Email deliverability is a fundamental concept in the field of digital marketing. It refers to the ability of an email to reach the recipient’s inbox without being filtered by spam systems or rejected by mail servers. In other words, deliverability is not just about successfully sending an email, but ensuring that it actually reaches its intended recipient.
Email deliverability is essential because it directly affects open, click, and conversion rates. An email that doesn’t reach the inbox is a missed opportunity and can also harm your sender reputation. This reputation is closely monitored by email service providers, who use complex algorithms to determine which emails should be flagged as spam. Thus, poor deliverability can not only reduce the effectiveness of a campaign but also damage your reputation and impact your future mailings.
Probance implements rigorous practices to maintain a high-quality contact base and establish a good sender reputation with email service providers, two essential factors for optimizing your deliverability.
1. Contactability Criteria Applied by Probance One
The following profiles are legally contactable and automatically identified as opt-in by Probance One:
- Individuals who have explicitly agreed to receive your email communications
- Existing customers who have purchased one of your products or services within the last three years and have not explicitly refused further contact
The integration of buyers from the past three years as opt-ins must first be approved by our deliverability team. No buyers from this period can be added until deliverability has stabilized and a sufficient number of campaigns have been sent to assess its consistency.
Note: Even when explicit consent is not required, the person must still be informed that their email address will be used for marketing purposes, and they must have the option to object to this use.
Probance One updates the database daily to identify profiles that are no longer legally or technically contactable:
- Contacts who have explicitly requested to stop receiving your communications, via the unsubscribe form or other means
- Contacts who filed a spam complaint against one of your emails
- Contacts whose previous email delivery resulted in a hard bounce
- Contacts whose last six email deliveries since the last interaction resulted in a soft bounce
- Contacts whose recent email (within 30 days) resulted in a soft bounce with the message “mailbox full”
- Blacklisted contacts (Probance blacklists profiles identified as bots)
- Inactive contacts: those who have not interacted (clicked, visited, made a transaction, or added items to their cart) in the past three years and have been sent at least 30 emails
This cleaning process aims to maintain a high-quality contact base by systematically excluding profiles that are likely to generate bounces, complaints, and lower your deliverability.
2. Sending Volume Ramp-Up
The sending of your first newsletter with Probance is carried out according to a ramp-up plan defined by your project manager, depending on the number of contacts registered in your project.
If your database contains more than 10,000 opt-in profiles, the newsletter is duplicated to be sent gradually, with the number of recipients increasing with each send until the entire contactable base is reached.
The ramp-up is crucial to avoid large, sudden sending volumes being flagged as suspicious by email service providers, which could result in your communications being blocked. This approach allows you to gradually build your sender reputation.
Contact your project manager once the date for sending your first newsletter is set. This send should be scheduled on a business day after 11 a.m. to ensure that our deliverability team can monitor the send and intervene if necessary.
3. Optimizing Your Deliverability: Some Tips
In addition to these provisions and the monitoring provided by our experts to identify risks of deliverability degradation, it’s important to ensure that your practices are compliant and conducive to maintaining optimal deliverability.
Here are some of our recommendations to get started:
- Ensure that your recipient collection is secure and complies with consent regulations. Implementing a recaptcha protection on your website’s signup forms is highly recommended to counter potential bot attacks that could pollute your opt-in database with fake email addresses.
- Gradually activate your automated scenarios, and prioritize the ones most likely to generate good returns: cart abandonment reminders, cross-sell campaigns, and catalog alerts.
- Limit the number of newsletters sent to the same recipient over a short period. We recommend sending no more than one newsletter per week to each recipient. We also recommend sending no more than one newsletter per month to your entire contactable base and focusing on targeting your active contacts.