In email marketing, delivery refers to getting your message to the recipient. The delivery rate measures how reachable the contacts on your mailing list are: how many addresses actually receive your message compared with the number of addresses it was sent to.
What does email delivery mean?
In any communication strategy that includes email marketing, before you even evaluate the content and effectiveness of a message, you need to make sure it actually reaches the recipient.
That is what delivery is: getting a newsletter or any other email communication to an address in your database.
How to calculate it in a marketing campaign
The formula behind the delivery rate is simple: [number of emails sent] – [number of emails not received] = delivery rate.
To calculate it, you need to take into account the total number of contacts in your database. You should also calculate another equally important metric: the bounce rate.
When an email is not delivered: the bounce rate
The bounce rate is the opposite of delivery. It covers all the emails sent as part of your email marketing efforts that never reached the customer.
Bounces fall into two categories:
- Hard bounce: emails that cannot be delivered because the address is wrong or the mail server no longer exists.
- Soft bounce: emails that do not reach their destination because of a temporary, fixable problem, such as a full mailbox or an unavailable server.
How to improve delivery
In a good email marketing strategy, the delivery rate should be as high as possible. How can you improve it with a few simple techniques and precautions?
The first step is optimizing your contact list. A “clean” list contains only valid email addresses that actually exist, which lowers your hard bounce rate.
You can achieve this with double opt-in, a way to confirm that the address entered is correct: you ask the user to click an activation link that verifies their identity.
Another very simple method is to add an email confirmation field to your newsletter signup form.
Mistakes to avoid if you want a higher delivery rate
While some hard bounces are unavoidable, you can act on softer issues to raise your delivery rate.
Email delivery can suffer, for example, from the share of spam complaints your address receives. Keep an eye on that number and fix whatever leads users or servers to flag your emails as spam.
The cause may be sending messages too often or too aggressively. Another reason some servers reject your emails is content filtering: content filters automatically screen out words and expressions considered offensive or annoying.
Find out which ones are relevant to your industry and remove them from your messages: your email marketing campaigns will see better delivery.