Deliverability may not be the most exciting part of email marketing, but it is the most important part. It doesn't matter how great your creative or offer is if it doesn't reach the email inbox.
Getting inboxes is getting harder. Earlier this year, Google and Yahoo began enforcing new requirements for bulk email senders. Luckily, these requirements help reputable email marketers by making best practices mandatory.
Here we explain why the requirement was put in place, the impact and cost of delivery issues, and how to ensure that email is always delivered.
Why are the rules getting stricter?
“Google, Yahoo, and many other mailbox providers are becoming increasingly frustrated with dealing with spam,” Al Iverson, industry research and community engagement lead at Valimail, told MarTech, “so they're tightening their requirements to make it harder to send unwanted and junk email.”
How big is the spam problem?
“The most recent numbers I saw were that 347 billion emails are sent every day,” Cynthia Price, senior vice president of marketing at Litmus, told Martech, “and depending on which metric you look at, we estimate that more than half of those are spam.” That's 173 billion spam emails. one day.
“Internet service providers, global companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are doing everything in their power to keep our inboxes safe from chaos,” Price said.
What are the new requirements?
The new requirements codify tried-and-tested best practices for email marketing.
“Best practices are now moving towards literally documented requirements that mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo put on their websites and say, 'These are what you have to do now,'” said Iverson, who is also the long-time publisher of The Spam Resource newsletter.
The majority of requirements focus on three areas: authentication of outgoing emails, reported spam rates, and the ability to easily unsubscribe from email lists.
certification
High volume senders (typically those sending to at least 5,000 addresses per day) should use:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) helps prevent domain spoofing by allowing senders to identify mail servers that are allowed to send email from their domain.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature to outgoing email, verifying that the message was sent by an authorized sender and hasn't been tampered with along the way.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) helps domain owners specify actions to take when email authentication fails and also enables reporting of email authentication results.
Learn more: Gmail spam update is here: what should I do next?
Spam Rate
According to Google, bulk senders should keep their spam rate (i.e. the percentage of sent messages that are reported as spam by recipients) as reported in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.1% and “no higher than 0.3%.”
According to Yahoo, your spam rate should be below 0.3%.
Unsubscribe
Yahoo and Google require organizations to make it easy for users to unsubscribe.
This means:
- Use of a functional unsubscribe header to support one-click unsubscribing from marketing and subscribed messages.
- Include a prominent unsubscribe link in the body of the email.
- We will process your unsubscribe request within two days.
“You no longer need to hide unsubscribe links or send people to landing pages with phone numbers,” Price says. “It still happens a lot, but it really needs to stop. You need to allow people to remove themselves from your list, because forcing them to do so will just frustrate them more and more, encouraging them to mark you as spam every time.”
Cost of Failed Delivery
According to Mailtrap, the cost of undelivered mail for US businesses is:
- Over $164 million per day.
- Over $1.1 billion per week.
- Over $4.9 billion per month.
- Over $59.5 billion per year.
According to a report by Validity, delivery issues cost more than $15,000 for every million emails sent.
“Many people don't realize they have delivery issues until it's too late,” Price says, “and just like a credit score, it takes time to rebuild it and be recognized as a safe sender.”
Increased delivery success rate
- Over the past three years, the average delivery rate has improved from 94.26% in 2020 to 96.43% in 2023.
- The average bounce rate was 1.98%.
- Over the past four years, the e-commerce industry has seen the biggest improvement in deliverability (up 10.28%) and decrease in bounce rate (0.7%).
- Over the past four years, the overall average unsubscribe rate has decreased by 26.32%.
- The overall spam rate in 2023 decreased by 44.4% compared to 2020.
sauce: Selzy Email Marketing Performance by Industry, 2024 Benchmarks
Learn more: Google, Yahoo's new rules for bulk email senders: What you need to know
Consumers also dislike delivery failures
It's not just businesses that are bothered by email not being delivered: consumers want emails that are relevant to their interests, and they get frustrated when their emails aren't delivered.
According to a report from Mailgun:
- When emails from a brand are regularly classified as spam, 52.7% of consumers say they feel frustrated, lose trust, or unsubscribe as a result.
- Over 70% of consumers check their spam folder to see if they’ve missed an important email, and around 33% get annoyed when they find an email from a brand in their spam folder.
Delivery Best Practices
Tighter regulations also mean clearer regulations: Yahoo and Google have made their requirements very clear to everyone.
“The good news is that they're trying to be really transparent about what their algorithms are, how they measure bad behavior, what they're looking for,” Price said. “It's important to stay in the loop on what it is, and what should you do?”
These best practices can be summed up as: Don't spam Send relevant content to people who want to hear from you.
Monitor inbox placement ratesThis will tell you if your email program is working and if the message has been blocked by your mailbox provider.
Keep your email list organized. Make sure there are no spam traps, unknown users, or inactive subscribers. Use a double opt-in process to reduce inactive and spam addresses on your list. Use a contact validation solution on your existing lists and make sure every new address is validated as it is added.
Send periodically and continuously. Spammers send emails in varying volumes, not at set times. Make sure your email bursts are similar in size and sent at regular intervals. “Implement a preference center so your subscribers can say, 'Actually, I only want one email a month from you, or I want every email I send from now on,'” Price says. “You'll have both types of readers, and if you treat everyone the same, that's where you'll get real problems.”
Monitor your sender reputation. Sender reputation is a combination of IP reputation (how trustworthy an IP is based on sending history) and domain reputation (how trustworthy an email sending domain is based on engagement, spam complaints, bounce rates, etc.). It is one of the main factors mailbox providers use to decide whether to send a message to the inbox, spam folder, or block it completely. Your sender score is a numerical representation of your sender reputation, and you can view it for free at SenderScore.org.
Use BIMI to increase reliability. Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) places your brand logo on your email, proving that the email is from a verified, trusted sender and is safe to open.
“There are a few simple things to keep in mind, the most basic being making sure the content you send is relevant and valuable to your audience,” Price says. “This is the hardest thing to solve, but it's key to making sure people don't actually think of you as spam or mark you as spam.”
