One of the easiest things to do in Mailchimp is look at your delivery rate and assume that means your emails made it to the inbox.
It doesn’t.
Delivered simply means the receiving mail server accepted the email. It doesn’t tell you whether that email landed in the inbox, Spam, or somewhere else.
That’s the difference between email delivery and email deliverability.
Why Does Inbox Placement Matter?
You can have a 99% delivery rate and still have a deliverABILITY problem.
Mailbox providers, such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo!, use their own internal systems to determine where an email should go, either the inbox or spam. They look at things like your sending reputation, authentication, engagement, content and sending patterns.
And those decisions can change over time.
If you’ve noticed that your open or click rates have dropped, it’s easy to assume your audience isn’t interested anymore. But before changing your content or sending strategy, it’s worth finding out whether your emails are actually reaching the inbox.
What Can Affect Deliverability?
There isn’t one single reason an email ends up in the Spam or Junk folder.
Your domain authentication is an important starting point. SPF, DKIM and DMARC need to be properly configured.
Your audience matters, too. Sending to old, inactive or poor-quality contacts can hurt engagement and your overall sending reputation.
Your sending behavior can also make a difference. Large changes in volume, inconsistent sending or suddenly sending to a much larger audience can raise questions with mailbox providers.
And then there’s the email itself. Links, images, HTML and other elements can all contribute to how a message is evaluated.
The challenge is that your regular Mailchimp reporting doesn’t show you all of this.
So How Do You Know What’s Happening?
You test.
Deliverability testing can show you how an actual email is being handled by different mailbox providers. It can also identify potential authentication, spam and reputation issues that keep you from making to the inbox.
There are several tools available for this, including GlockApps, which we use as one way to get a better look at inbox placement.
You don’t necessarily need to test every email you send. But testing can be particularly useful when you’re seeing a sudden change in engagement, launching a new sending domain, making significant changes to your email setup, or preparing for an important campaign.
What We’ve Seen in Real Accounts
In one account we reviewed, every Mailchimp campaign was failing SPF. The domain’s SPF record didn’t include Mailchimp and was set to a strict fail policy. It was easy to miss because the organization’s everyday business email made up most of the domain’s sending volume, and that mail was passing. The domain looked healthy overall, but the marketing emails weren’t.
Once the record was corrected, authentication passed consistently. Google Postmaster Tools has since shown the domain’s reputation holding at High with no spam complaints.
In another account, the problems were layered: two conflicting DMARC records, an SPF record that left out services sending on the organization’s behalf, and a contact list was outdated. After we resolved the domain authentication issues and carefully worked through the list, average open rates went from around 5% to around 24%, and the domain went from passing 3 of 8 compliance checks in Google Postmaster Tools to all 8.
That second account also showed the limits of technical fixes. Much of the list had been built for a different purpose years earlier, and those contacts weren’t the right audience for the content being sent now. Fixing your setup can help your email reach the inbox. Create a segment of contacts who haven’t clicked or even opened a campaign in the last 6 months, you would be surprised by who isn’t opening your messages!
Don’t Guess at Deliverability
If your email engagement changes, don’t immediately start changing everything.
Before you rewrite your emails, change your sending schedule or start removing contacts, find out what’s actually happening under the hood.
Your Mailchimp report can tell you whether an email was delivered. Deliverability testing can help tell you where it went.
That’s information worth having if email is an important part of your business.
