Mastering Email Deliverability for Holiday Campaign Success: Part I

Ensuring email deliverability is essential to the success of your upcoming holiday campaigns. This blog post highlights the main factors that impact deliverability so you can optimize performance.

• Deliverability measures whether an email reaches the inbox or ends up in the spam or junk folder.
• Factors that impact deliverability include sender reputation, list hygiene, and engagement metrics.
• Mastering deliverability boosts inbox placement, maximizes campaign ROI, and strengthens sender reputation, especially during the high-stakes holiday season.

It’s that time of the year again

The holiday season is approaching, and marketers worldwide are gearing up for their campaigns. This usually involves a strategy of increasing send volumes and frequency. But does sending more emails, more often, really drive results?

Internet service providers (ISPs) actually penalize high-frequency strategies, which can lead to your emails being marked as spam or blocked and not reaching your target audience.

That’s why mastering the rules of email deliverability is crucial to making sure your messages reach the inbox—and your customers.

Email deliverability vs. delivery

Deliverability and delivery are distinct metrics. Email delivery measures whether an ISP accepted your email, but it doesn’t indicate where it landed—in the inbox, spam, or junk folder—only if it bounced or not.

Deliverability, however, tracks whether the email reached the inbox, which affects open rates, engagement, conversions, and ultimately campaign return on investment (ROI).

The role of engagement in deliverability

The importance of engagement to deliverability cannot be overstated. This is because the ISP’s evaluation of engagement determines deliverability.

If they detect low engagement or that your emails are unwanted, they’re less likely to deliver them to the inbox.

The main factors that go into the consideration include:

• Sender reputation: How well does your domain/IP perform, e.g., are you blacklisted or flagged?
• List quality: Do you regularly clean your list by removing invalid addresses and suppressing unengaged users?
• Email content: Is your content relevant and tailored to your audience, from subject line to message content?
• Send frequency: Are you sending at a steady rate? (Sudden spikes can trigger spam filters.)

The mechanics of engagement and inbox performance

You’ve sent an email to your target audience with a couple of personalization tags to boost engagement potential. Your open rate is 14%. Does this indicate strong engagement?

Not necessarily. Open rates alone don't determine how ISPs view engagement (and impact deliverability). The calculation is more complicated, taking into consideration both positive and negative engagement metrics.

Negative actions such as deleting without opening, bouncing, inactivity, and non-engagement over a period of time also impact deliverability.

While 14% may seem strong, deliverability has been negatively impacted because the ISP also noted that:

• 5% of the target group deleted today’s email without opening it, likely due to an irrelevant subject line or preview.
• 5% bounced due to invalid or unknown addresses.
• 12% of the target group is completely inactive, showing no engagement for months.
• 52% ignored the email entirely.

*Some charts may not add up to 100% due to rounding

While some recipients opened and engaged with today’s email, a significant portion of the target audience has taken negative actions.

This will harm the deliverability of future emails. And this is why assessing both positive and negative engagement factors is paramount.

In summary

Overwhelming subscribers with too many messages can lead to disengagement and cause ISPs to flag your messages as spam.

When building your campaign strategy for the holidays (or at any time of the year, for that matter), it is essential to first recognize whether you have a deliverability issue.

So, before you finalize the plan for your 2024 holiday campaign, be sure to check out our next post in this series. We’ll cover the four warning signs of a deliverability issue, along with the positive and negative engagement signals that every email marketer should watch for.

In the meantime, to learn how Optimove can help you improve deliverability rates and increase user engagement, contact us to request a demo.