Why is email deliverability important?

Key findings on the importance of deliverability

Deliverability problems vs the payoff

Our survey asked people responsible for email in their organizations to identify both the biggest problems with landing in spam and the biggest benefits of prioritizing email deliverability.

The top three problems with emails being filtered into spam include two factors related to the customer experience and one related to how those customers view a brand:

1. People miss important information (37.5%)

2. Damage to brand reputation (15.9%)

3. Upset customers/contacts (13.4%)

Keeping customers informed is pivotal to building trust, so it’s no surprise that the most common concern centers around customers missing important messages. That could be a transactional email such as an order confirmation or password reset. There’s no denying those messages contain important information for individual recipients. However, your email newsletter or a weekly promotional campaign could also contain valuable information for customers and subscribers.

A combined 20% of respondents would say the biggest problems with being filtered into spam are connected to the financial impact. While 10.7% say it’s a waste of marketing resources, another 9% realize failing to reach the inbox reduces revenue from email marketing.

The importance of supporting the customer experience also emerged among the biggest benefits of prioritizing email deliverability:

1. Reliable customer communication (29.5%)

2. Improved customer satisfaction (15.8%)

3. Higher engagement metrics (12.3%)

Deliverability practices such as regular list hygiene will definitely lead to higher engagement metrics (opens and clicks). We’ll tell you more about why engagement and deliverability are closely connected in Chapter 4.

The point here is the positive impact good deliverability has on your customers. If we combine the top two results, more than 45% chose a benefit related to the overall customer experience. Obviously, reaching the inbox means you reach more leads and increase revenue from the email channel. The real benefit of improving deliverability is the chance to provide value to the people who signed up to receive your emails, keeping them engaged, informed, safe, and happy.

Email deliverability and the customer experience

Many businesses understand that reaching the inbox is crucial for a reliable and consistent customer experience. But how do consumers feel about deliverability?

Sinch Mailjet surveyed consumers around the world for The path to email engagement 2024. Our report includes a look at how people react when emails they’re expecting end up in spam.

Transactional emails are almost always expected. These messages are typically triggered by an action your customers take: placing an order, creating an account, requesting a password reset, etc. What happens if one of these important emails gets filtered into spam?

According to our survey 71% of consumers would check their spam folder for the missing message and another 16% would do so if it were important. Just 13% wouldn’t bother to look for expected emails that don’t show up.

This says a lot about the importance of transactional emails. But do you really want your customers digging through spam to find an important email? Have you seen what’s inside your spam folder? There’s a reason it’s called junk. Imagine how you’d feel if your mail carrier dropped your monthly bills in your garbage.

When legitimate emails fail to reach the inbox, it creates a poor customer experience. More than half of consumers told us they are likely to have a negative reaction when a brand’s messages continually end up in spam:

• I am annoyed or frustrated (32.8%)

• I lose trust in the brand (10%)

• I unsubscribe (9.9%)

More than 35% of global consumers indicate they wouldn’t worry about messages landing in spam and around 10% say they wouldn’t notice. However, those reactions aren’t exactly positive either. Not worrying or caring suggests these subscribers aren’t even interested in your emails.

The business case for better inbox placement

Prioritizing email deliverability will require some time and resources. So, is it worth the effort?

Our survey asked participants to rate the importance of email deliverability to their organizations on a scale of 0 to 10. A combined 78.5% rate the importance of deliverability as an 8 or higher. That includes 46% who say deliverability is important enough to get a 10 out of 10.

If you think about what could happen to a company that’s totally cut off from delivering email, it’s easy to see the importance of reaching the inbox. Businesses could grind to a halt if promotions, transactional messages, and other customer communications failed to reach their intended recipients. What usually happens, however, is that smaller deliverability problems go unnoticed:

• Your email list contains outdated contact data, which can mean wasted marketing budget, inaccurate reporting, and more.

• Your spam complaint rate creeps up and more emails are filtered into junk.

• You end up on an email blocklist and stop reaching certain subscribers.

These smaller problems add up. The flow of messages to inboxes may not dry up completely, but it’s as if there are leaks in your email plumbing. Those leaks create inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Deliverability problems reduce your return on investment (ROI) from email. Whether it’s email marketers creating campaigns, developers integrating email into applications, or lifecycle marketing efforts – when fewer messages reach the inbox, email ROI goes down.

Of course, the only way to get a return on an investment is to make an investment. How is your organization investing in email this year? Considering ways to improve your deliverability could be the best way to get even more from the channel.

Who is handling email deliverability?

If email deliverability is this important, whose job is it to make sure messages are reaching inboxes?

Our survey asked participants to tell us who handles deliverability in their organizations. The least common options were deliverability consultants (2.8%) and in-house deliverability experts (12%).

For most organizations, it comes down to marketers and technical teams:

• 31.7% say IT and technical teams are responsible for email deliverability.

• 16.8% say deliverability is the marketing team’s job.

• 21% say it’s a combination of IT and marketing.

Many of the respondents who selected the “Other” option were small business owners who told us they were the ones ultimately responsible for keeping an eye on email deliverability.

The truth is both technical and marketing teams impact deliverability. There are aspects of email sending that require a certain level of technical expertise and decision-making. However, what marketers do on a daily basis also has a significant effect on the ability to reach the inbox.

There are also deliverability duties that belong to both marketers and technical teams. This Venn diagram provides a basic breakdown of those areas and where they often intersect.

As we explore this report, we’ll offer lots of actionable advice for marketers, small business owners, and others who regularly use the email channel as part of their job. But we won’t be shying away from some of the more technical topics either.

When you have a basic understanding of factors like email authentication, email sending infrastructure, and your sender reputation, you’ll be better equipped to tackle the challenges – even if you aren’t the one handling the technical details.