What Is Email Deliverability?

An email has a long way to go before it arrives in a customer’s mailbox: It must pass numerous filters and technical checks of the email service to avoid the Spam folder.

Major email services like Gmail and Outlook evaluate many indicators when they receive an email and decide which folder to put it in for a customer.

Deliverability depends on the following factors:

1. Customer database activity. How often do your customers open emails, click links, unsubscribe, or report spam?
2. Sender’s domain reputation. For example, does the sender email the customers who have previously unsubscribed or reported spam?
3. Email content. Does it mention, for example, products whose advertising is prohibited by law?
4. Infrastructure reputation. For example, when you send campaigns via email services, the deliverability may depend on the reputation of IP addresses.
5. Policy and signature settings. Set up DKIM signatures and DMARC policies to prevent email spoofing and maintain the sender’s reputation.

You cannot directly measure or see in reports the deliverability of your emails to the Inbox or Promotions folder. Email services do not disclose which folder your email ended up in. Nonetheless, you can get an indirect indication of whether your deliverability has improved or declined from certain engagement metrics such as open rate and click-through rate.

Delivery refers to the recipient’s mail server accepting your email, regardless of the folder it went to: Inbox, Promotions, or Spam. If your emails end up in the Spam folder, they will have a high delivery rate but low deliverability.

If the recipient’s server rejects an email, the sender receives a notification called a bounce message or "bounce." This allows you to determine if the email has not been delivered and, if so, why.

If you use Maestra to send emails, the platform also receives such bounces and shows them as actions in a customer’s Activity Feed. You can see whether your recipient failed to receive the email and, if so, why.

A delivery rate of 99 percent or higher is considered good.

Your can view this rate in the Campaigns report:

1. Go to Reports → Campaigns in your account.
2. Select Channel → Email in the Conditions tab:

3. Click Apply for the report to calculate the email delivery rate: