Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Deliverability Rate

Your deliverability rate indicates whether or not you’re getting to the subscribers you intend to reach. If you sent to 100 people and 50 messages were undeliverable, you had a deliverable rate of 50 percent (ouch). Obviously, deliverability is critical to your success. If you get blocked or wind up in the subscriber’s junk folder, all of your effort is a waste of time. In Chapter 13, we’ll talk about the reasons why filtering issues and deliverability problems might emerge. At this point, you should make a commitment to measure your overall deliverability rate. You also need to measure deliverability across several ISPs and domains. Without going through this exercise, you have no idea if you have a problem with one particular ISP, such as Gmail, or if you have issues across the board. If you are a B-to-B marketer, you may have a bigger challenge on your hands since a higher proportion of your email database may be company domains rather than the bigger ISPs (i.e., [e-mail] as opposed to [e-mail]).

There are a few ways to monitor your deliverability. The simplest and most effective way is by creating a seed list. A seed list is simply a list of test email addresses that enables you to see the results of your deliverability firsthand. A good practice is to sign up under several email addresses, at as many ISPs as possible, including the majors (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Comcast, Earthlink, Hotmail, MSN, etc.) and the minors. If a specific organization ...