Email Marketing Deliverability: Which Department Should Be Accountable?

Not getting enough ROI on your marketing campaigns can be frustrating. But, who is to blame? 

Email marketing and everything email adjacent are vital for businesses because email is one of the most successful digital marketing mediums. Email marketing is hyper-personalized, making it easier to persuade the customer to take an action.

In fact, studies suggest marketers get over $36 to $40 for every dollar spent.

If your business is not getting the returns around those numbers, you might want to hold the responsible department accountable. But, whose job is it anyway?

Before jumping right into it, please note that the numbers above are an average and can widely vary depending on several factors, such as industry, targeted area, and audience. For an accurate estimation, look it up according to your industry.

Whose Job Is Email Deliverability?

Usually, one of the marketers or IT experts is thrown under the bus for email marketing deliverability failures. However, it is actually a collective effort that requires particular attention from both marketers and technicians. In fact, some businesses even hire industry-specific experts or consultants to fine-tune email strategies to maximize return-on-investment.

Mailgun did a survey to solve this burning question to discover that:

• Over 31% of organizations let their IT experts handle email marketing.
• 17% claimed marketers to be responsible for email delivery success or failures.
• 21% of them revealed the combination of marketing and IT.

We will come back to this study later in this article. However, before we debunk whose job it should be, let’s take a moment to understand the common factors of email delivery that decide if the email will land in the inbox or junk box.

Factors Impacting Email Deliverability

The following factors determine whether the email will land in the inbox of the intended recipient or the spam folder.

1. Email sender’s reputation

The reputation of the email sender is the most significant evaluation signal that receiving servers use to determine the authenticity of the incoming email. If it’s coming from a domain reported as spam, servers throw the email in the spam, or worse, bounce the email off, causing serious harm to the sender’s reputation.

Some factors, such as the escalating number of unsubscribes or recipients marking the email as spam, can harm the sender’s reputation and hinder delivery.

Another critical blow to a sender’s reputation is spam traps. If you send emails to such addresses you are most likely to be blacklisted or get your reputation seriously harmed. 

There are two kinds of spam traps: pristine and recycled. 

• Pristine are email addresses that are invalid and can not opt for receiving marketing emails. These are embedded in site codes and are used to bust marketers who practice ill practices for building email lists, such as collecting random emails from the internet. Sending an email to such an address can cause serious harm to your reputation, often leading to a blocklist.
• Recycled are email addresses that were once valid but are not valid right now. Recipients that haven’t responded to your messages for over a year are also included in spam traps. Although the reputation damage by texting this spam trap is comparatively lower, it is better to avoid it by regularly cleaning your email list.

2. Authentication protocols

Authentication protocols also directly impact the deliverability of the email. These protocols establish trust between the sender and the recipient’s email server, ensuring that the email originates from a legitimate source and has not been tampered with during transmission. 

Without proper authentication, ISPs servers reject, mark as spam, or bounce the email off. Especially now with more and more people using these authentication protocols to maintain email authenticity. Below are the primary authentication protocols that you should know about.

• Sender policy framework. SPF is an email authentication protocol that prevents email spoofing by allowing domain owners to specify which mail servers are permitted to send emails on their behalf. When an email is received, the recipient’s server checks the SPF record of the sender’s domain to verify if the sending server is listed in the DNS records; if it is, the email is completely legitimate. However, if the server is not listed in the DNS records, the email is bounced off, isolated, or sent to the spam folder.
• DomainKeys identified mail. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing emails, allowing the receiving server to verify that the email has not been altered in transit. It works by attaching a digital signature to the email’s header, which is then verified against a public key in the sender’s domain’s DNS records. Similar to SPF, it reassures the server that the email is indeed legitimate.
• Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance. DMARC record basically works like a manager looking after if the incoming emails are following the proper authentication protocols or not. It allows the user to choose what to do with the email if it fails to comply with the set regulation. DMARC offers three choices:
  • None. This DMARC policy signals the server not to do anything about the email and to receive it without any further action. This policy is used for testing purposes.
  • Quarantine. The policy ensures that emails that fail authentication protocol are sent to the spam or junk folder, hence quarantined. 
  • Reject. As the name suggests, this restrictive policy instructs email providers to discard emails that fail proper verification checks, preventing them from reaching the recipient at all.

💡 Also Read: What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC? [Everything You Need to Know]

3. Email infrastructure configuration

Even the most compelling marketing emails won’t reach the inbox if the email infrastructure isn’t properly configured. The technical side of email delivery plays a crucial role in ensuring emails reach the intended destination successfully.

