Deliverability is your ability to land in the inbox
Deliverability refers to the likelihood that your message will successfully reach the inbox. In other words, how likely is it that your message is going to be blocked or filtered out as spam? There are many factors that influence whether or not your messages are successfully delivered to your audience. Watch the video below to learn more about what email deliverability is and why it is crucial to your long-term success.
Understand the factors that influence deliverability
Deliverability is the sum of many factors. Expand each of the dropdowns below to learn how each factor influences your ability to land in the inbox.
Domain authentication and alignment
All of your emails are sent through a domain. Over time, your domain develops a reputation among inbox providers based on all of the interactions users are having with your domain.
Domain authentication refers to the process of adding the appropriate DNS (Domain Name System) records to your DNS in order to pass verification checks. Once you’ve authenticated your domain, you’ll want to make sure that the sender “from” address you’re using to send emails aligns with (or uses the same domain as) your root domain. When you have a domain that is authenticated and you have alignment across all of your messages, inbox providers are more likely to see you as a legitimate sender.
We will cover this topic in much more detail later in this course.
Clear and easy unsubscribe options
You should aim to make it incredibly easy for recipients to opt-out or unsubscribe from your messages at any time. Klaviyo automatically includes a code snippet in the header of every marketing email that enables one-click unsubscribe within inboxes like Gmail and Yahoo.
As a best practice, you should also add a clear unsubscribe link to the bottom of every single email that you send.
Spam complaint rate and bounces
Guess what happens if subscribers can't find an easy way to unsubscribe from your emails? They will manually mark them as spam. This is very bad for your sender reputation, because it means recipients are putting in a direct complaint to inbox providers that they do not want what you are sending them. If enough people complain, your messages could start being deflected to the spam folder automatically, or blocked all together.
Bounced messages never even have a chance of reaching your subscribers. Learn more about the different types of bounces that can occur.
Open and click rates
Inbox providers don't just look for negative signals. They also look for signs of positive engagement, like how often recipients are opening and clicking on your emails. Maintaining a high average open rate and click rate indicates to inbox providers that you are sending relevant messages that recipients want to receive. This contributes positively to your sender reputation.
Quality of your subscriber list
One major tactic for achieving good open and click rates on your emails is to make sure you are sending messages to a high quality recipient pool. You should only send marketing emails to folks who have explicitly opted in to receive them. As you build your subscriber base, make sure you follow these best practices:
- Provide a clear explanation on all sign-up forms that explains exactly what kind of content subscribers are opting in to.
- Use double-opt in to prevent spam traps, typos, or otherwise fake email addresses from entering your list.
Quality of your message content
The actual content and structure of your emails can also impact your deliverability. Emails that are very code-heavy may be clipped. Clipped emails can be really frustrating to recipients and may cut off the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, causing the recipient to mark the email as spam. Klaviyo has a built-in email code weight monitor to help you gauge the likelihood of Gmail clipping your email.
Keeping your ratio of text-to-images to a minimum of 60:40 (text:images) will help inbox providers scan through your email and read the content within the message. Adding alt text to images may also help with readability.
Finally, make sure most (if not all) of the links included in your messages point back to your own website. Emails that link out to a bunch of extraneous sites that are not aligned with the sending domain can be a red flag for inbox providers that the content in the message is unwanted or harmful.
Local laws and regulations
Depending on where you conduct business, your messages may be subject to a variety of laws and regulations. Some of the main pieces of legislation that impact email marketing and use of customer data are:
- The CAN-SPAM Act (United States)
- GDPR (European Union)
- CCPA (state of California)
- HIPAA (United States)
Violating any of these rules can result in huge losses and potential legal action against your business. It’s important to take the time to familiarize yourself with the laws that apply to you and your customers so that you can conduct digital marketing activities in compliance with the law. Klaviyo cannot provide you with any legal advice, so it’s a good idea to speak to your legal counsel/advisors about any specific questions you may have related to laws and regulations.