[FAQ]

Hey everyone,

I’m looking at my email campaign reports, and I see a very high “delivery rate,” something like 99%, which seems great. However, I still have a feeling that many of our emails are ending up in the spam folder or the promotions tab rather than the primary inbox.

Could someone please explain the technical difference between “email delivery” and “email deliverability”? The terms sound so similar, but I get the sense they mean very different things. Is deliverability the metric I should be more focused on for getting our emails seen?

Trying to get my head around these terms. Thanks for any help!

[Jeff Bullas]

Understanding the difference between email delivery and email deliverability is crucial for any serious email marketer, as the two terms describe very different stages of an email’s journey and measure different kinds of success.

First, email delivery is a technical measure. It simply means that your email was successfully sent and accepted by the recipient’s mail server. When your email marketing platform reports a 99% delivery rate, it is telling you that 99% of your emails did not “bounce” or result in a permanent delivery failure due to an invalid or non-existent email address. It confirms the email has arrived at the front door, but it says nothing about what happens next.

Second, email deliverability, sometimes called inbox placement, is the much more important marketing measure. Deliverability refers to where your email lands after it has been delivered. Does it get placed in the subscriber’s primary inbox where it is likely to be seen? Or does it get filtered into the promotions tab, or worse, sent directly to the spam or junk folder?

A simple way to think about it is like posting a letter. Delivery is when the postal worker successfully puts the letter into the recipient’s letterbox. Deliverability is whether the homeowner brings that letter inside to read, or if they immediately identify it as junk mail and throw it directly into the recycling bin without opening it.

You can have a near-perfect delivery rate, but if your deliverability is poor, a large portion of those “delivered” emails could be going straight to the spam folder, meaning they will almost never be seen by your subscribers.

Your deliverability is influenced by a range of factors that inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook analyse. These include your sender reputation, whether you have proper email authentication set up (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), your subscriber engagement levels, and the quality and relevance of your email content. These signals are what the inbox provider uses to decide if you are a trustworthy sender who belongs in the primary inbox.

In summary, delivery is the technical success of the server accepting your email. Deliverability is the marketing success of that email landing in the inbox where it has a chance to be read. Your primary goal should always be to improve your deliverability.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Author]

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