Deliverability: an underlooked KPI, but how important to the few who are looking at it. What is it? How it can be improved? We’re going to answer that question right now.
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What is deliverability?
If we take the literal definition, email deliverability refers to the likelihood of an email being delivered to a subscriber's inbox.
It is a measure of how successful you are at getting your message in front of your intended audience.
A decrease in your deliverability can be caused by several factors, such as a bad technical setup, poor copywriting, or bounces, for example.
Now that we understand what deliverability means, let's dive into some benchmarks.
Benchmark
Email Open Rate - Benchmark and how to improve
Given you’re using direct emails and not marketing domains, your average opening rate should reach at least 60%. Anything below is considered bad and might be explained by a technical setup that is wrong or bad copywriting.
Benchmark :
Anything below 60% is considered bad, probably due to a wrong technical setup that can be corrected
60-80% is considered average: this means technically all is good and improvements will be based on your segmentation and copywriting
Anything above 80% is considered excellent: well done!
Be suspicious of the 100% open rate: it's probably that something is opening all your emails and skewing your stats. Note that email opens are tracked using a pixel left on the email. Whenever the email is opened, the pixel is loaded.
Email Click Rate - Benchmark and how to improve
Click is a great way to track the interest of a lead.
Benchmark :
0% is probably because you forgot to activate the link tracking
Anything below 5% is considered low
5-8% is considered good
Anything above 8% is excellent
How to improve :
Embed your links using hyperlinks: it's a very bad practice to copy-paste a link directly into the email. Make sure to embed the link using a hyperlink to make the reason/content stand out and improve the click rate
Email Bounce Rate - Benchmark and how to improve
Bounce is the enemy. Too high a bounce rate may damage your domain’s reputation. Too high a bounce rate for prolonged periods may lead your email to end up in spam - if you're sending a lot of them.
Bounce rate alone isn't enough to assess if you're taking a risk - you have to look at the volume per week also. If you have a campaign with a 30% bounce rate, but only 50 emails, risks are limited.
Benchmark :
Anything below 7% is considered very low risk.
7-12% is acceptable, so long as you are not sending more than 200 emails per day consistently
12-20% is considered at risk, especially if you send more than 200 emails per day consistently
Anything above 20% is dangerous if you're doing volume
How to improve it?
After understanding what benchmarks are, we can focus on how to improve them.
Firstly, let's discuss technical adjustments.
As previously mentioned, bad deliverability can sometimes be caused by poor technical setup.
But what does a technical setup entail? It includes DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. Do these acronyms seem confusing? Let's clarify:
SPF: Sender Policy Framework. It verifies the sender's IP address.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail. It verifies the sender's identity.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It prevents emails from being forged by someone else.
In LGM, if there is an error, it will be displayed in the mail settings of your identity.
There are several ways to check if those records are valid.
One easy way is to use the Google Admin Toolbox. Input your custom email domain, and Google will:
Inform you of all critical and non-critical issues
Provide a guide for each issue on how to set everything up properly.
Even if not using a Google-provided address, you can use this tool, those records are universal. Otherwise, you can use the MX toolbox that will do the same and go further. It will help you out on how to correct your problems
Have you heard about our Lord and Savior Custom Domain Tracking?
If not already using one, consider using a tracking domain in your emails to collect engagement analytics. The domain has the format tracking.actual-url.com and allows you to track when your email has been opened and clicked.
The tracking domain is nearly invisible to leads as they will be automatically redirected to the final URL after clicking a link. They can only see the tracking domain by hovering over the hyperlink.
In LGM, you can set up your own custom domain tracking. By default, when tracking links within LGM without using your own custom domain tracking, you will use the LGM shared domain. Since this domain is common to all users, it has a less reputable reputation among servers. Using your own custom domain tracking will help you improve your deliverability.
To set up your custom domain tracking, please read our article on how and why to set up a custom tracking domain.
Copywriting adjustments
There are some copywriting adjustments you can make that are not specific to La Growth Machine.
For example, you can use spins within your messages. A spin variable allows you to generate a different version of the template based on the spins that you write. This is very useful if you're reaching out to people who know each other with the same template, and you don't want them to see that it's always the same message. In the following example, we used one spin variable with 4 spins, another with 4 spins, and a third with 3 spins, creating a template with 48 different variations. If you want to learn more about Spins, just check out this article! If you send this message to multiple people in the same company, no one will get the same message.
This will improve your deliverability because if you send more than 300 emails with the same copywriting, Google will ban you, and no email sent equals 0 deliverability.
Avoid using spam words such as "lower price," "save up to," "special promotion," and "get started now," among others. You can follow this list of good recommendations.
Warming up your email
If your email domain is new, you need to build some activity to earn the trust of other email servers. A new email domain that suddenly sends a lot of emails is suspicious!
There are two possible approaches:
Manual: Over the next three weeks, use your professional email to exchange messages with people outside of your organization. You can also sign up for newsletters to receive more emails.
Avoiding bounces
Then, there is the question of where the email comes from. In La Growth Machine, this will vary depending on the source of the email.
When using La Growth Machine to enrich emails, LGM only provides you with an email we’re able to verify so long as you haven’t activated catch-all emails.
This is the safest approach but sometimes may yield a low enrichment rate. Learn what the catch-all feature means and why sometimes you may choose to activate it.
If you’re using outside sources to find emails, La Growth Machine will not verify their authenticity. You’ll have to do it yourself and you might do it by using email validation services such as Zerobounce.
It's up to you now!
Even if a 100% deliverability rate does not exist, with those elements, you can be sure that most of your leads will receive your emails for sure! Moreover, you can check these articles :