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Email Deliverability Explained: Everything You Need to Know

This is a cover image fro the ultimate email deliverability guide which covers the details of email deliverability

In this guide, I dive deep into email deliverability and suggest what to focus on and what to avoid so your emails land where they’re supposed to: in your subscribers’ inboxes. Along the way, we’ll be using real-life examples from Mailtrap.

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What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability to successfully land your emails in recipients’ primary inbox instead of spam or other folders, regardless of the email providers they might be using. It’s also known as “inbox deliverability.”

Email deliverability vs email delivery

Email delivery is whether the recipient’s mail server accepted the actual email file and delivered it to the mailbox, no matter the folder. In contrast, email deliverability is the actual ability to get emails to land in the recipient’s inbox.

Email delivery and email deliverability often get confused for being the same, but they are two separate things, and it’s important to distinguish between them.

If you’d like to get more details, here’s the YouTube video prepared by our team.

Why does email deliverability matter?

Email deliverability matters because it defines whether your audience sees your emails. It’s the gateway to engagement, conversions, and building relationships. 

If your deliverability is poor, you’re not just missing vanity metrics (opens, clicks, etc.); you’re missing real business opportunities. 

Also, good deliverability matters because major mailbox providers such as Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and Apple Mail have been tightening regulations for you as an email sender. In a nutshell, it’s about email authentication, having a clear one-click unsubscribe link, and recipients’ consent. 

I’ll analyze why this is so critical across different types of emails, with examples relevant to different types of businesses wherever possible.

Transactional email deliverability

Transactional emails are the automated messages triggered by a user’s action, like password resets, order confirmations, shipping notifications, or account alerts. Their timely arrival in the inbox is crucial for user experience and trust.

And, I wouldn’t go out on a limb to say poor deliverability for transactional emails directly harms your business’s capacity to retain customers. Worse yet, it increases operational costs due to more support requests and the need to inspect the entire infrastructure. 

Now, let’s cover some common issues businesses encounter. 

The bottom line is that if you send transactional emails, 95 %+ of them need to land in the inboxes. However, I’ll cover the detailed percentages across different verticals in the coming sections.

Marketing email deliverability 

Unlike password resets and order confirmations, no one will freak out if a newsletter, a promo, or a re-engagement email ends up in the wrong place. 

However, if poor marketing email deliverability remains unresolved, you’ll still be throwing money out the window. Your carefully crafted messages, valuable content, and enticing offers go to waste. 

Here are some examples to give these issues the proper context. 

Ultimately, email deliverability is not just the concern of the email marketing team; it’s a business-wide issue that affects customer experience, revenue, reputation, and operational efficiency. 

With average global inbox placement rates around 85% and variations across providers (some seeing drops in early 2025), a significant portion of emails aren’t hitting the primary inbox. 

Focusing on deliverability is essential to ensure your emails and business aren’t invisible. And I wouldn’t exaggerate to say that high deliverability might also give you a competitive edge.

What is a good email deliverability rate?

Check the overall numbers breakdown before I move to good email deliverability rates per type of email message. 

With that in mind, defining a single “good” email deliverability rate can be tricky, as benchmarks can vary slightly depending on the source, industry, and audience engagement. So, I’ll make things more granular and discuss deliverability across different types of emails.

Marketing emails deliverability rate

But how did I come up with those numbers?

First, I did some research on my own and cross-referenced it across a few sources. For instance, ActiveCampaign puts the good deliverability at 89%, and the guys at EmailToolTester agree. 

Next, I wanted to do more research and give you the most realistic numbers based on our experience. Hence, I talked to Yaroslav, our resident deliverability expert, and the satisfactory numbers could be somewhat lower. 

However, and it’s a big however, you need to closely track where the missing emails went. For instance, if your deliverability is indeed 89%, we would all agree you’re doing well. But if the remaining percentage is spread between spam and hard bounces, you still need to inspect what’s going on immediately.

To remind you, keeping the email marketing deliverability good or great is a challenge due to stricter requirements from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple. And you need to pay more attention to the technical aspects of your email campaigns.