A poorly configured infrastructure can lead to major deliverability issues, including high bounce rates, email throttling, and IP reputation damage. Below are the critical components that need to be optimized:

• Dedicated vs. shared IPs: If your email volume is high, using a dedicated IP address is essential for maintaining a strong sender reputation. A shared IP, on the other hand, can be risky because its reputation depends on other senders using the same IP.
• Reverse DNS (PTR) records: This ensures that the sending IP address resolves to a valid domain name, helping ISPs verify the legitimacy of the sender.
• Proper SMTP configuration: The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) should be set up correctly with appropriate relay settings, connection limits, and authentication mechanisms. You can do that easily with Post SMTP.
• Email throttling & rate limiting: Some ISPs restrict the number of emails that can be sent in a specific time frame. Configuring rate limits ensures that emails are delivered smoothly without triggering ISP defenses.
• Feedback loops (FBLs): Setting up FBLs with ISPs allows you to receive reports when recipients mark your emails as spam. This helps in identifying and addressing problematic email content or audience segments.

4. User interaction

Not only technical stuff but the way receivers respond to your emails also deeply impacts the email deliverability. High engagement and open rates send a positive response to the ISPs that abstain servers from marking them as spam.

Conversely, negative responses, such as low open rates/click-through rates or ample spam complaints (more on this later), can signal ISPs about illegitimate or low-value emails, resulting in spam-marked and eventually quarantined or rejected emails.

Low user interaction usually hints at one of the following for the internet service provider:

• Low content quality. If a user is refraining from reading the content of the email or taking time to look at the images or graphics of the email, that is a sign of low-quality content.
• Unclear subject lines. Users may also abandon an email if the subject line does not align well with the context of the email. For instance, a clickbaity title or a too good to be true offer.
• Lack of personalization. Lack of personalization sounds like a spammy technique aimed at a bulk of contacts, whereas personalization indicates legitimacy.
• Mobile unresponsiveness. With a bigger portion of the internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it is pretty self-explanatory to not prioritize unresponsive emails.
• Unclear call to action. Emails ending without a proper action may also get marked as spam since ISPs consider such emails as valueless.
• User experience. Low user interaction or engagement may also signal a lack of user experience optimization, which is another evaluation factor for ISPs.

5. Email frequency

Another evaluation metric ISPs use to distinguish between legitimate and spam email is the frequency of the emails. Usually, businesses or newsletters send out weekly, bi-weekly, twice, or thrice a week; in a nutshell, they follow a routine according to their marketing strategies.

Opposite to it, spam emails are done more frequently in bulk, making it easy to catch the spam campaign.

Ideally, your email frequency should be at a minimum, especially initially when building an audience. You can gradually increase your frequency once you have built enough rapport with your audience. Monitor analytics to evaluate how the audience is reacting to the changes.

Also, the ideal email frequency depends on the context of the emails. For example, some email newsletters send daily affirmations or jokes; these kinds of emails are expected daily by subscribers. However, one will not always appreciate reading a gigantic guide every day, as it might be overwhelming.

However, you can always clarify the frequency before the email collection form. This eliminates the stress over frequency, allowing you to follow your marketing strategies freely.

6. Spam complaints

The most significant factor that can prevent your emails from reaching your targeted inbox is when users mark your emails as spam. Not to mention, the strict threshold of 0.1% complaints can negatively impact the sender’s reputation severely. 

To put it into perspective, that’s one complaint per 1000 emails sent, which might seem pretty extreme, but if you think about it, spam complaints are a direct signal of something fishy. Thus, ISPs do not welcome such emails. 

The lower the complaint rate, the better. However, going for the perfect 0% spam rate is not only unrealistic, let alone achievable, because receivers usually spam-mark your emails for literally anything. Therefore, you should aim for it keep it below 0.3% by any means, because that’s where the line is drawn and anything after that is going straight to the spam folder.

Even if you can’t always get the perfect zero complaint rates, you can still keep the score below the threshold by being more authentic in your emails and being vigilant about user convenience. Simply put, avoid unsolicited content, misleading subject lines, and poor email design, and make it dead easy to unsubscribe.

7. List quality

Keeping your email list clean is fundamental to maintaining a high deliverability rate. Poor list hygiene can lead to high bounce rates, spam traps, and disengaged recipients. 

An outdated or improperly managed email list often contains inactive subscribers, invalid email addresses, or even spam traps. Sending emails to such addresses increases the chances of being flagged as spam or getting blacklisted by ISPs.

