Deliverability Rate
The percentage of sent emails successfully accepted by recipients' email servers.
The percentage of sent emails successfully accepted by recipients' email servers.
Why It Matters
If emails don't reach subscribers, nothing else matters—your best subject lines and offers are worthless in spam or rejected by servers. Poor deliverability directly costs revenue. A 90% vs 98% deliverability rate on a 100,000-subscriber list means 8,000 fewer people seeing your message every send.
Practical Example
Scenario
A home goods brand sends 75,000 emails. 71,250 are accepted by recipient servers.
Calculation
71,250 ÷ 75,000 × 100 = 95% deliverability rateResult
At 95%, they're at the minimum healthy threshold. Investigation reveals a subset of old, unengaged subscribers causing bounces. After list cleaning, deliverability improves to 98.5%.
In-Depth Explanation
A rate above 95% indicates healthy list quality.
Pro Tips
- 1Maintain deliverability above 97% as your target—95% is the minimum acceptable
- 2Remove hard bounces immediately and soft bounces after 3 consecutive failures
- 3Warm up new sending domains gradually—don't blast 100,000 emails on day one
- 4Monitor your sender reputation with tools like Google Postmaster Tools