Gmail and Yahoo are adding new requirements for email senders this year in an effort to reduce spam. For the recipients, it is a blessing. For e-commerce businesses, a critical marketing channel may be at risk.
To assess impact, we first need to understand “deliverability.”
Gmail has announced new 2024 rules for email senders in an effort to reduce spam. The new Yahoo email rules are similar.
Deliverability
Deliverability is the extent to which an email reaches recipients.
Good deliverability means messages arrive in subscribers’ inboxes. Subscribers won’t be able to open them but will see that you sent them.
Messages with poor deliverability are marked as promotional and filtered to another inbox or tab (such as “Promotions” in Gmail), sent to spam, or potentially blocked entirely.
Without deliverability, it doesn’t matter how good the email writing and design is. You could have the best products and deals, and no one will see them.
What influences deliverability? Let’s go.
Domain consistency
A sender’s domain appears in three places:
- In the “From” address (for example, admin@mybusiness.com),
- In the “Reply to” address,
- The sending domain.
Your email service provider usually assigns a sending domain. This is somewhat of a pseudonym because the real sender is the supplier and not your company. However, suppliers (e.g. MailChimp, Klaviyomany others) allow clients to use sending domains that match sender and reply-to addresses.
Make sure your domain is consistent in all three places and you’ll be in good shape.
Authentication
A recipient’s email provider needs to know that the sender is not an imposter.
Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records at the sender’s domain registrar passes this basic deliverability test. Without authentication, recipients’ providers are much more likely to block marketing emails.
Most email providers offer tools and guides to streamline or fully configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings.
Reputation
Someone who registers a domain and immediately sends 10,000 emails is probably not trustworthy. A domain with 50% passed emails is also not marked as spam or sent to expired or invalid addresses.
Conversely, a well-established sending domain with few spam complaints and consistent email engagement likely has a good reputation.
A domain’s sending reputation is critical to inbox delivery. Several services offer reputation monitoring. The best place to start is Google Postmaster Toolswhich is free.
Building a good reputation includes:
- Sending only to people who register,
- Never buy email addresses,
- Sending quality and relevant content,
- Deletion of expired subscribers and invalid addresses,
- Use a list cleaning service such as Neverbounce or AtData to detect bad addresses.
Google Postmaster Tools monitors the email sending reputation of domains. The service is free.
Content
The last element of deliverability is the most obvious: sending precise, clean and relevant content. Let’s say a clothing store sends emails to its subscribers about Lego sets. This would annoy and confuse many recipients and deserve a bad reputation.
Loading an email with excessive images and exaggerations — “win big,” “millions,” “lottery,” “gold” — can flag an email as spam.
Some of this is intuitive. Take for example excessive images. Emails from many e-commerce brands are truncated and cannot be easily read due to the large number of photos and product links.
Using Glockapps, my favorite deliverability testing tool, I verified the same message with more images rather than fewer images. I consistently get better deliverability results with fewer images. HubSpot studies show the same thing.
Definitely use images in your marketing emails. Don’t overdo it: use mostly text.
Delivery KPIs
Inform on “good” or “bad” delivery with these key performance indicators:
- The opening rate. The number of recipients who open an email divided by the number of emails sent. Some messaging apps (such as Apple’s iOS) mark all messages as opened for privacy reasons. Still, aim for an open rate of at least 20% for e-commerce campaigns.
- Click-through rate. The number of recipients who click through an email divided by the number of emails sent – ignoring unsubscribe clicks and “show in browser” links. Aim for a click-through rate of at least 1%.
- Rebound rate. The number of emails immediately bounced (usually due to invalid or blocked addresses) divided by the total number of emails sent. Keep this KPI below 1%.
- Unsubscribe rate. The number of recipients who click the unsubscribe link divided by the number of emails sent. Keep it below 0.5%.
- Spam rate. The number of recipients who click on the spam link divided by the number of emails sent. Spam is perhaps the most critical KPI. If the figure is 0.3% or more, deliverability and reputation will suffer. Aim for 0.05% or less.
My e-commerce business sells downloadable music software. In 2023, we sent 7.9 million marketing and automation emails, with these KPIs:
- 42% opening rate,
- 1.28% click-through rate for marketing; 3.43% for automation,
- Bounce rate of 0.43%,
- 0.27% unsubscribe rate,
- 0.005% spam rate.
Prioritize your business’s email deliverability and get results as good or better.