To maintain good list hygiene, consider the following practices:

• Regularly remove inactive subscribers. If a recipient has not engaged with your emails for an extended period—as discussed earlier, this is a major red flag—it’s best to either re-engage them with a targeted campaign or remove them altogether.
• Verify email addresses. Use email verification tools before sending campaigns to eliminate invalid or fake addresses. This process is compulsory for marketers who buy email lists.
• Implement a double opt-in process. This ensures that only genuinely interested recipients are added to your list, reducing spam complaints and improving engagement.
• Monitor bounce rates. If an email bounces repeatedly, remove that address immediately to prevent ISPs from seeing your emails as low-quality.
• Remove unsubscribers immediately. If someone opts out, respect their choice and remove them from your list immediately. Failing to do so can lead to spam complaints.

A clean list ensures that your emails are sent to active and engaged recipients, boosting your sender reputation and maximizing deliverability.

Enhancing Email Marketing Deliverability

Now that you understand the common factors that impact email deliverability, we can say for sure that email marketing is definitely something that goes beyond just one department. As we discussed, factors such as email infrastructure configuration and authentication protocols are better off being left for the technical team, whereas the marketing team can create a publishing plan to avoid spam complaints, monitor results, and create future campaigns accordingly to maximize deliverability and, potentially, sales and revenue.

What can technicians do?

Here is a complete checklist of what a business can expect from the technical side of the corporation:

• Setting up authentication protocols. The IT department should take care of authentication protocols, such as DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, as discussed earlier. Nowadays, ISPs refuse to accept emails lacking such protocols. With Google and Yahoo’s policy making it mandatory for bulk sending, it’s essential to have such protocols intact. 
• Setting up email infrastructure. Setting up email infrastructure is another thing that marketers should not stress about. Configuring dedicated or shared IPs, reverse DNS records, and feedback loops should all be the IT people’s responsibility.
• Blocklist removal. It refers to the process of getting your IP address, domain name, or website removed from the list of spam email senders. Sometimes, even legitimate marketers can be marked as spam due to one or more of the reasons described above. Hence, timely blocklist removal can enhance email deliverability.
• IP warming. As we learned earlier, sending excessive emails may annoy users, leading to higher complaint rates. To combat that, technical experts must warm up IPs, which is the process of gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a specific IP, to build positive sender reputation, which can prevent landing into spam folder.
• Implementing encryption protocols. ISPs appreciate any protocol that can contribute to the authenticity of the email. Thus, implementing protocols, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS), DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), etc.
• Ensuring compliance with laws. The technical team should also ensure compliance with email programs, such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and specific requirements to ISPs to prevent legal issues that can lead to loss of reputation.

What can marketers do?

Everything else can be assigned to marketers. Here is what marketers can do to ensure sky-high email deliverability.

• Construct compelling emails. First and foremost, marketers should create captivating emails encapsulated with a catchy subject line that can catch the reader’s interest and poke them to read further.
• Build list. Marketers should also take care of building the email list by adding new active emails consistently. 
• Ensure list hygiene. Maintaining list hygiene, simply put, removing dead, inactive, inconsistent subscribers, can also enhance email deliverability by enhancing user engagement.
• Develop marketing strategies. Email marketing thrives when the emails are sent to those who are actually interested in your products. Thus, creating robust marketing strategies can refine deliverability by improving engagement.
• Monitor campaign analytics. Understanding open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversions helps marketers adjust their strategies accordingly. Helping keep campaigns relevant and improve deliverability.
• Create educational content. Marketers can create educational content that can educate readers about the products, which can build customer relations. Eventually helping with sales and engagement.
• A/B test campaigns. Marketers can also enhance deliverability by testing multiple instances of marketing emails and finalizing upon those that comparatively perform better. 

When To Look For a Helping Hand?

Email deliverability can be a complicated process that may require constant tweaks and amendments. And it is fairly common for an abrupt hurdle to arise that is beyond the responsibilities of both departments. In such a case, reaching out to trained professionals is essential.

For instance, filtering out a gigantic spreadsheet to look for valid emails is a responsibility that can not be assigned to either of the two. In such a case, hiring a data entry expert or an individual freelancer who is proficient with spreadsheets is important.

Moreover, there will be constant challenges that don’t even look like problems from the outside. Such errors will negatively impact your email campaigns without you having an idea about it. In such cases, email marketing professionals can dive deep into the issues and potentially find proper solutions.

Enhancing Email Deliverability with Post SMTP!

Neither marketers nor technology experts can actually help unless you have correctly configured necessary authentication protocols, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Given the importance of these security enhancers, you can always turn your head to Post SMTP!

It is the best SMTP plugin for WordPress. Not only helps with email deliverability but comes with multiple other benefits such as helpful deliverability testing tools and a variety of choices. Not to mention, you can always get more features by switching to a premium plan!

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