Emails Gone Missing: The Myth of the Delivered Metric
In this industry, it doesn’t matter if you’re an email expert or an email newbie, you’ll talk about email deliverability! That’s because everything we do–every campaign we plan, message we write, email we design, landing page we formulate—everything is for naught if we don’t get into the inbox in the first place.
Deliverability isn’t always a known commodity, however, because the number you get from your ESP might not be the actual number that made it into your recipients’ inboxes. The deliverability metric many marketers are used to includes only hard bounces, leaving out other inbox no shows like soft bounces, and those emails that ended up on junk or spam folders.
The industry doesn’t yet have a way to measure true deliverability when you take these other factors into account. But the savvy email expert knows better than to rely solely on the delivered metric for a hard and fast measurement, and to assume that the delivery percentage reported by the ESP might not be the same number as the percentage of emails ending up in inboxes.
The solution? Email marketing best practices that engage and delight, ensuring your emails are wanted, anticipated even, so you’re not flagged as spam, filtered from the junk folder, and missed when a soft bounce occurs. And you don’t have to be an email expert to serve up great stuff like that! Just smart.
About the Author: Sharon
