Email Deliverability: How to Ensure Marketing Emails Get Seen

Email marketing campaigns are an impactful way to reach customers—but only if your emails actually arrive in your customers’ inboxes.

Just because you send them something, it doesn’t mean it will escape junk mailboxes or the spam filter. Email deliverability requirements are more stringent than ever, so monitoring and improving deliverability is essential to keep in touch with your audience.

Email deliverability enables email marketers and merchants to carry out effective email campaigns. With more than four billion email users worldwide, global email marketing revenue will reach an estimated $17.9 billion by 2027. If you want to keep your marketing emails from turning into spam messages, learn what factors influence email deliverability and how you can improve your email marketing success.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability measures whether your marketing emails arrive in subscribers’ inboxes. Whereas the term “email delivery” refers to the successful delivery of an email—meaning it didn’t bounce but could have ended up in spam—“email deliverability” measures whether the email actually made it into a recipient’s inbox.

By improving your email deliverability, you reduce the extent to which email service providers send your email messages to spam folders. Email deliverability affects email campaigns—the more often messages end up in users’ inboxes, the higher your conversions and engagement could be.

In 2024, Gmail and Yahoo introduced tighter email deliverability requirements for bulk senders. You must comply with best practices for email validation and spam prevention to ensure your emails continue to land in inboxes. These include authenticating your email and enabling easy unsubscription, while you must also remain under new spam rate thresholds. Ensure compliance as a Shopify store owner by following the steps outlined here.

What factors influence email deliverability?

• Email sender reputation
• IP reputation
• Spam traps
• Email list quality
• Email volume
• Open rate
• Bounce rate
• ISP infrastructure

There are multiple factors that influence email deliverability. Consider each of them when setting up and iterating on your email marketing strategy.

Email sender reputation

Internet service providers (ISPs) determine your email sender reputation based on a number of considerations, including spam complaints and low open rates. Your sender reputation informs inbox providers how reliable a sender you are and influences whether your emails end up in the spam folder. While your sender’s reputation can change from one internet service provider to another, it typically manifests in the form of a sender score that ranges from 0 to 100.

IP reputation

Whereas email sender reputation is specific to your company and domain, IP reputation refers to the quality of the server you use to send your emails. If a sender’s IP address sends a high volume of spam messages, it will have a low IP reputation.

Send high-quality emails from a dedicated IP address to improve your IP reputation and increase the chances that your email messages appear in your customers’ inboxes.

Spam traps

Spam traps are fake email addresses that ISPs and other organizations create to find scammers. They are common in email lists that you can purchase or rent online. Spam traps attempt to identify scammers by luring them into sending spam to fake email addresses. If you accidentally send your marketing emails to a spam trap email address, it can negatively impact your email deliverability.

Email list quality

Email list quality also affects email marketing deliverability. If your list includes invalid email addresses, it signals to ISPs that your emails do not properly arrive in an inbox, which impacts your sender reputation.

Practice good email list hygiene by culling any unknown users with strange email addresses and avoiding spam traps at all costs by not purchasing or renting email lists. Only keep engaged users on your email list to improve your email deliverability and help ensure your emails make it to inboxes.

Email volume

Erratic email volume can negatively impact your email deliverability. Internet service providers notice when the frequency of your email marketing campaigns increases too fast. To ISPs, this is a sign that scammers may have hacked your email account and can trigger spam filters that hurt your sender reputation and email deliverability.

Open rate

Email service providers monitor how often recipients open your emails. By maintaining good email list hygiene, crafting quality content, and writing compelling email subject lines, you can increase the chances of a higher open rate. When your open rate starts to decrease, so can your email deliverability.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate measures how often your emails cannot reach recipients. There are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces are permanent errors; they are most common when you send an email to an invalid email address. Soft bounces indicate a temporary problem with your email, like a technical difficulty or a recipient’s inbox being full.

A high bounce rate (more than 2%) can decrease your email deliverability. Remember to remove any email addresses from your list that trigger a hard bounce and investigate soft bounces to make sure there isn’t a technical issue with your IP address or ISP infrastructure.

ISP Infrastructure

The internet service provider you use influences the quality of your email deliverability. Send your marketing emails through a reputable ISP infrastructure to increase email deliverability and avoid technical issues with your campaign. Tools like Shopify Email enable you to send well-designed emails with a strong ISP infrastructure.