Deliverability is one of the most critical aspects of email marketing. It measures whether your emails are reaching your customers’ inboxes or getting blocked by spam filters. In Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), monitoring deliverability is vital for ensuring the success of your campaigns, as high deliverability means your messages are reaching the intended audience, driving engagement, and converting leads.
Deliverability goes beyond just sending emails. It involves reputation management, authentication protocols, and continuous monitoring of key metrics to identify and resolve potential issues. In this article, we’ll explore how you can monitor and improve deliverability in SFMC, why it’s so crucial, and the steps you can take to keep it optimized.
This topic connects directly with Day 13: Best Practices for Email Marketing in SFMC, which discussed strategies for crafting effective emails. Additionally, it’s related to Day 89: Email Authentication Best Practices (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) as authentication plays a significant role in ensuring high deliverability.
What is Deliverability?
Deliverability in the context of email marketing refers to the ability of your emails to land in the recipient’s inbox rather than the spam folder. While sending emails is easy, ensuring they reach the inbox without being filtered out by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) or blocked by email filters can be challenging.
SFMC provides tools and features that enable marketers to monitor and improve deliverability by identifying and addressing issues related to email reputation, compliance, and content quality. Good deliverability means higher open rates, better engagement, and more conversions.
Why Monitoring Deliverability is Important
Monitoring email deliverability is essential for several reasons:
Maximizing ROI: If your emails aren’t reaching customers, your entire campaign’s performance will suffer. Monitoring helps ensure that the time and resources spent creating your campaigns are not wasted.
Maintaining Reputation: ISPs and email service providers assess your sender reputation before deciding where to place your emails. If your reputation is low, emails may go to spam, or worse, not be delivered at all. Constant monitoring helps maintain a positive reputation.
Improving Engagement: Deliverability is closely tied to engagement metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. By improving deliverability, you increase the chances of recipients interacting with your content.
Key Deliverability Metrics in SFMC
To monitor and optimize deliverability, SFMC offers several key metrics that provide insights into how your emails are performing:
1. Bounce Rates
Bounce rates refer to the percentage of emails that were not delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are two types of bounces:
Hard Bounces: Permanent delivery failures caused by invalid email addresses or non-existent domains.
Soft Bounces: Temporary issues such as a full inbox or server issues.
High bounce rates can severely impact your sender reputation. SFMC provides detailed reports on bounce rates, allowing marketers to clean their lists and address these issues proactively.
2. Open Rates
While open rates don’t directly indicate deliverability, they can give you insights into how many emails reached the recipient’s inbox and were opened. A low open rate might suggest that your emails are landing in the spam folder, making it a useful indicator for potential deliverability issues.
3. Spam Complaints
When recipients mark your emails as spam, it negatively affects your sender reputation. SFMC allows you to monitor spam complaints and provides strategies for minimizing them, such as offering clear opt-out options and ensuring your content is relevant and valuable to your audience.
4. Unsubscribe Rates
A high unsubscribe rate may not directly impact deliverability, but it does indicate that your emails are not resonating with your audience. Monitoring unsubscribe rates can help you refine your messaging and segmentation strategies, both of which can positively influence deliverability.
5. Sender Score
Your sender score is an indicator of your email-sending reputation. It’s measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating better deliverability. SFMC provides tools to monitor your sender score, and maintaining a score above 90 is crucial for ensuring that your emails land in the inbox.
Common Factors Affecting Deliverability
Several factors can impact your deliverability. Being aware of these factors and addressing them proactively can help improve your email performance.
1. Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation is the most critical factor in determining deliverability. ISPs evaluate your reputation based on the quality of your mailing lists, email engagement, and whether your emails are marked as spam.
2. Email Authentication
Authentication protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) play a crucial role in improving deliverability. These protocols verify that your emails are coming from a trusted source, helping ISPs trust your emails.
We covered this in detail in Day 89: Email Authentication Best Practices (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), where we discussed how each protocol works and how to set them up in SFMC.
3. List Hygiene
Maintaining a clean email list is essential for good deliverability. Regularly removing inactive or invalid email addresses helps reduce bounce rates and improve your sender reputation. SFMC offers automated tools to clean your list and keep it updated.
4. Content Relevance
The content of your emails plays a significant role in deliverability. If your emails are not relevant to the recipient, they are more likely to be marked as spam or ignored, leading to low engagement rates. By personalizing your emails based on customer data, you can improve relevance and ensure higher engagement.
For more insights on this, refer to Day 60: Personalizing Emails Based on Customer Data, where we discussed how to tailor email content based on customer preferences and behaviors.
5. Volume and Frequency
Sending too many emails, especially to unengaged recipients, can harm your deliverability. ISPs may flag your account for sending spam or too many emails in a short time. Monitoring the frequency of your email campaigns ensures that you maintain good relationships with ISPs and customers alike.
Best Practices for Monitoring Deliverability in SFMC
To ensure consistent and high deliverability in SFMC, marketers must follow best practices. These include strategies for monitoring key metrics, maintaining sender reputation, and ensuring emails reach the inbox.
1. Use a Deliverability Monitoring Tool
SFMC offers a deliverability monitoring tool that tracks key deliverability metrics in real-time. This tool provides insights into how ISPs are treating your emails, and alerts you if your sender score drops or if emails are bouncing more than usual. Regularly reviewing this data allows you to take immediate action to resolve issues.
2. Monitor Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates, are essential for identifying deliverability problems early. A sudden drop in engagement might indicate that your emails are being flagged as spam or are not reaching the inbox.
3. Leverage Email Authentication
Setting up proper email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC ensures that your emails are verified and trusted by ISPs. SFMC makes it easy to configure these protocols to maintain high deliverability.
4. Maintain List Hygiene
Regularly cleaning your email list by removing inactive and invalid email addresses is essential. SFMC’s list management tools automate this process, ensuring that you only send emails to engaged and valid recipients.
5. Segment Your Audience
Segmentation allows you to target the right people with the right message, leading to higher engagement and better deliverability. By dividing your list based on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics, you can tailor your campaigns for maximum impact.
6. A/B Test Your Emails
A/B testing helps identify what resonates best with your audience, leading to better engagement and improved deliverability. Test different subject lines, content, and call-to-action buttons to determine what drives the best results.
Conclusion
Monitoring deliverability in SFMC is not just about tracking numbers; it’s about maintaining a healthy relationship with ISPs, ensuring your emails land in the inbox, and engaging your audience effectively. By leveraging SFMC’s deliverability tools and following best practices like authentication, list hygiene, and segmentation, marketers can achieve optimal deliverability and drive meaningful results.
Whether you’re looking to improve engagement, protect your sender reputation, or optimize your email campaigns, deliverability monitoring is key to success. By integrating the insights discussed in previous articles like Day 13: Best Practices for Email Marketing in SFMC and Day 89: Email Authentication Best Practices, you’ll be well-equipped to monitor and improve deliverability in all your campaigns.
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