• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 16, 2023

Marketing emails cannot do their job unless the emails actually reach the inbox. But not all email teams know if they are reaching it, judging by State of Email Deliverability, a study from Mailgun by Sinch.  

Over a fourth of senders are unsure of their delivery rate. Moreover, only 15.7% say they are very confident in their knowledge of email deliverability, although 39.8% say they are somewhat sure. Another 25.4% are neutral, while 19.1% say they lack confidence -- 5.8% to a high degree.

Deliverability is a 100% priority at 36.2% of companies, while another 15.9% put their level at 90% and 13.6% at 80%. And only 4% of the respondents hold the job of email deliverability specialist.  

That said, companies enjoy several benefits from prioritizing email deliverability: 

• Improved customer satisfaction — 40%
• Increase revenue from email — 18..6%
• Reaching more leads and prospects — 13.3%
• Higher email engagement metrics — 9.7%
• Delivering more messages to the inbox — 8.8% 
• Better protection of broad reputation — 6.6% 
• Other — 3% 

But they face several challenges. The top three are:

1. Staying out of the spam folder 
2. Getting more emails delivered 
3. Staying off email blocklists

One significant issue related to best practices is that among the marketers surveyed, 42.1% have separate domains for sending IP addresses for transactional and marketing emails. The remainder don’t, or are unsure. 

Companies that send more than 1 million are most likely to have separate domains, at 64.5%. So do 60.6% of those that send 100,000 to 1 million.

In contrast, 47.3% of firms that send 50,000 to 99,999 emails have separate domains, and 34% that send fewer than 50,000. 

Companies claim these delivery rates for transactional emails: 

• 95% or more — 47.1% 
• 855 to 94%--19.3% 
• 75% to 84%--7.5% 
• Less than 75%--5% 
• Unsure — 20.2%

And for marketing emails? The delivery rates are:

• 95% or more — 27% 
• 85% to 94% — 24.2% 
• 75% to 84% — 10.1%
• Less than 75% — 11.2%
• Unsure — 27.5% 

At the same time, 40% of those that uses DMARC for email authentication, were unsure of their policy. And 24.5% couldn’t say if they’d been blocklisted in the last two years. 

Email marketers track these deliverability metrics:

• Delivery rate — 57.8% 
• Open rates — 57.0%
• Hard bounces — 40.8% 
• Unsubscribes — 40.3% 
• Spam complaints — 37.2%
• Soft bounces — 29.9%
• Block/reject rate — 23.9%
• Read rates — 20.2%
• Inbox placement — 16.4% 
• Requests — 12.7%
• Not monitoring deliverability — 12.3%
• Spam trap hits — 10.8%

What kinds of infrastructure do they have? 

• Cloud-based with shared IP — 25.0%
• Cloud-based with dedicated IP — 19.5%
• On-premise MTA—6.0% 
• Hybrid solution — 14.6% 
• Open-source solution — 7.9% 
• Unsure — 27.0%

Mailgun by Sinch surveyed 1,980 customers and those of sister brands in May 2023.