What is email delivery rate?
Email delivery rate is the number of emails delivered against the total number of emails sent. It measures how successful your emails are at arriving in your subscribers' inboxes.
How to calculate email delivery rate?
To calculate email delivery rate or email deliverability, subtract the ‘number of emails bounced’ from the ‘number of emails sent’, which gives us the number of emails successfully delivered. Now divide the number of emails successfully delivered by the ‘total number of emails sent’ and multiply by 100.
Formula for calculating email delivery rate
Real-life example of email delivery rate
Let’s understand email delivery rate with an example:
Say, you sent 500 emails for your email marketing campaign. Out of those 500, 10 emails bounced which means 490 emails got successfully delivered.
Plugging this information in the formula gives us an email delivery rate of: (500-10)/500 x 100 = 98%
What’s considered a good email delivery rate (benchmark)
A good email delivery rate or email deliverability is considered to be more than 90%. Anything above 95% is exceptional. As of April 2022, the average email deliverability rate was 84.2% across various email marketing platforms. In 2019, the average inbox placement rate was 83%, meaning one of every six messages failed to reach the inbox.
So, good email deliverability varies based on platforms, industry, and email type.
Also, there’s a correlation between low email deliverability rates and high rates of emails flagged as spam.
With all that said, landing in your subscribers' inboxes should be your foremost goal otherwise everything else will be in vain.
Ways to improve your email deliverability
- Avoid spammy subject lines or content: Email providers use spam filters to identify emails that might be spammy. Avoid using spam-triggering phrases like "discount," "% off," or "free". Crafting spammy subject lines or content not only lands your email in spam but also harms your sender's reputation. Read this massive list of 394 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid in your email.
- Warm up your email address: Sending emails in bulk to a large set of recipients might get you ending up in spam. To avoid this, it is suggested to warm up your email account. Start by sending emails in small batches. Also, avoid sending emails every day. A Step-by-Step Domain Warm-Up Guide might help you.
- Employ double opt-in for confirmation: Double opt-in asks users to confirm their email address while signing up, which makes sure users provide valid and active email addresses. This will reduce your bounce rate, eventually increasing email deliverability. Read: Single Opt-in vs Double Opt-in