This course would be incomplete if we didn't talk about deliverability, which is the art of getting emails into inboxes rather than spam folders. If it doesn't make it to the inbox, your email has failed before it has had a chance to do its job, so this is a vital element of a successful email strategy.
And as you'll see shortly, this is a significant challenge. But fear not: we're about to give you the keys to overcoming it!
Identify Spam
Spam is defined in different ways.
What the Law Says
The first way is legal. As you saw in the first part of this course, permission is crucial when sending emails. In the eyes of the law, spam is a message sent without the recipient's consent. Though this may vary from one country to the next, that's a general idea.
But the legal definition isn't usually the most challenging standard to meet.
What the Inbox Provider Does
Whether it's Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, or a corporate email account, the organization that controls your recipient's email account will almost certainly have rules in place to keep unwanted messages out.
Often using AI and machine learning, these rules check incoming messages for signals that they might not be welcome. The inbox provider's definition of unwelcome is not always right - but most prefer to erroneously send a genuine message into the junk folder rather than annoying or distracting users with spam.
How often have you seen a note when you sign up for a newsletter or an alert that advises you to check your junk folder? That is why.
Recipient Perception
Generally speaking, recipient perception is the most important definition of spam when it comes to deliverability. Pretty much everyone has, at one point or another, been annoyed by an email, whether it's bad timing, a muddled message, an aggressive tone, or simply too many.
This idea of irritation is vital. Once you've irritated your audience, it's pretty hard to win them back - especially if they've hit the "Mark as spam" button at the top of their inbox. If enough of your contacts do that, the inbox provider gets a pretty clear signal that all your messages are junk!
Fight Spam
If you want to understand the battle against spam (and why it concerns you if you think you’re doing all the right things), you need to know why it has become so important to fight.
Over recent years, spam has accounted for around 28% of the total number of emails sent. (see the study below).
Though this may fluctuate significantly from one month to the next, you can see that we’ve come a long way. Between 2007 and 2010, spam accounted for over 80% of all emails.
Storing and handling this spam is expensive, and keeping it from invading individual and corporate inboxes isn’t cheap either.
Understand the Challenge of Reaching the Inbox
If you were going to create a scale of email respectability, on one side, you’d have personal emails that include messages to family, friends, colleagues, and managers. On the other end of the spectrum, you have criminal emails: phishing, extortion, scams, or illegal products.
Marketing emails sit somewhere in the middle of this scale.
Inboxes have two goals:
Protect themselves and cover their backs (from criminal emails).
Clear their users’ inboxes of anything that might be irritating.
As outlined in the 2020 Email Delivery Benchmark report from Validity (a data integrity company), one in six emails that marketers send don’t get through, and half of those don’t even make it into the junk folder.
Of the 85% that do make it through, in many inboxes, messages from marketers are separated and sent to a promotions or newsletters folder, thereby missing out on prime time visibility.
This means you need to understand the way your clients perceive your emails and the impact it has on the way your emails are catagorized by the inbox. It is important to maximize every email we send as it is an opportunity to make a good impression on your client.
Let’s Recap!
Deliverability is the art of delivering an email into inboxes rather than spam folders.
There is a legal definition of spam, but it is often defined according to recipient perception.
Spam has become a major issue in the digital world, so a fierce battle is being fought against it.
Marketing messages sit on the border between personal emails and spam, sometimes ending up in the spam folder.
In the next chapter, we’ll deal with the notion of reputation, which is crucial for understanding deliverability.
