Why Obsess Over Email Deliverability? Its Effect on ROI

Your email delivery rate has a direct impact on your email marketing ROI. The difference between an 88% delivery rate and an 89% delivery rate is far more than a measly 1%. It’s money in your pocket. Well, not in your pocket. Here’s why it matters…and how hard it can be.

The bottom-line benefit to improving email deliverability
Any incremental increase in your email delivery rate has a direct impact on your bottom line. Consider the following scenario for a hypothetical B2C business with an 82% email deliverability rate:

• ABC’s current delivery rate is 82%
• Their average conversion rate is 3%
• They have 500,000 names on their in-house email list
• With a delivery rate of 82%, only 410,000 people get the emails
• That means 90,000 people do not get promotional emails from ABC
• At a conversion rate of 3%, that’s 2,700 people not buying from ABC
• If an average sale is $50, that’s $135,000 in revenue ABC misses out on due to poor email deliverability

Furthermore, consider a 1% improvement in their email deliverability rate: Evaluating their program and making improvements to increase their email delivery to 83% potentially equals $7,500.

Imagine, 1% = $7,500. Times that by say, four emails per year, and that’s $30,000.

Does that number get your attention? If not, let me try and sum it up even more succinctly:

Improving your delivery rate = more emails get delivered = more opens = more click throughs = more conversions = greater email marketing ROI.

Many in email marketing fail to appreciate the impact deliverability has on the bottom line, i.e. the money. It’s easy to overlook. Email marketing has the best ROI per dollar spent compared to every other marketing channel. So why worry if your delivery seems “good enough,” right?

But “good enough” is the enemy of great. A lower deliverability rate can mean you’re leaving money on the table ($30,000 per year if you consider our example above). And you can do great things for your email marketing ROI—and ultimately your company’s overall financial health—by doing everything possible to maximize your email delivery rate.

Improving email deliverability can be a challenge
However, it’s not as if you can sit down one day and make it all better. You will earn that email marketing ROI. Even organizations that follow email marketing best practices can be challenged getting to the inbox, with 30% of the emails they send ending up in a spam folder or—worse yet—getting completely blocked, according to a Pivotal Veracity benchmark study of 1.2 million emails done in June 2009.

That’s because improving email deliverability is a highly specialized and ongoing process. It’s a balancing act involving business practices, technical practices and management of the email ecosystem both inside and outside of your organization.

Start with your ESP
Like your incremental improvements in email deliverability, however, you can make small steps in learning—and implementing—the email deliverability best practices that will improve the performance of your program.

An important step to start with, interestingly, is your ESP. Some ESPs will offer you a higher email deliverability rate than others. Find an email marketing vendor (like ClickMail Marketing) or consultant who can help you evaluate the delivery rate of your current email service provider compared to the rate you might get with another provider.

If it turns out it’s time to shop around for a new provider, download this guide to choosing an ESP for help.

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