputation (and Sender Score)
Domain Reputation
Mailing list quality (bounces, SPAM, compliance)
Content of the email
Now let's dive in and break them down!
Email Server Infrastructure
The journey of an email from sender to recipient is full of potential obstacles, starting with the existential risk of mail server failure and your emails not being sent (on time) because your sending server is unavailable. To prevent and minimize the risk of such a fundamental problem, it is recommended to work with experienced and trusted mail service providers that manage many clients and millions of emails daily and are able to provide infrastructure redundancy and fast problem resolution.
At SiteGround, we offer not only email marketing services but also email hosting services. Over the past 20 years, we have gained unrivaled experience in managing email servers on both sides of the barricade – the sender side (what all email marketing platforms do) and the recipient side (what hosting companies and email service providers typically do). We manage the sending of over 6 million emails per day on average and receive a similar number of millions of emails as well. This wealth of knowledge we have accumulated has translated into multiple infrastructure and server-side customizations as well as software solutions that increase the deliverability of emails sent from our platform and reduce inbound and outbound SPAM. All of this has made us one of the leaders when it comes to email deliverability .
Unmatched infrastructure redundancy
Our highly redundant email infrastructure is designed to provide continuity and maximum resilience to all of our email marketing services . We maintain multiple, fully functional, alternative email infrastructures and our software that manages email sending is able to switch between them in a matter of minutes. This means that if one system encounters any kind of technical difficulty, the other is ready to take over the task of sending your emails without any delay or interruption. These infrastructures are hosted in different data centers, which eliminates the factor of internet connectivity and all kinds of major data center failures such as power outages, natural disasters, etc.
expert pilots in the cockpit of an airplane – if one can’t fly, the other is immediately ready to take over, ensuring a safe and uninterrupted journey for everyone on board. Similarly, our dual infrastructure approach ensures that your email campaigns are always on track , reaching your audience as intended.
Sender reputation and sender score
Sender reputation refers to the reputation of your sending server and more denmark whatsapp number data specifically your IP address with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and ESPs (Email Service Providers) in the context of how likely this IP is to send SPAM. Sender score is a metric that indicates how good or bad your reputation is as a sender. Think of your sending server's reputation as the passport to your email success. It's like a badge of trust that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look closely at, deciding whether your emails are worth delivering or not.
It usually takes time to build a good sender reputation. Imagine you set up a new server with a new, clean IP address that has never been used before and this server starts sending a huge volume of emails on the first day. No one else has heard of that IP and suddenly “BOOM” – it’s sending tons of emails. A bit unexpected? Who would do that? Well, this is a typical spammers behavior pattern, so most ISPs and ESPs would immediately blacklist the IP address (report it to IP blacklist databases) and consider the emails as spam.
What are IP address blacklists?
The integrity of your sender reputation is closely tied to the concept of IP blacklists. These lists are maintained by various organizations and are used to flag IP addresses suspected of distributing spam, harmful content, or engaging in other questionable email practices. If an IP address or domain is added to these lists, email deliverability is severely impaired as ESPs and ISPs begin sending these emails to the spam folder or even blocking them altogether.
Therefore, one of the main goals of email service providers like us is to maintain a good sender reputation for our servers and IP addresses in order to ensure high email deliverability for our customers. At SiteGround, our system administrators carefully monitor our network 24/7 to ensure that our IP addresses remain pristine from activities that could result in blacklisting. They manage multiple sending IP addresses in a pool, carefully building a reputation for each and every one of them, so that in case a blacklisting event were to occur, they would immediately remove the bad IP and replace it with another one without affecting the sender score or raising suspicion from ISPs and email service providers. By proactively managing our mail servers and keeping our IP addresses free of spam-related behavior, we increase the likelihood that your emails will be favorably received by email service providers , ensuring they reach your subscribers' inboxes and supporting the success of your email campaigns.
Domain Reputation
Domain reputation refers to the trustworthiness of the sender's domain as seen by email service providers . Again, this is about the likelihood that your sending domain will cause problems – send SPAM, launch phishing and spoofing attacks, etc.
This is where we come to the rescue by helping you understand how email deliverability works, breaking it down into its main components, describing the role and actions performed by email service providers and your tasks as a sender, and finally, giving you the right formula to successfully reach subscribers’ inboxes.
Understanding Email Deliverability
Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach your subscribers’ inboxes, not spam folders . It plays a critical role in the success of any email campaign and encompasses technical and strategic processes that ensure your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes. This capability is the cornerstone of email marketing , as it is the first critical step in a sequence that leads to customer engagement and ultimately drives conversions and sales.
Why is email deliverability important?
In the world of digital marketing, the journey of an email from sender to recipient is plagued by many hurdles, including server responsiveness, changing algorithms from email service providers, strict spam filters, and the constant battle to maintain a good sender reputation. These challenges make email deliverability an important factor to consider in your marketing strategy.
