Email Deliverability Trends and Predictions for 2023

[InnaSabada]

There are many ways to optimize email marketing campaigns. But none of them play such an important role as ensuring high deliverability.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is when an email successfully reaches a person's mailbox. Your email program performance and ROI relies on your ability to reach the inbox.

Email deliverability is affected by a lot of factors such as service provider, sender domain, mailing list quality, mailing frequency, IP reputation, and overall sender reputation profile.

Just because your email was delivered doesn't mean it landed in the right place: the reader's primary inbox. Your email can end up in several places:

- folder with spam/junk mail;

- in the case of Gmail, the Promotions tab;

- or, worst of all, it disappears (not delivered)

After you hit send, the messages go through a lot of checks. First, it must go through various filters. If they determine your email as malicious or untrustworthy, it will be blocked at the gateway and will never end up in either the inbox or spam folder.

Next, the email is checked in spam filters and blocklisters, they evaluate the sender's reputation, and interaction with subscribers and content, and decide where the email will be placed, in the Inbox or in the Spam folder.

As you can see, the process is really not easy and every year the rules of mail providers become only stricter, as each mail provider wants to protect their customers from unwanted emails.

Statistics

According to statistics for the past years, global deliverability has been declining year on year. For example, according to Benchmark, in 2019 globally, the average inbox placement rate was 83%, meaning one in six messages did not reach the inbox. In 2018 it was 85%.

If we talk about spam statistics, then the percentage of spam has been decreasing in recent years.

According to the Statistician, over the past 5 years, the percentage of emails identified as spam has averaged 55%.

And in December 2021, 45.37% of the total emails were considered spam email (source - Statistica).

Email deliverability challenges in 2022

The main problems in this area, in our opinion:

1. Search for a high-quality customer base when mailing, which will not have many bounces, as they greatly damage the reputation.

A quality customer base is your golden treasure. Having your own customer base is a must-have for any business.

If you bought an email database or didn't regularly clean your email database, you run the risk of ruining your domain's reputation or even getting blocklisted.

What to do?

The most ideal way is to collect your own quality customer base, using your website or landing page. You need to work with the database regularly, maintain list hygiene, validate emails, etc.

2. Always a hot topic - landing in spam folder.

As described above, providers are improving algorithms and emails are increasingly getting into spam folders (or other folders bypassing inboxes).

What to do?

In order to avoid landing in spam folder, the ideal way is to use email deliverability tools, such as Warmy.

Their essence is to warm up your mailbox and improve your reputation. Now more and more businesses are using such tools since manually warming up a domain is a long and tedious process. And such services have proved to be very good.

3. Sending a large number of emails and at the same time not ruining the reputation of the mailbox or not to be blocked at all.

Email campaigns bring real results at a very low cost.

Email marketing continues to be unmatched when it comes to the return on investment it drives. It has a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every $1 spent (Litmus).

Email marketing makes money. Therefore, not using this channel to attract new customers or maintain relationships with your existing customers is not right.

What to do?

In order to avoid ruining the reputation of the domain and not be blocked, you need to follow clear rules.

At this point, the advice is the same as in the previous one. Before sending email campaigns, you need to warm up the domain.

4. Do not miss the real response of the client in a bunch of junk (auto-replies, bounced, other people's mailings) emails in the mail.

Nowadays, mailboxes are overflowing with a huge number of messages, it is difficult to read everything or find what you need, especially if you are warming up a domain.

What to do?

Our advice is to use different mailboxes for different purposes.

If this is your work email, don't use it for personal purposes. It is best to create a separate mailbox for subscriptions to your favorite brands.

As for the email warm-up process, Warmy has the function of archiving warm-up emails, and your mailbox will not be filled with unnecessary emails.

Trends and forecasts for 2023

With 2023 just around the corner, here are a few trends we think will take place in the email deliverability market.

1. Crisis in the markets and its impact on distribution channels

The general global crisis affects business, many companies suffer losses due to the economic and political situation in the world. Therefore, companies are trying to save their budget and are looking for more cost-effective channels to promote their business. This means the increasing use of email as a marketing channel.

We wrote above that the ROI of email marketing is 4,200%! it has proven its effectiveness and, with the right approach, will bring big profits to the company.

Therefore, we expect the email marketing channel to grow in 2023.

2. The use of AI, including spam filters

Spam filters are getting smarter and are successfully filtering more and more unwanted messages. However, a significant percentage still ends up in folders other than the inbox.

According to Google, its most effective tool against spam and fraud is an AI-based prevention system known as SpamBrain.

The introduction of AI technologies solves the problems of both business and end users - people receive useful and understandable letters for them personally, and companies see an increase in business indicators. And if that's the case, then there's no reason why email can't be the number one communication tool.

In 2023, artificial intelligence will advance faster and become smarter, so businesses that want to keep up with the times should continue to invest in smart tools that will solve problems automatically.

3. Transition from monitoring similar messages sent in large numbers to understanding whether the nature of the message is marketing or not

Over the past few years, we have seen an increase in the power of machines capable of writing text (eg GPT-3). Instead of template and personalization, we will see deeper personalization in terms of the whole message. This will result in many whole unique messages in campaigns.

Spam filters will find these emails harder to control and require more semantic focus.

Such tools will take personalization and the entire email marketing channel to the next level, as email campaigns will be unique, non-repetitive, and therefore more targeted.

There is only one conclusion - the market for email deliverability and email marketing is not only continuing to develop but is also growing rapidly.

[PamCotton]

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