Transactional emails deliverability rate

Again, I did some digging and consulted with our deliverability wizard, Yaroslav, to give you the most realistic numbers. If you’d like more info, here’s a bedtime reading on transactional metrics

But at Mailtrap, we don’t like to shuffle around other people’s data and guestimate. So we ran some tests ourselves. 

To ensure our clients’ business operations run smoothly and generally test deliverability, we conducted comprehensive inbox placement tests. The results you see below were all done on a free plan, with the same email template (courtesy of our friends at TitanApps), and there was no IP warmup.

Email service providerEmail placement results
MailtrapInbox: 78.8%
Tabs: 4.8%
Spam: 14.4%
Missing: 2.0%
Amazon SESInbox: 77.1%
Tabs: 1.9%
Spam: 20.0%
Missing: 1.0%
MailgunInbox: 71.4%
Tabs: 3.8%
Spam: 23.8%
Missing: 1.0%
SendGridInbox: 61.0%
Tabs: 1.0%
Spam: 17.1%
Missing: 20.9%
PostmarkInbox: 83.3%
Tabs: 1.0%
Spam: 14.3%
Missing: 0.9%

If you would like to read the detailed methodology and interpretation of this data, check our email deliverability comparison test blog post.

Who is responsible for email deliverability?

It’s a shared responsibility. On one side, it’s you. I mean, it’s your team where devs are typically responsible for transactional emails, and marketers handle email campaigns. And, on the other side, it’s your Email Service Provider (ESP).

But let me break it down a bit more.

Sender responsibility

You, as an email sender, are primarily responsible for:

ESP responsibility

Your email service provider is responsible for:

Understanding this shared responsibility is key to diagnosing and improving deliverability; you must focus on the factors within your control while leveraging your ESP’s capabilities. However, keep in mind that ESPs cannot single-handedly fix deliverability issues caused by your list quality or sending habits.

How to monitor email deliverability?

To monitor email deliverability, you need to track key metrics like delivery and bounce rate, spam complaints, unsubscribes, etc. Use email analytics from ESPs or 3rd party tools, then analyze feedback from mailbox providers using Google Postmasters Tools or Microsoft SNDS.

Pro tip: Typically, there’s no need for 3rd party tools; most ESPs offer the functionality out of the box. The exception is Amazon SES. 

Monitoring is even more critical for high-volume senders because of the sheer number of emails. To put it into perspective, a 1% increase in bounce rate isn’t the same number when you send 10K emails monthly compared to 100K. 

Regardless of the tool, the focus is on tracking key metrics.

Let me provide an example of how analytics looks in an email service provider. Mailtrap offers built-in analytics to help you monitor the performance of the emails you send.

Through your Mailtrap dashboard, you can track key metrics essential for understanding your deliverability health:

This allows you to proactively address issues related to list quality, content, or technical setup before they severely impact your ability to reach the inbox.

So, if you’re a high-volume sender, you can meet Yaroslav (our deliverability expert) and he’ll tell you exactly how to engineer smashing metrics for the highest possible returns. Just hit the link below ⬇️.

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What affects the email deliverability rate?

Email deliverability rate is affected by a complex interplay of technical setup, sender practices, and recipient behavior. 

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mailbox providers analyze numerous signals to determine if an email is trustworthy and wanted, influencing whether it lands in the inbox or the spam folder. Understanding these factors is key to optimizing your email program.

Email infrastructure

Email infrastructure is the foundation for all your email-sending efforts, and here are the aspects you should pay special attention to. 

Email service providers (ESPs)

The platform you choose to send emails significantly impacts deliverability. A reputable ESP maintains a strong sending infrastructure, manages the reputation of shared IPs, and provides tools and support for authentication and monitoring, which are all vital for inbox placement.

Take Mailtrap as an example. For product companies sending high volumes of email, Mailtrap offers an infrastructure (API or SMTP) built for reliable deliverability at scale. 

The platform focuses on robust analytics to provide visibility into how your emails perform across different mailbox providers, automatic handling of essential authentication protocols, and features designed to protect your sender reputation, helping ensure your critical emails reach the inbox.

If you’d like to learn more about ESPs, check out our articles:

Sending domain configuration

Properly setting up your domain’s DNS records (like MX, A, CNAME) is essential for guiding emails to recipient servers and enabling authentication checks. Incorrect configuration can cause delivery failures or signal untrustworthiness, or worse, open your domain for phishing.

Email authentication

These protocols prove your identity as a legitimate sender and prevent malicious actors from spoofing your domain.

If you’d like to dive deeper into email authentication, check out this blog post.

Use of shared or dedicated IPs 

Here, I have to stress that the dedicated IP makes sense only if you send 100K+ emails a month. If you send less, it would take forever to warm up the IP, and the whole process may negatively affect your sender reputation.

Sender reputation

Your sender reputation is an aggregated score of your trustworthiness as determined by ISPs, based on your historical sending behavior. 

IP reputation

IP reputation is tied explicitly to the IP address(s) your emails originate from. 

Domain reputation

Domain reputation is associated with your email sending domain name. It carries significant weight for the overall deliverability, and a poor reputation can be tough to rehabilitate. 

Spam & complaints

Receiving spam reports or having emails marked as junk by recipients severely damages both IP and domain reputation.

I highly recommend checking out more on this topic to avoid your emails being marked as spam:

Email sending

How and when you send emails impact your reputation. 

Email list management

The quality and health of your email list are fundamental to good deliverability. Also, you need to handle the list and your recipients following the related laws, such as CAN-SPAM and the GDPR. If you want more info on the topic, check our detailed guide on email marketing laws

Anyway, here’s how to manage your list properly. 

Build an email list

Focus on permission-based list growth through transparent opt-in processes (like double opt-in) and don’t forget to set up recipient email validation. 

Sending to subscribers who genuinely expect and want your emails leads to higher engagement and fewer negative signals. Never purchase or scrape lists; they’re detrimental to deliverability.

Maintain email list hygiene

It is essential to regularly clean your list by removing invalid email addresses (hard bounces), spam traps, and inactive subscribers. This reduces bounces, spam complaints, and low engagement rates, all of which hurt your sender’s reputation.

Email content

The actual message you send is evaluated by spam filters and influences recipient behavior.

Subject line optimization

The first thing recipients see. An engaging and relevant subject line encourages opens, a positive engagement signal. Avoiding spam trigger words, excessive punctuation, or misleading claims helps bypass filters.

Personalization

Tailoring the email’s content to the recipient based on data and segmentation. Personalized, relevant content increases engagement (opens, clicks), signaling to ISPs that the email is desired.

Relevancy

Ensuring the content of your email aligns with what the subscriber signed up for and their interests. Irrelevant content leads to low engagement, high unsubscribes, and potential spam complaints.

Recipients’ engagement

How subscribers interact with your emails is heavily monitored by ISPs and directly impacts your sender reputation and future inbox placement. 

Positive engagement (opening, clicking links, replying, forwarding, adding to contacts, moving from spam to inbox) signals to ISPs that your emails are wanted and valuable, improving your standing. 

Negative engagement (deleting without opening, marking as spam) or a lack of engagement over time signals disinterest or unwanted mail, leading to increased filtering or blocking. Truth be told, this could also be one of the reasons your domain ends up in blacklists, which basically means the ISPs hold you for spammers.

How to test email deliverability?

To test email deliverability, you need to run the following checks and analyses: 

Testing isn’t a one-time action; do it as a regular process, especially critical for high-volume senders. A comprehensive testing approach provides the clearest picture since deliverability is a complex system where each element influences the others. If you’d like to know more, we prepared a separate guide on the testing and tools.

Alternatively, you can check our YouTube tutorial on the topic.

How to improve email deliverability: best practices

To reiterate, improving email deliverability isn’t a one-time fix. It’s an ongoing commitment to apply and stick to a set of best practices, aiming to cultivate a strong engagement with your audience and build trust with ISPs. The silver lining is that the automation of specific aspects helps streamline the whole optimisation process. 

Anyway, I already covered several best practices throughout this write-up. So, here’s a digest version of foundational principles to ensure your emails keep landing in inboxes. 

And here’s a detailed checklist you can use for reference when auditing your deliverability.

ActionExplanation
Implement email authenticationCorrectly set up and maintain SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to verify your sending identity and build trust with mailbox providers.
Build your list organicallyAlways obtain explicit consent (opt-in) from subscribers to ensure your audience genuinely wants your emails. This will lead to higher engagement and fewer complaints.
Maintain regular list hygienePeriodically remove invalid, unengaged, and bouncing email addresses to protect your sender reputation and reduce spam trap hits.
Warm up new sending IPs/DomainsGradually increase your sending volume from new IPs or domains to build a positive sending history and reputation with ISPs.
Monitor your sender reputationRegularly check your domain and IP reputation using tools like Google Postmaster Tools to identify and address perceived trustworthiness issues.
Avoid spam triggers in contentDesign email content and subject lines to be relevant and free of characteristics (e.g., excessive capitalization, spammy phrases) that can trigger spam filters.
Personalize and ensure relevanceSegment your audience and tailor your content to individual interests and behaviors, which will significantly boost engagement and signal legitimacy to ISPs.
Encourage positive engagementDesign emails that prompt opens, clicks, and replies, as active subscriber engagement is a powerful positive signal to mailbox providers.
Track key deliverability metricsRegularly monitor your bounce rate, spam complaint rate, open rate, and click-through rate to diagnose issues and measure campaign health.
Perform inbox placement testsUse seed list testing tools to simulate real-world inbox placement and see exactly where your emails are landing across various mailbox providers.

Again, if you’d like to learn more, check our video on the topic.

Email deliverability tools

Navigating the complexities of email deliverability requires more than just good intentions; it demands the right tools. These specialized platforms and services provide the insights, diagnostics, and infrastructure necessary to ensure your emails consistently reach the inbox. They allow you to monitor performance, identify issues, and proactively optimize your sending strategy.

Email Service Providers (ESPs) with a deliverability focus

Your choice of ESP is foundational to your deliverability success. Modern ESPs go beyond simply sending emails, offering features and infrastructure designed to enhance inbox placement.

Take Mailtrap Email Delivery Platform as an example. (Yeah, I’m biased, but just let me remind you of the deliverability test results I shared earlier.) 

Anyway, we provide robust infrastructure for sending both marketing and transactional emails, specifically catering to high-volume senders. 

Also, there are comprehensive analytics dashboards with detailed insights into email performance (delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, spam complaints) across various mailbox providers, enabling users to monitor deliverability and quickly diagnose issues. 

And we automatically handle the authentication protocols so you don’t need to create the DNS records manually.

Inbox placement and content testing tools

These tools help you simulate how your emails will perform in real-world inboxes and identify content-related issues before you hit send.

Sender reputation monitoring tools

Understanding how major mailbox providers perceive your sending reputation is crucial. These tools offer direct insights into your sender health.

Email authentication checkers 

Email authentication checkers verify protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly set up; i.e., you’re a legitimate sender and your emails are legitimate.

You can use tools like MXtoolbox, Verifalia, etc.

And, on Mailtrap, we also have free email checkers mentioned above:

While comprehensive deliverability platforms often include authentication checks, dedicated tools or features can help verify your setup.

Within Mailtrap’s Email Testing (sandbox) environment, users can leverage built-in spam analysis tools that include checks for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment. This allows developers and marketers to verify that their email authentication is correctly configured and will pass initial checks by mailbox providers before sending emails to live recipients.

Utilizing a combination of these tools allows you to gain a holistic view of your email deliverability, from infrastructure setup and sender reputation to content quality and actual inbox placement. This enables you to manage and improve your email program’s performance proactively.

Summary

Ultimately, email deliverability isn’t just a technical term buried in analytics. It’s the invisible force that makes your entire email strategy work; the “secret sauce” that ensures your efforts in segmentation, personalization, and compelling content truly connect with your audience and drive tangible results. 

When your emails consistently land in the inbox, you unlock the full potential of this powerful channel, transforming it into a reliable engine for engagement and revenue.

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