What is Deliverability Reporting?
The Deliverability Report is one of our Deliverability Tools that helps you to identify possible issues with your deliverability on ISP and email provider level. We do this by analyzing the response rates for the 10 most popular domains in your launch list and comparing these with the campaign average. We also look at your responses for other campaigns to provide a clear picture of why your messages have deliverability issues.
Please note that when a contact is deleted, all of the data relating to that contact is also deleted. This will retrospectively affect any reports which use contact-level data. Contact deletion may affect domain-level results in the Deliverability Reporting.
For more information on the effects of contact deletion, see What happens to deleted contacts in Emarsys?
How does it work?
We compare data from two different sources to make sure we do not display false alerts.
- Our domain reporting service compares ISP-level open rates to the general campaign open rate. If the ISP open rate does not hit our data benchmark, it suggests that your emails most likely ended up in spam folders (low open rate compared to average campaign open rate) or you might be blocked by the specified ISP (no opens for a domain).
There is a limitation which may sometimes have an impact on Deliverability Reporting: if you are using Send Time Optimization, this reporting is not available for all the parent campaigns; it is only available for each individual launch.
FAQ
How does domain reputation work?
Internet and Email Service Providers decide if your emails can be trusted based on your domain reputation.
How is your performance measured?
Measurement completely depends on the domain of your recipients. Each ISP and email provider has its own tools. For example, the Google Postmaster Tools allow you to collect data on your sending domains. For more information, refer to the provider’s documentation.
What are the terms and conditions of the main ISPs?
For more information, see our Deliverability guide to major ISPs.
Sections of the report
The report is broken down into three sections.
1. The table
You can find metrics related to domain-based campaign deliverability performance in this section.
2. The pie chart
The pie chart shows the distribution of the top 10 target domains for the selected campaign.
3. The bar charts
Click Show more details to display bar charts which provide details of the Opens, Clicks, Bounces and Unsubscribes for the top 10 domains, in percentage terms and with absolute numbers.
Opens and Clicks
Bounces
Unsubscribes
Interpreting the results
A low open rate for a specific domain does not necessarily indicate spam folder delivery. To understand what’s happening, you need to examine the campaign results. The following questions help you understand the possible reasons.
Is it happening for the first time?
If this is the first time you notice this warning, you may ignore it and continue with your marketing automation. However, we suggest paying attention to the results of your next campaign.
Is it a trend?
If you notice a trend of low open rates, check if you have changed your email templates or used new segmentation rules that resulted in a shift in your target audience (e.g. increasing number of inactive contacts). Check the Engagement reporting because it provides you with a better breakdown of your audience engagement.
To achieve ideal results, we recommend keeping a ratio of 50-50 between engaged and non-engaged contacts.
When you introduce new campaign versions, we recommend performing A/B tests. For more information, see sections A/B Testing automated emails and A/B Testing batch campaigns.
Additionally to the suggested steps described in Why is the Open rate low for a specific domain?, make sure your links are visible and clickable. You also need to ensure that your campaign is sent to the relevant audience. For more information on best practices for creating clickable links, see this DMA guide.
Additionally to the suggested steps described in Why is the Open rate low for a specific domain? and Why is the Click rate low for a specific domain?, you need to check the types of bounces you received:
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Hard Bounces - These happen when either the contact or the domain does not exist (e.g. an email address or domain name has been misspelled).
- Recommendation: To resolve this issue, you need to verify the acquisition processes and use either an email validation tool or a Double Opt-In process.
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Soft Bounces - These happen when a contact’s mailbox is full or there is a temporary server error on the recipient side.
- Recommendation: It is recommended to review how frequently you send campaigns to those contacts as they may not check their mailboxes that regularly or they have abandoned those mailboxes. You can change the threshold when contacts become invalid due to soft bounces anytime on the Contacts > Bounce Management screen.
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Block Bounces - These are the results of reputation issues (i.e. the recipient’s domain has filtered you temporarily to protect their users). This is a temporary issue and these contacts will not become invalid contacts.
- Recommendation: Concerning the next few campaigns, it is recommended to focus on your most engaged contacts for the specific domain.
For more information on the most common issues, see Common deliverability issues.