Imagine the situation where you’ve spent a lot of time designing an email campaign: you’ve polished the subject line, tailored the message to resonate with your audience, segmented your audience for maximum relevance, and added a good CTA. However, these efforts depend on one critical factor: whether your email is successfully delivered to your audience. An email that doesn’t reach subscribers’ inboxes is like a billboard in the desert: it may be a masterpiece, but if no one sees it, opportunities for engagement and interaction are lost.
An undelivered email, whether lost in the spam folder or bounced entirely, wastes the potential of your campaign and reflects negatively on your sender reputation, affecting future deliverability efforts. Therefore, a combination of a solid, reliable email infrastructure and adherence to email marketing best practices are essential to ensure your messages reach your current and potential customers.
Factors that influence the success of your email delivery
There are several important factors that influence the deliverability rate of your emails, each of which plays a crucial role in the overall success of reaching your subscribers' inboxes.
Email infrastructure
Sender Reputation (and Sender Score)
Domain Reputation
Mailing list quality (bounces, SPAM, compliance)
Content of the email
Now let's dive in and break them down!
Email Server Infrastructure
The journey of an email from sender to recipient is full of potential obstacles, starting with the existential risk of mail server failure and your emails not being sent (on time) because your sending server is unavailable. To prevent and minimize the risk of such a fundamental problem, it is recommended to work with experienced and trusted mail service providers that manage many clients and millions of emails daily and are able to provide infrastructure redundancy and fast problem resolution.
At SiteGround, we offer not only email marketing services but also email hosting services. Over the past 20 years, we have gained unrivaled experience in managing email servers on both sides of the barricade – the sender side (what all email marketing platforms do) and the recipient side (what hosting companies and email service providers typically do). We manage the sending of over 6 million emails per day on average and receive a similar number of millions of emails as well. This wealth of knowledge we have accumulated has translated into multiple infrastructure and server-side customizations as well as software solutions that increase the deliverability of emails sent from our platform and reduce inbound and outbound SPAM. All of this has made us one of the leaders when it comes to email deliverability .
Unmatched infrastructure redundancy
Our highly redundant email infrastructure is designed to provide continuity and maximum resilience to all of our email marketing services . We maintain multiple, fully functional, alternative email infrastructures and our software that manages email sending is able to switch between them in a matter of minutes. This means that if one system encounters any kind of technical difficulty, the other is ready to take over the task of sending your emails without any delay or interruption. These infrastructures are hosted in different data centers, which eliminates the factor of internet connectivity and all kinds of major data center failures such as power outages, natural disasters, etc.
expert pilots in the cockpit of an airplane – if one can’t fly, the other is immediately ready to take over, ensuring a safe and uninterrupted journey for everyone on board. Similarly, our dual infrastructure approach ensures that your email campaigns are always on track , reaching your audience as intended.
Sender reputation and sender score
Sender reputation refers to the reputation of your sending server and more denmark whatsapp number data specifically your IP address with ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and ESPs (Email Service Providers) in the context of how likely this IP is to send SPAM. Sender score is a metric that indicates how good or bad your reputation is as a sender. Think of your sending server's reputation as the passport to your email success. It's like a badge of trust that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look closely at, deciding whether your emails are worth delivering or not.
It usually takes time to build a good sender reputation. Imagine you set up a new server with a new, clean IP address that has never been used before and this server starts sending a huge volume of emails on the first day. No one else has heard of that IP and suddenly “BOOM” – it’s sending tons of emails. A bit unexpected? Who would do that? Well, this is a typical spammers behavior pattern, so most ISPs and ESPs would immediately blacklist the IP address (report it to IP blacklist databases) and consider the emails as spam.
What are IP address blacklists?
The integrity of your sender reputation is closely tied to the concept of IP blacklists. These lists are maintained by various organizations and are used to flag IP addresses suspected of distributing spam, harmful content, or engaging in other questionable email practices. If an IP address or domain is added to these lists, email deliverability is severely impaired as ESPs and ISPs begin sending these emails to the spam folder or even blocking them altogether.
Therefore, one of the main goals of email service providers like us is to maintain a good sender reputation for our servers and IP addresses in order to ensure high email deliverability for our customers. At SiteGround, our system administrators carefully monitor our network 24/7 to ensure that our IP addresses remain pristine from activities that could result in blacklisting. They manage multiple sending IP addresses in a pool, carefully building a reputation for each and every one of them, so that in case a blacklisting event were to occur, they would immediately remove the bad IP and replace it with another one without affecting the sender score or raising suspicion from ISPs and email service providers. By proactively managing our mail servers and keeping our IP addresses free of spam-related behavior, we increase the likelihood that your emails will be favorably received by email service providers , ensuring they reach your subscribers' inboxes and supporting the success of your email campaigns.
Domain Reputation
Domain reputation refers to the trustworthiness of the sender's domain as seen by email service providers . Again, this is about the likelihood that your sending domain will cause problems – send SPAM, launch phishing and spoofing attacks, etc.