Delivery is like going to the postal office and having them accept your payment and 100 letters from you to send to your family and friends. They take the letters and send them to have them processed somewhere else. It isn't at this stage that you know that people will actually receive them. Deliverability is knowing that people received the letter in their mailbox and can engage with it after they are processed.
Your letters (or emails) may end up in the right place, or they may not. There are many logical reasons they may not, such as:
People changed address
The person at the counter doesn't like you and processes them all late
There is a mistake in the address
It got lost when processing
Their mailbox is full, and it ended up flying away or wet from the rain
In the world of email, those are the issues that can be dealt with easily enough (Will share more in order to tackle all those issues in the following posts).
Ensure that you authenticate your domain name with all tools that are sending email with your company's email addresses (All of them!). Ensure you are following all best practices, and don't rely on only the deliverability of the email system you are using. What we should all care more about is deliverability and not delivery. Deliverability takes into account your domain's reputation and the engagement of your subscribers. Just like a credit score takes more than your income into account. Here is a list of a few things taken into account when an inbox provider has to decide what to do with your email:
The number of subscribers you have & and how quickly your volume accrued
Are you authenticated?
How many spam traps have you hit lately?
How engaged are your subscribers?
Are you emailing subscribers who have not engaged even once with you in the last months?
When subscribers add your sender email in their contact list (Safe sender button)
Have subscribers saved your email (starred)?
How "heavy" is your email?
Does the content and writing style resonate with your business and customers?
Are you sending from a noreply@emailaddress.com?
In summary
Delivery: You sent your email to your subscribers, and the inbox of your recipients lets you know they received it.
Deliverability: How many emails, from the ones you sent, were accepted by your subscriber's inbox AND landed in the inbox.
So stop wondering why your customers don't engage with your brand if you have worked hard on your strategy and follow all best practices. Maybe, most of them haven't even received the email, to begin with.
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Note: Keep in mind that when your favourite email service provider is talking about their delivery rate (usually in the high 90s), they are talking about their own reputation. This doesn't mean that your emails will inbox, just like the bank won't give you a loan if your mother has excellent credit, and you don't.
If anyone has questions, leave a comment and I will gladly answer them.
This is very helpful. Great explanation. What does it mean for an email to be heavy? Does that mean a lot of text? Thanks for posting!
Each inbox provider will accept more or less 102 kb of information. Here are some of the usual reasons an email is considered heavy:
#1 - If a marketer asks a designer to create a beautiful high quality resolution image/poster/pdf and use it as the actual content for an email it can affect the deliverability of the campaign. Other than not being able to scan the image/poster/pdf to see if it is malicious (which affects your deliverability) it is not great for engagement as it can only have one link and it is not optimized for mobile (which also affects your deliverability). All inbox providers have their own limits to how heavy an email can be and will either not accept the email or hide the content. This results in a soft bounce if it is seen as malicious, or the recipients will see a beautiful white email with the "Message Clipped" error. In a regular HTML email, the email will be clipped (see # 3) and it will be cut off after limit. This means subscribers will see some of your email. In the case of an image/poster/pdf, the inbox can not cut the image at the limit, therefore it will show nothing. #2 - Companies sometimes like to add attachments. It is always better to have a direct link to the document using your website's domain (Not a direct link to download). Direct downloads or attachments with mass mailings is seen as a big no-no as. Inboxes won't actually scan the attachment, and depending on your reputation it can be seen as malicious. We all remember, "Way back when", when spammers would send emails with malicious software. Most of the time, the inbox provider won't send a message back (soft/hard bounce) so you will see 0% open rates for those subscribers, meaning they never received the email.
#3 The code of the actual email is actually too long and goes over the limit. Sometimes it can be code injected from Chrome Extensions into the HTML when using an editor such as MailChimp's or Cakemail's. Sometimes, I have seen many customers use images with HUGE & VERY LONG urls. This adds to the weight, and let's just say,102 kb is not that much, even for text.
No one wants to see this: