Email Deliverability Metrics: How to know if your emails land in spam?

If you’re struggling to get your emails opened or never hear back from your prospects…

Then, it’s crucial to monitor your deliverability. Your emails could be landing in spam unbeknownst to you.

With the right tools and metrics, you can monitor your deliverability and fix any deliverability problems before they affect your campaign results.

In this article, you’ll discover 6 key deliverability metrics that affect your campaign performance and the easiest way to track them.

How do you track email deliverability?

Email deliverability is your ability to deliver emails right into your target’s primary inbox. In short, your deliverability measures whether your emails successfully reach your audience.

3 main factors affect your email deliverability:

1. Your Sender Reputation: If you have a history of sending spam or unwanted email, email providers are more likely to land your emails in spam.
2. Technical Setup: If you haven't done your email authentication correctly, your emails could land in spam or not be delivered at all.
3. Email Content: Emails with spammy or inappropriate content have a lower deliverability rate.

If number 3, email content, is a concern for you, use our free Cold Email Audit tool to check your email's content. ⬇️

The difference between email deliverability and delivery

When monitoring their deliverability, most people confuse “email deliverability” with “email delivery”.‍

Email delivery tells you whether your email was successfully sent to your audience. Email deliverability tells you where your emails land if your audience gets them — in the spam or inbox folder.

While most emails get delivered, they may have low deliverability and land in the spam folder. So it’s important to use the right metrics and tools to monitor your deliverability.

6 email deliverability metrics to track where your emails land

1. Deliverability Score

Your deliverability score measures the ability of your emails to reach your audience's inboxes. It is scored out of 100 based on all the factors that affect your deliverability.

Depending on your email health, your deliverability score could be under 3 different stages:

→ Red

This stage means you might be blacklisted or have a wrong technical setup. You shouldn’t send email campaigns at this stage as you risk landing in spam.

→ Orange

At this stage, your email address is warmed up & fewer emails are landing in the spam folder. But you should still wait for the green stage to start sending emails.

→ Green

At this moment, you can start sending emails. Make sure to keep your warm-up & deliverability booster ON before-during-after sending campaigns to keep deliverability high.

Tracking your deliverability score helps you send emails at the right time to keep them away from spam and land in your audience’s inbox.

2. Open Rates

Here’s where it gets kinda complicated…😱

Open rates used to indicate whether your emails landed in the inbox. And if you had open rates of less than 45-50%, chances were your emails were landing in spam.

However, due to email service providers’ policy changes, the tracking pixel in emails that tracks whether your recipients opened your email is not always allowed to function properly.

What does that mean?

Either the tracking pixel doesn’t get loaded, or it gets preloaded without the recipients opening the email!

In other words, your open rate can be either inflated or deflated.

One thing is for sure: the good ol’ email open rate is no longer a reliable metric.

However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just that you cannot reliably measure it anymore. But you still can (and should) try to improve it.

You still have to take all the steps to improve your opens.

Your audience won’t open or reply to emails they never saw! So it’s essential to keep your emails away from spam and land emails in their inbox.

Here are 3 tips to increase open rates and boost your deliverability:

• avoid using clickbait in your subject lines
• regularly clean your email list to remove inactive subscribers
• use a reputable email service provider that follows industry best practices

Even though open rates are no longer accurate, it’s still wise to look at your open rates periodically. Extremely low open rates still indicate that there’s a problem.

You can use an outreach tool like lemlist for detailed reports on your open and reply rates 👇

3. Bounce Rate

Email bounce means an email that couldn't be delivered to your audience. Your email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that couldn’t get delivered, also known as ‘bounced.’

Hard bounces occur when the email address is invalid or no longer exists. Soft bounces occur when an email bounces because of a temporary issue with the receiver’s email address.

Unlike a hard bounce, this doesn’t mean a permanent delivery failure; you can try sending the email again.

A high email bounce rate can ruin your sender reputation and reduce your chances of getting replies. Email providers and spam filters could also permanently block your emails from getting delivered to your audience.

So ensure to keep your bounce rate below 5%.

Here are 3 tips to boost your deliverability and decrease bounce rates:

• use a professional sender domain (for example: name@lemwarm.com)
• verify your email list before sending campaigns to avoid hard bounces
• remove all addresses showing “permanent delivery failure" from your email list

4. Spam Complaint Rate

The spam complaint rate measures the percentage of subscribers who mark your emails as spam. A high spam complaint rate can damage your sender reputation and deliverability.

Your average spam complaint rate should be less than 0.08%.

Here are 3 tips to reduce spam complaints and keep a good sender reputation:

• remove all contacts who unsubscribe from your email list
• define a clear ICP and ensure you send emails to people who will find them valuable
• add a double opt-in process so you have explicit permission to send emails to your audience

5. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of your audience who opt out of your email list. A high unsubscribe rate indicates your audience isn’t finding your content relevant or valuable. It’s still important to add an opt-out option in your emails. This prevents spam complaints and protects your sender reputation.

Here are 3 ways you can use your unsubscribe page to build a relationship with your audience:

• take feedback from people who unsubscribe to improve your email content and targeting
• offer your audience some options to receive fewer emails, less often
• avoid losing touch by sharing other resources or newsletters that they can access 👇

6. Sender Reputation

Your email sender reputation is a score given to you based on how you send emails and how much your audience interacts with them. Email providers use metrics like open and reply rates, sending frequency, etc., to decide your sender reputation.

With a poor sender reputation, email providers are likelier to block or send your emails to the spam folder. This hurts your email deliverability and ruins the performance of your email campaigns.

You can use these 3 tips to keep a high sender reputation score:

• do email warm-up before, during, and after sending email campaigns
• avoid using spam trigger words in your emails
• use a dedicated IP address if you have a high sending volume

Here’s the difference between a shared and dedicated IP address 👇

The Easiest Way to Monitor Your Deliverability

The easiest way to monitor your email deliverability is to use a warm-up and deliverability booster.

Let’s look at lemwarm, for example 👇

Your dashboard gives you access to your deliverability score and tips on improving it.

Based on the time frame you choose, you can get a detailed report with:

• total lemwarm emails sent, including replies sent to other users
• total lemwarm emails saved from spam & categories
• a full overview of where your emails are landing
• and a full overview of where your replies are landing in other users’ email inboxes

All these reports will inform you of how your emails are performing and what steps you can take to improve your deliverability.

You can also use lemwarm to monitor your technical setup and ensure nothing is missing.

A quick checklist to keep your deliverability high in the long run

Monitoring your email deliverability is the best way to avoid the spam folder in the long run. And with the right tools, you’ll have higher email deliverability, get more replies and create more growth opportunities!

Before sending your next email campaign, use this quick checklist to ensure you land in the inbox:

☑️ complete your technical setup

☑️ verify your email list

☑️ warm up your email address

☑️ follow email sending best practices

☑️ monitor your email deliverability before-during-after sending campaigns

And if you want to save hours of manual deliverability work, you can use a warm-up tool and deliverability booster like lemwarm.

PS: it works 100% on auto-pilot 🔥

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