What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is the second step in the email marketing funnel, right after “Sent”, and it refers to the percentage of emails you send which actually get delivered to your audience’s inbox. That is, if an email campaign doesn’t get delivered to subscribers (for various different reasons that we’ll discuss later), then that email can’t be opened or clicked, and it definitely can’t work to convert your subscribers into paying customers.
So in some ways, deliverability is one of the most important phases of an email marketing campaign. After all, if your email deliverability rate is poor, then your subscribers won’t even receive your emails! You should track it and seek to improve it if it’s unsatisfactory.
What is an email marketing reputation?
There are two parts to an email marketing reputation.
The first is about email branding, design consistency, and the rapport that your business gains in the eyes of your audience as you email your subscribers. You can learn more about email branding over here.
What we’re going to discuss here is the technical aspect of your email marketing reputation, which is completely intertwined with your deliverability rate.
Your technical email marketing reputation — sometimes known as your sending domain or IP address’ reputation — is the good, average, or bad reputation which your domain or IP address has for sending emails. The better your reputation, the higher deliverability rate you’ll have, and vice versa.
The primary way, then, to increase the deliverability of your email campaigns is to improve the sending reputation of your domain or IP address. This takes time and persistence but is definitely possible with enough dedication. In fact, that’s what we’re going to discuss in Part 2 of this series.