The Deliverability of Emails: What You Should Pay Attention To

With 4.3 billion email users and an average of 200 emails, a total of 808 billion emails are estimated to be in the recipients' inboxes worldwide. In 2020, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received daily. Our attention span cannot keep up with this flood of information, anyone who does not convince as sender within seconds will lose.

But what happens if the newsletter does not arrive at all? The deliverability in email marketing is often still a hurdle that your carefully planned campaigns have to overcome in order to successfully land in your recipients' inbox. The performance in this category varies depending on the email marketing solution provider. So what should you look out for when it comes to the deliverability of your emails?

Spam folder, advertising, unknown?

The enemy of every email marketing campaign are the folders that pull the content away from the eyes of the recipient. Spam folders or the tabs "Advertising" and "Unknown" stop newsletters that, according to the provider, do not come from trustworthy sources or carry certain features that are marked as "spam" and are therefore sorted out by the provider itself. If your email does not end up in the main inboxes of your recipients, you always have a disadvantage over the candidates who make it directly to the top spot in the mailbox.

Even worse is when the email is not delivered at all. For then you are not only losing important leads, but as a result, also real turnover. The ROI (Return on Investment) in email marketing is steadily increasing. In 2019 it was said to be 42:1, but the marketing channel has now climbed to a whole 44:1.

With an eye on increased sales options and optimized customer retention through efficient direct communication, email marketing remains one of the most important marketing channels – if you know what matters.

Newsletter deliverability in comparison

Only recipients who have the chance to read your newsletter can also interact with your content and, in the best case scenario, click, buy, reserve, etc. You should not overlook the so-called door openers in email marketing: the suitable, exciting subject line, a fitting and trustworthy sender name or a personalized, appealing salutation of the recipient at the start of the newsletter.

Most marketers, in addition to the other content of the emails, focus on these door opener components, for they decide who reads the newsletter and who possibly deletes it directly or simply ignores it. These are the wheels that you can individually adjust, on which you have the most influence.

But even when it comes to deliverability, you must make decisions that will influence the success of your campaigns in the long run. The choice of your email marketing solution provider is an important factor. Through membership in industry associations for newsletter senders, the servers of some providers are on a so-called whitelist.

This guarantees you that you will be recognized as serious newsletter senders when using the provider, which allows you to benefit from high delivery rates. In the delivery ranking from October 2021 by EmailToolTester, the providers CleverReach, ActiveCampaign and KlickTipp are on the winner's podium. But other tools can also convince on average:

• The providers with the fewest lost emails were CleverReach (1.7 %), Mailchimp (2.9 %) and rapidmail (3.5 %).
• The providers with the fewest emails delivered to the spam folder were ActiveCampaign (2.9 %), CleverReach (5.0 %) and KlickTipp (5.2 %).

Critiques in deliverability were mainly about the question of spam classification and the loss of newsletters during delivery:

• The providers with the most emails marked as spam were Benchmark Email (29.5 %), HubSpot Marketing Hub (26 %) and GetResponse (18.4 %).
• The providers with the most lost emails were Benchmark Email (20.9 %) and Mailjet (10.2 %).

Different providers, same goal: to successfully deliver your emails. The test of different email marketing providers not only took into account which providers could deliver most successfully and especially in the most important folder, the main inbox, but also examined the mailbox providers that were best reached:

• The providers with the highest probability of emails being delivered to the main Gmail inbox were KlickTipp (77 %), and Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue) (75 %).
• The providers with the most emails delivered to Gmail's advertising folder were GetResponse (100 %), HubSpot Marketing Hub (100 %) and Benchmark Email (83 %).
• For Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue) and CleverReach, 96 % of emails ended up in the inbox of Outlook and Hotmail.

Consistent performance in deliverability

For those currently dealing with the choice of an email marketing tool for their shipping, it is worth comparing the latest figures with the preceding ones of the last years. The average delivery rate in October 2021 has again reached a solid level (84.3 %), but is slightly down compared to the first test in March 2021 (88.9 %).

However, email marketing services continue to invest more and more in the successful deliverability of their tools in order to convince their customers in the long term. “It is important to us to ensure the best possible deliverability for our users”, explains Sebastian Strzelecki, CEO of CleverReach.

“We constantly optimize our systems with great effort to be able to compete sustainably. This applies not only to deliverability, but to the whole user experience. We are pleased that our efforts are paying off and that we have managed to consolidate our position in the latest test and thus take the top spot.”

The tested tools delivered with a deliverability rate of 50 % to 93 %, showing strong differences in their performance. If you want to take a closer look at the deliverability of your current provider, EmailToolTester recommends "GlockApps" for conducting your own deliverability tests.

Email marketing facts at a glance

Aside from deliverability, the direct marketing channel "email" holds some other decisive factors for you. Among other things, follow-up emails after unfinished purchases have a 3-fold higher conversion rate. Newsletters also work with a diverse audience, regardless of whether your recipients are in the B2C or B2B sector.

In a current survey, 59 % of B2C recipients stated that marketing emails had influenced their purchasing decisions and 50 % said they make a purchase at least once a month due to marketing emails. With B2B recipients, it's even 87 %.

Did you know? Welcome emails are the most important emails in your email marketing. With an 86 % open rate and a 25 % click rate, you directly link important first-time interested parties to your brand and score points with special attentions right at the start of contact. Finally, there is an overview of email marketing from EmailToolTester:

Overview Email Marketing from EmailToolTester (https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/email-marketing-statistics/)