Do You Know How to Measure Email Deliverability?
Carly Brantz
If you currently have an effective online marketing plan in place for your business, you are probably well aware of the importance of overall email deliverability. You may have already conquered the vital steps of developing a very compelling product or service offer and creating an excellent list of potential customers, but, your email message is useless if it ultimately fails to reach the inbox.
Accurate monitoring of your overall email deliverability rate is very challenging to do, as there isn’t an exact method to use that can guarantee each and every message will be correctly tracked. However, you can get a general idea about how successful your entire email campaign is by paying close attention to to certain measurable components.
To date, the only information you can confidently gather about a sent email is whether or not the recipient’s ISP accepted the message or not. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing the final destination of that email. For instance, you can learn that the message was accepted, but you aren’t able to get any useful information indicating if it landed in the dreaded spam folder. Obviously, an email classified as spam is extremely unlikely to get your important message across.
Luckily, there are some measurable statistics that can help you get a better idea of your campaign success rate. You can create a list of test email addresses and track where sent messages ultimately land after they are received. You will discover if your virtual notice ended up in the inbox, spam folder, or simply didn’t reach the test account at all. It’s recommended that you track this information over a period of time, often experts suggest a duration of 6 months to obtain useful statistical rates.
Open rates are a very reliable way to monitor where your email landed. Obviously, if a message is opened, the recipient received the message and was interested enough in the information to view it. Clearly, higher open rates indicate that you are sending your business information to the right people and getting their attention in an effective manner. Hence, your email campaigning efforts are delivering successful results.
To learn more about email deliverability, check out our Deliverability Guide.
