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  • Managing Email DeliverabilityManaging Email Deliverability

    • Date: 16/07/09

    • Category: Email Marketing

    Email deliverability incorporates all the issues which stop your emails from arriving in your recipient’s inbox. Improving email deliverability, therefore, involves increasing the amount of emails which get delivered by looking at the issues which are hindering email deliverability such as bounces and spam filters.

    For those new to email marketing, it may be difficult to understand how an email could be prevented from being delivered. Bounces are akin to return mail, in that, when the email isn’t delivered it is returned to the sender’s inbox with a notification of failed email delivery. Bounces are divided into two types; hard bounces are the fault of permanent or technical error such as a non-existent address or a misspelt address. Hard bounces are common because people regularly change addresses resulting in the old ones being deleted after a period of time, or if people use their work email as their primary email access, this will be deleted if they change jobs. Soft bounces, on the other hand, are the result of a temporary technical error such as a faulty connection or a full inbox. Soft bounces will normally remain in the sender’s outbox until the email can be successfully sent, and some mailboxes may accompany this with a notification message.

    Anti-spam measures such as spam filters are a deliberate interference from the recipient’s mailbox. Unsolicited bulk email, or spam, is illegal, and mailboxes go to great lengths to prevent this sort of mail being delivered. Some mailboxes will delete the mail outright, or place it in a junk or spam folder for the recipient to open at their discretion. The problems for email marketers is that spam filters aren’t perfect, and often legitimate mail will go undelivered because 1) not all mailboxes uses the same anti-spam measures, and 2) the sender won’t receive any notification of non-delivery meaning there isn’t any feedback on why the message was considered illegitimate.

    Bounces are easier to improve because a notification is received, meaning the problem can be rectified immediately or even automatically if an email marketing software is being used. This bounce management system makes list hygiene a lot easier to keep on top of. To find out how you can manage anti-spam measures, see The Big Spam Theory and How to Avoid Going from ‘Whitelists’ to ‘Blacklists’