What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability involves a variety of practices designed to ensure that emails reach recipients' inboxes without being rejected or marked as spam. Ensuring high deliverability is crucial for any omnichannel strategy for several reasons:
Critical messages such as account creation confirmations, password reset emails, and order service related messages must reach recipients to ensure the smooth operation of your business.
Marketing emails that don't reach users represent lost opportunities and wasted effort from your team. With the growing volume of emails users receive, it's essential to refine your targeting, content, and user experience to make each email anticipated and effective in driving conversions.
What is the "sender reputation"?
The sender reputation refers to an internal scoring used by inbox providers to evaluate the trustworthiness and reliability of an email sender (e.g. IP reputation, domain reputation, etc).
It is one of the indicators that help inbox providers decide wether an incoming email should be accepted, delayed or blocked, shown in the inbox or in the spam folder, displayed in the main inbox of the user or in another category.
The sender reputation is not shared across all inbox providers.
Each inbox provider uses its own set of parameters and values different aspects of your email activity differently.
The reputation is usually build taking into account
Sending IP and sending domain reputation, taking into account the history of sent emails and the presence in block lists.
Authentication of the email trafic (e.g. use of authentication protocols like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC).
List hygiene (e.g. high hard bounce rate indicating a poor list quality, high soft bounce rate indicating inactive subscribers are targeted, etc).
Sending frequency and volume (e.g. senders with consistent and predicable patterns tend to be less suspicious).
User feedback, wether it is positive (e.g. opens, clicks, interactions, etc) or negative (e.g. unsubscribes, spam complaints, etc).
Taking care of your reputation Shared vs dedicated IP
The distinction between legitimate senders and spammers is constantly evolving as inbox providers need to react to increasingly sophisticated spamming tactics. For legitimate senders, this means more risks to be identified as a potential spammer and to get emails blocked or not shown in the main inbox.
Building a strong email reputation requires long-term commitment and daily attention from your technical and marketing teams. The amount of work needed to sustain a good reputation is different depending on your situation.
→ If you are using shared IPs
Using shared IPs is a good solution for most senders, either they have or not enough trafic to sustain the reputation of a single IP (e.g. <500K emails/day).
From the start, they benefit from the reputation of the shared IPs. The reputation is already established thanks to the other customers using these IPs, reducing the risks of facing delivery issues and making the subdomain warmup process easier. This is also a cost-effective solution, that comes with other advantages, like a delivery management team monitoring possible IP-related issues and mitigating them for you.
Although using shared IPs might appear to be a "low maintenance" option, it still requires adherence to best practices in terms of userbase quality, email sending, and email content. It is possible for your domain's reputation to decline, even if you use shared IPs with an strong reputation.
In order to protect the email activity of our shared IPs customers, all Batch customers are:
Audited: Each customer must fill a vetting document to ensure they follow the industry best practices. In case of non-compliance, modifications are required before they can send their first email with Batch.
Assisted: Our Customer Success team help you building a domain warmup plan, to avoid operational mistakes and start from the right foot.
Monitored: Our Delivery team monitors the email activity on Batch shared IPs to alert in case of anomalies and suspend a customer's email activity if necessary.
→ If you are using a dedicated IP
Enterprise customers sending large volumes of emails (e.g. 2 to 5 million emails/day), with dedicated resources to monitor and troubleshoot email trafic, can go for a dedicated IP to send their emails.
When choosing a dedicated IP, Batch customers are fully in charge of their own IP reputation:
Tailored IP warmup: By taking care of the IP warmup process, you can customize the warmup strategy to maximize long-term deliverability for your specific case. While initial delivery issues may occur, such as temporary blocks or delays, a carefully planned warmup ensures better results with inbox providers over time.
Constant and predictable trafic: With exclusive use of the dedicated IP, you have the advantage of establishing a consistent email sending pattern. This helps inbox providers recognize your traffic as trustworthy, significantly reducing the risk of being flagged as a potential threat.
KPIs monitoring: Managing a dedicated IP allows for precise monitoring of key performance indicators. While our Delivery team handles this for shared IPs, having a dedicated IP gives you the opportunity to directly oversee and optimize the health and performance of your email campaigns.
→ In both cases
Customers who use Batch shared or dedicated IPs are all required to adhere to:
The service agreement and the code of conduct outlined in the contract, which take into account industry best practices.
The local legislation applicable in the country of the email subscribers they are addressing.
The guidelines of inbox providers. They must stay informed about any updates of these guidelines (see annexes at the end of the article).
Note: In order to help you navigate these new complexities, this article will guide you through the key practices for managing email deliverability. We will cover crucial elements such as collecting email addresses, maintaining subscriber lists, and crafting effective email campaigns.
Additional resources
In addition to following the guidelines described above, be sure you take into account the best practices documented by main inbox providers and anti-spam organizations to help your mailings reach their intended audience: