Navigating Email Deliverability

2024 has been a year that forced every email marketer to care about email deliverability. No more flying under the radar. With Gmail and Yahoo rolling out new requirements, marketers rushed to correctly set up their email authentication, implement DMARC, manage spam complaint rates within healthy thresholds, and take a hard look at what was (and wasn’t) working in their email programs. Problems that had been long ignored had to be addressed. This really puts ownership back on marketers to continue making email marketing a powerful tool. 

This has been a major transformational shift and doesn’t come without challenges. For one, email authentication, DMARC specifically, is majorly complex. We saw brands struggle to add the right DMARC records, make sense of the reports, and figure out how to level up to the next stage of DMARC. Some brands started from square one, gradually building domain reputation from scratch and learning to embrace this level of ownership. Others had to dive directly into their data and fix their domain reputation to see better results on their email programs. As if it wasn’t enough, 2024 brought significant fluctuations in bot activity across inbox providers, causing unpredictable swings in open and click rates and making performance metrics more volatile than ever.

Here’s the thing – having the right ESP has been crucial throughout the evolution of email deliverability. For senders with domain reputation issues or outdated practices, poor deliverability quickly turned into declining email performance and worse: declining revenue. With domain reputation now calling the shots in email delivery, there’s no more hiding from best practices. The strategies that used to work? They’re no longer sustainable in 2024. And adapting to these changes is no easy task. 

Ready to peek into the future of email deliverability? 2024 was just a warm-up. The next few years are likely to bring a combination of challenges and opportunities for the email marketing ecosystem.

Things are changing fast, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial. Here are the key trends to watch and most importantly, prepare for.

Key Trends to Watch

1. High-quality and relevant emails become non-negotiable
   We’ve always known the importance of personalized emails, but it’s becoming even more critical. As inbox providers continue to double down on making long-standing best practices requirements, brands must prioritize superior email experiences for their subscribers.The days of huge batch and blast email campaigns that send the same exact content to everyone are going to be a thing of the past. Brands will need to double down on highly personalized, valuable, and delightful email experiences that will stand out in increasingly crowded inboxes.
2. First-party data takes center stage
   With privacy regulations and growing consumer awareness, brands need to focus on building direct relationships with subscribers. Collecting data with their consent and nurturing their email lists will give these brands a competitive edge in the inbox.
3. Automation and AI will be huge in email marketing
   Automation will become even more powerful, with AI-driven content personalization and segmentation leading the way. But with great power comes great responsibility not to harm deliverability. Brands must use these tools wisely to send relevant, valuable emails and avoid spamming subscribers.
4. DMARC enforcement ramps up
   2024 brought us a big boost in DMARC adoption, mostly with p=none policies. According to Al Iverson at Valimail, a leading DMARC monitoring platform, approximately 20% of the top 10 million domains have implemented DMARC. Inbox providers are expected to enforce stronger DMARC policies in the next few years by moving towards p=reject enforcement, where unauthorized emails are rejected outright. With the growing risks of email abuse, this shift is poised to create a safer and more secure email ecosystem, ensuring long-term value of email as a channel for all. 

To stay ahead of the game brands need to prioritize ongoing optimization and compliance. True deliverability success comes from sustained effort, regular monitoring, and adapting to new developments in the ecosystem. 

Getting Ready for Stricter Rules

While major mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo leading the way with new regulations, and it’s only a matter of time before others follow suit. 

Steps to take: 

• Clean up your lists: Keep your email list clean and only send to active subscribers who have given you permission. Reduce spam complaints by sending relevant, valuable content. Meeting the highest standards for email sending will ensure you’re prepared as mailbox providers tighten their requirements.

“Letting your email list fall into disrepair can have serious repercussions. A neglected list not only raises the chances of being flagged as spam, or blocked entirely, but it also tanks engagement rates. This can seriously harm your sender reputation and hinder your ability to reach even your most engaged subscribers. Think of list hygiene as your email campaign’s foundation – it’s not just a best practice, it’s essential for long-term deliverability success.” – Katie Intrater, VP of AtData

• Embrace DMARC: As DMARC enforcement becomes the new standard, brands need to prepare to update to p=reject policies. We recommend the following tactical steps to work towards p=reject: 
  • Monitor: Set up DMARC reporting to get valuable insights into who’s sending emails on your behalf. Use these reports to identify and address any issues in your sending practices such as spoofing or unauthenticated mail. 
  • Increase gradually: Start with p=quarantine and move to p=reject when you’re ready.
  • Get help: If your brand manages complex email streams, partner with a deliverability expert or a DMARC monitoring provider to help streamline the process and ensure smooth enforcement. For DMARC monitoring providers check out Valimail, Easy DMARC, or DMARCian.
• Stay Informed: Subscribe to deliverability updates from your ESP and industry experts to stay up-to-date.  

Maximizing Messaging Quality and Relevance

How do you make sure your emails don’t get lost in an increasingly competitive inbox? Ensuring messages are highly relevant and valuable is crucial. Use the first-party data to create emails that feel like they’re tailor-made just for them. This approach not only makes your brand look good, but it can also boost your email revenue.

Steps to Take:

• Give subscribers a reason to opt-in: Offer them something valuable in return for sharing their data. Whether it’s a sneak peek at new products, special discounts, or loyalty perks, make it worth their while.
• Get personal: Use subscriber data to send emails that feel like they’re just for them. Think personalized offers, product suggestions based on what they’ve bought before, or messages that match their interests. 
• Innovate and iterate: Continuously A/B test email content to find what resonates with subscribers in your email community. 
• Double down on analyzing email engagement: Prioritize engagement metrics like open rates and click-through rates. Build segments based on engagement, sending fewer but more meaningful emails to your most active subscribers.

Think beyond the inbox: Email is just one piece of the puzzle. Broadening your brand’s perspective to think of email as part of a broader omnichannel strategy helps create a smoother experience for your customers and improves how well your emails perform.

“Your emails will resonate more with users if they clearly understand what they’re signing-up for. Account registration and email subscription processes are often confused – which may cause issues around consent. Unwanted emails that don’t align with users’ expectations can easily damage engagement, and cause users friction (spam-complaints; unsubs; churn), impacting deliverability, and even the brand’s reputation.” – Nick Koreck, CEO of 360Inbox

Leveraging Automation and AI Thoughtfully

We can’t discuss email marketing in 2024 without talking about AI and automation. They’re game-changing tools when used right, but when misused, they can damage your sender reputation and subscriber relationships.

Steps to Take:

• Automate with intention: Welcome series, post-purchase follow-ups, re-engagement campaigns—these are all great candidates for automation. But make sure each automated email has a clear goal and delivers real value to your subscribers. If you can’t justify why it exists, it probably shouldn’t. 
• Balance frequency with value: AI-driven segmentation and personalization allow for more frequent touchpoints, but be mindful of subscriber fatigue. Use analytics to understand when and how often to send emails to maintain engagement without overwhelming recipients.
• Continuously monitor automation impact and performance: Your automated campaigns need regular check-ups. Watch your unsubscribe rates, spam complaints, and engagement levels to ensure your automations are delivering value without damaging your sender reputation.

Regular Audits for Deliverability Success 

To maintain a strong sender reputation and ensure consistent results, brands need to keep a close eye on their email programs. Deliverability isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task; ongoing performance monitoring, fine-tuning, and a proactive approach to email infrastructure are essential.

1. Make deliverability audits your new routine
   Regularly auditing your email program helps catch issues before they escalate. Focus on factors like bounce rates, spam complaints, engagement rates, and authentication setup. Tools like Google Postmaster Tools can help you stay ahead of potential deliverability problems—use them.
2. Using performance metrics as early warning signals
   Your metrics tell an important story. Open rates, click rates, and deliverability reports offer valuable insights into how your emails are really performing. See a sudden drop? That’s your cue to investigate—it could be pointing to an underlying deliverability issue that needs your immediate attention.

Tips for auditing from Nick Koreck, CEO of 360 Inbox

Walk in the shoes of your customer. Audit the user journey by subscribing to email marketing, and registering an account, on both web and mobile sites; testing different sign-up form locations. 

Be sure to make note of: 

• Which emails were received 
• Date and time they were received
• Friendly-from name 
• Sender address 
• IP address 
• Mail-header information 
• Inbox or spam placement 

We often find the audited user-experience is not in-line with the sender’s intention; and therein lies much room for improvement. 

Partnering with Experts 

Having the right people on your team can help you untangle all those tricky details and can make a world of difference when it comes to email deliverability. When you partner with the right experts, you can keep your email program at the top of its game and ensure you’re following current best practices. 

• Choose an ESP that gets deliverability
  Your ESP choice is critical—and it’s about more than just sending emails. Look for one that provides education on emerging deliverability topics, offers insights, and gives your team strategic support to stay ahead of issues. 
• Leverage integration partners
  Tap into expert integration partners to orchestrate your brand’s messaging strategy. The right partners don’t just add capabilities—they reduce friction in your email campaigns, giving your brand a competitive edge.

Ever wonder what email marketing success looks like in 2024? Let’s check out some global brands that didn’t just survive the email shake-up—they thrived. From fashion to wellness, these companies face the same headaches you do. The ones that embraced the new requirements didn’t just check boxes, they saw at least 10% higher engagement rates, leveled up their domain reputation with Google, and evolved their email programs to draw in more revenue.

