Where Emails Leave and Why They Fail to Succeed

It is known well how does emailing work: we click "Send" button, then subscriber receives a message, he is happy to know about the super-promo-share and runs for shopping immediately. If mailing result seems lower than expected you need to change the product you sell. So it looks like. But what if your email just was not received or did not cause the effect you expected while product is quite ok?

In the following article we will try to clarify what is really going on with your emails and which obstacles are standing on it’s way to the client; then I’ll give practical advices and unveil some technical secrets. In short, email is passing several stages before to “lead” consumer to shopping:


We can conditionally divide all these stages into two categories by relevance:

Technical. It requires special infrastructure and settings as well as skills of webpage coding and competences in an internal structure of emails.

Contentual. Mostly determined by email outfit (i.e. design and content).

Let’s check each of these categories.

Email service allows us to build a message, design it optimally and distribute by sending servers (which are often included in mailing systems) balancing the traffic load. One server is not enough for mass mailings because ESP (email service providers) like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc have a speed limit of receiving messages from one IP address; it depends on server reputation.

First of all, speaking about deliverability we must understand clearly that for email campaign it’s impossible to guarantee that message will be delivered. But what about guarantees are given by some companies - 99.9% and so on? We just cannot believe it. A sender may know that email is not delivered only when emailing service sent a report, but sometimes it happens that ESP simply marks your message as spam, or just "lose" deciding that you can survive without it and "don’t say nothing” about.

If you want your email to be accepted by emailing services you have to "equip" it. Let’s check the main parameters affecting emails delivery. If you decide to deal with emailing yourself, be very attentive to each of them or just trust specialized services (such as ours ☺). Here they are:

Mailing reputation is not much different from a person's reputation. It is not built up immediately - one needs to earn it. If someone has a bad reputation (roughneck and drunkard) then he unlikely will be invited to a party or wedding (of course if a row and a fight were not pre-ordered). The same goes for emails: messages with poor reputation are being marked as spam or just lost at all.

The reputation is influenced by many metrics, such as:

Infrastructure for mass mailings requires a high level of admins competence and their constant attention. This task is completely different from the regular corporate emailing server support. Incorrect providing and configuring of infrastructure may cause negative effects. Pay special attention to the following points:

Authentication in emailing is a set of techniques designed to protect the world from scammers and spammers. Essentially, this is email’s electronic passport verifying the sender identity; it includes 3 methods of authentication, and it would be perfect to use them all in your mailings:

Spammers are never sleeping, they always try to bypass the spam protection so new protocols and standards are constantly appearing, for example, DMARC combining SPF with DKIM and reporting domain owner about every attempt to make a mailing on his behalf or configuration error.

If you have no idea how your emails authentication is configured right now, you can use Mail-Tester service, it’s simple and free.

Keep abreast. We have already mentioned that every rate should be checked in 24/7 mode. Monitor the reputation of your servers (for example, using the SenderScore от Return Path)

It is crucial: server errors should be never ignored. There are two types of ESP errors: hard and soft bounce.

hard - mailbox does not exist,

soft - temporarily unavailable (for example, it is full or temporarily blocked).

If suddenly your message "bounced hard", remove the contact from your database immediately.

It is better to clean your database regularly removing the dead contacts. They are not just useless (being not read anyway) but also make your reputation much worse.

One more point is very important: to prevent your emails from marking as spam, just don’t send spam. ☺ We remind once again that spam means emails not interesting for your subscribers.

The easiest way to ensure high delivery rate is to build mailings via special service where specialists closely watch the following of every rule and standard. Welcome to our CDP.

We will end here with a technical side of email life cycle, and contentual part begins. We will look at this it in our next article, as it is already too much. So, the current article is dedicated to technical obstacles in email’s way; in the next article, we'll tell you how to overpass the human barriers and lead your offer right to purchase. We will also reveal some secrets how emailing services tracking the clicks-through, how they check was email read or not, and much more.

Some helpful links we used to write this article:

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