Deliverability is a word you hear a lot in email marketing and rightly so. However the term is loosely defined and wading through numbers of Google results on deliverability will cause your head to swim.

I’ll save you time and pain and break down exactly what deliverability is, how it is measured, and what you can do today to improve your email deliverability.

Deliverability, in general, refers to getting email messages to the inbox of the recipient. It’s often used interchangeably with the term “Delivery Rate” which is a calculation of deliverability.

Good Deliverability
Good deliverability is simply when messages arrive to the inbox. This is the goal of any email sender – especially email marketers. If an email never makes it in front of the recipient, it is as though it was never sent.

Poor Deliverability
Poor deliverability refers to any message that fails to reach a recipient’s inbox. A number of reasons including bad email addresses, aged lists, poor reputation, or spammy content can cause email delivery failures.

Determining Delivery Rate
The most accurate method for calculating delivery rates and the one used by ESPs such as Infusionsoft is Seed List Testing through an independent email reputation service. We use ReturnPath’s Mailbox Monitor to monitor the reputation of our email servers. This is used to test our email infrastructure; we take out all the variables we can’t control. This means we send to a seed list of working email addresses using content that has proven not to trigger spam filters. Mailbox Monitor automatically goes and checks all the email accounts and tells us what was delivered to the inbox, what never showed up and what landed in the spam filter. If we see things going into the spam filter, or not showing up, when using our known good content, we investigate to fix the problem.

How Infusionsoft Helps You

Infusionsoft does several key activities to ensure that our infrastructure gives your email the best chance at delivery.

Advanced Mail Servers – We use the Message Systems Momentum the same advanced mail platform used by the email heavyweight Facebook to server over 400 million people. If your message cannot get through a certain route our mail servers will intelligently try other routes until it is successful. There’s a reason why Facebook uses these types of mail servers. We agree.

Strict No-Spam Policy – Users reporting spam is one of the most damaging factors in email deliverability. Since we have and enforce our spam policies, we are able to carry on great relationships with ISPs.

Authentication – We use DKIM/Domain Keys signing and Sender-ID/SPF on all outbound email messages. These are the two industry standard methods ISPs use to ensure emails are coming from trusted sources. This makes it easy so you don’t have to worry about configuring SPF or Domain Key records on your own server.

Automated Monitoring – We have developed a system for identifying potentially risky campaigns and automatically monitor them to ensure they are not problematic. If a campaign appears to be problematic it gets paused for human review.

People Monitor Systems 24/7 – We actively test and monitor our infrastructure, systems and security. Our team of dedicated individuals monitors the Infusionsoft sending infrastructure ensuring emails are flowing. We also leverage blacklist detection and deliverability alerts using ReturnPath services.

As you can see, we have taken care of all the geeky technical stuff. However, the responsibility doesn’t rest on our shoulders alone.

Here are basic steps you can take today to maintain or improve your email deliverability:

Use Permission Marketing – As I mentioned ISP spam complaints really hurt deliverability. By ensuring everyone you send email to has requested it directly from you and are expecting the it,  you are going to send you reduce complaints and improve your reputation.

Keep a Clean List – Remove inactive contacts (older than six months) from your list. Some major ISPs turn old email addresses into spam traps that damage your reputation. We have also found that the risk for spam complaints doubles at approximately six months.

Use a Spam Checker – Getting blocked by a content spam filter will either land you in the spam folder or worse cause your email to never show up. You can use tools like Litmus to check your email for spam characteristics. There is a small fee, but it is well worth it. Alternatively, you can also use a Windows program, MailingCheck, that will provide you the SpamAssassin score for a specific email.

Ask to be Whitelisted – Ask users to add you to their “Safe Sender” list. When a user adds you to their whitelist, they are essentially turning the content filtering off for email coming from you. This increases your chances of constantly reaching your recipients. This activity is considered by some ISPs as “engagement,” so it never hurts to ask.

Email deliverability is a big deal to us. It’s no question that it should be — we help our users send over 30 million email messages a week and they expect their messages to reach customers and prospects in their businesses. By utilizing the Infusionsoft mail systems and following the steps outlined above you will achieve excellent delivery rates, reach more people, and ultimately be a more successful marketer.

After reading this, you should have a solid understanding of exactly what is email deliverability, how Infusionsoft protects it for its users and how email senders can improve their email deliverability. If you have questions about email deliverability, reputation or best practices, let us know by leaving a comment below.

[Image credit: Horia Vorlan]

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