Aviator Nation

When Google and Yahoo released their new guidelines, Aviator Nation—like many brands—felt the pressure. The complex jargon and technical requirements- like domain authentication and DMARC record enforcement- felt overwhelming to tackle alone, especially when it meant that their top revenue channel could be at risk. Faced with the need for more hands-on support, they made the move to partner with Yotpo Email. With Yotpo’s guidance, Aviator Nation not only came into compliance with the new sender requirements, but revolutionized their entire email approach. First, their intentional and thoughtful list warming plan grew their open rates by 34%- helping them get in front of more subscribers than ever before with better inbox placement. And, by getting strategic with segmentation and timing, they started hitting customers’ inboxes at just the right moments. The result? Their click rate increased by 15% after making the switch, climbing to 2.7% above the fashion industry average. 

Naked Harvest

In 2024, we saw a major evolution: where long-standing email best practices quickly became requirements in order to see optimal deliverability. Australian-founded wellness brand Naked Harvest realized that in order to have optimal deliverability, they needed to prioritize engaged subscribers– and refocused their strategy to do just that. By prioritizing their most active audience, they benefited from higher engagement rates and optimized for a strong domain reputation.

The proof is in the personalization. Their diverse email content offers a range of valuable experiences from product launches to wellness tips, further enhancing subscriber loyalty and reinforcing brand trust through relevant and personalized communication. The result: their open rates didn’t just improve—they doubled.

Felina

With email marketing being a huge revenue driver for many brands, it’s hard to find a reason to change what’s always worked. However, for some brands- like women’s loungewear and intimates brand Felina- migration to a new platform offers a unique opportunity to reflect on strategy and build the best possible deliverability foundation. As Felina moved to Yotpo Email, they realized the huge opportunity to grow their overall email engagement by investing in deliverability- starting by focusing on their most engaged, most likely to convert subscribers.

With their strategist, they defined what “engagement” really meant for their brand, building out targeted segments and a sending strategy to reach their goals. As a result of this thoughtful effort, they not only improved their open rates significantly- by 30 percentage points on average- but also built a much stronger domain reputation with Google. 

My Rocking Kids

When UK-based family fashion brand My Rocking Kids discovered deliverability problems with their previous email provider, they were lacking the help needed to not only find the source of the issue, but to solve it, too. Generic support documentation and chat agents weren’t enough to resolve issues nor share nuanced expertise about the recent Google & Yahoo changes. They found themselves feeling lost, with their top revenue channel exposed to risk. 

After searching for a provider with more hands-on guidance, they found the right fit with Yotpo. Together they built a robust plan to rebuild their email marketing strategy. After authenticating a new sending domain and using a thoughtful list-warming approach, they were able to boost their deliverability, now seeing on average 99.9% delivery rates, and open rates at ~35 percentage points on average above fashion industry benchmarks.

Deliverability
The ability for a message to be delivered both to the recipient’s inbox provider and into the recipient’s inbox.

Delivery rate
The rate at which a campaign or sender’s messages are delivered to the recipient’s inbox provider. The rate is the percentage of messages that were successfully delivered to the selected recipients.

DMARC
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a type of domain-based protocol that assists in monitoring and regulating email traffic by determining whether said traffic is authenticated or not.

ESP
An email service provider is a system or platform that allows users to send marketing emails to their customers and subscriber base, especially in bulk volumes which are not possible through most ISPs.

Hard bounce
A bounce type related to permanent delivery errors that should not be re-attempted with any traffic attempts in the future, like a disabled mailbox.

ISP/MBP
Internet Service Provider(ISP)/Mailbox Provider(MBP) refers to various organizations that provide email mailboxes for users to receive important email messages. ISPs often provide other internet services as well with this.

List cleaning
List cleaning is the work of removing long-term unengaged or low-quality subscribers from future email traffic.

List maintenance
The process of regularly reviewing and cleaning a subscriber database. It includes re-engaging and removing long-term problematic subscribers from ongoing traffic to protect sender reputation.

List warming
The process for slowly warming or ramping up reputation for a domain or IP address by starting small and gradually increasing volume over time

Opt-in
The state or activity of a subscriber in providing consent to a sender for receiving messages from their organization. Single opt-in refers to the simple submission of a form while double opt-in refers to a process that requires a confirmation step after form submission, usually in the form of a confirmation link click.

Opt-out/unsubscribe
The state or activity of a subscriber in removing consent from a sender for receiving any further messages from their organization.

Reputation (domain/IP/sender)
A ISPs/MBPs rating of an email sender’s reliability to send desirable content. Reputation is assigned per sending domain and per IP.

Soft bounce
A bounce type related to temporary delivery errors that can be re-attempted with any traffic attempts in the future, like a technical or connection issue.

Spam complaint
An activity where a message recipient either marks a message as spam/junk or manually moves a message to the spam/junk folder.

Unsubscribe rate/Opt-out rate
A message engagement metric related to unsubscribes that occur from message recipients. The rate is commonly calculated by the number of unique recipients who unsubscribed in a message divided by the number who received the message. Often seen with email, SMS, and Push notification reports.