Email deliverability is the measure of how well your emails reach recipients' inboxes instead of spam folders. Without proper benchmarking, you can't evaluate your performance or spot issues that may hurt your campaigns. Here’s what you need to know:
Tracking the right metrics is essential for understanding the performance of your email campaigns. These metrics serve as a guide, helping you pinpoint areas that need attention and improvement. Each one offers insights into a specific aspect of your email strategy. Let’s break down the most crucial metrics.
The delivery rate is the percentage of emails that successfully land in recipients' inboxes without bouncing back. It’s calculated as:
(delivered emails ÷ total emails sent) × 100.
For established senders, a delivery rate above 95% is considered strong.
On the other hand, the bounce rate represents the percentage of emails that fail to be delivered. There are two types of bounces:
To maintain a healthy email list and infrastructure, aim for a bounce rate below 2%. Tools like Infraforge can help achieve this by automating DNS configuration and managing dedicated IPs, ensuring your emails have the best shot at reaching their destination.
The open rate measures how many delivered emails are opened by recipients. While privacy updates have made this metric less precise, it still provides a sense of how appealing your subject lines are and whether recipients trust your emails.
Open rate benchmarks vary by industry. For instance, B2B cold outreach campaigns often see open rates between 15-25%, while more established email marketing campaigns can achieve rates of 20-30%. Keep in mind that these are general guidelines, especially with tracking limitations due to privacy changes.
The click-through rate (CTR), however, offers a clearer picture. It tracks the percentage of recipients who click on links within your email. Unlike open rates, CTR reflects deliberate engagement. For cold outreach, a solid CTR typically falls between 2-5%.
If your open rate is decent but your CTR is low, it might mean your subject lines are effective, but the email content or call-to-action isn’t connecting with your audience. A high CTR, on the other hand, suggests your message is resonating and your call-to-action is compelling.
The spam complaint rate tells you how often recipients mark your emails as spam. This metric is critical for maintaining a good sender reputation. Email providers like Gmail and Outlook heavily factor complaint rates into decisions about whether to deliver your emails to the inbox or the spam folder.
Keep your spam complaint rate under 0.1% (one complaint per 1,000 emails). Rates above 0.3% can lead to serious issues, such as your emails being filtered automatically. High complaint rates are often a sign of poor list quality, irrelevant content, or overly aggressive sending practices.
The unsubscribe rate measures how many recipients opt out of receiving your emails. While unsubscribes may seem negative, they’re far less damaging than spam complaints. Most email campaigns see unsubscribe rates between 0.2% and 0.5%.
If your unsubscribe rate starts climbing, it could signal content fatigue, overly frequent emails, or a mismatch in audience targeting. However, some level of unsubscribing is normal and can even help you maintain a cleaner, more engaged list. The key is to watch for patterns over time rather than focusing on isolated spikes.
To gauge the success of your email campaigns, it's essential to compare your performance against both industry standards and your own historical data. These two perspectives provide a well-rounded framework for evaluating the metrics discussed earlier.
Industry benchmarks serve as a valuable reference point for assessing your campaign's deliverability and engagement. By consulting benchmark reports, you can determine whether your campaigns are performing within expected ranges or if adjustments are necessary.
For example, delivery rates are a critical indicator. High-performing campaigns typically achieve excellent deliverability. If your delivery rate consistently falls below these norms, it could signal issues with your email infrastructure or the quality of your contact list. Adjust your expectations based on the nature of your audience and campaign.
Open rates, on the other hand, can vary widely depending on the audience and campaign type. A campaign targeting B2B audiences may see different engagement levels compared to one aimed at general consumers. Similarly, cold outreach campaigns often result in lower open rates, so it's crucial to align your expectations with benchmarks relevant to your specific scenario.
Click-through rates (CTR) also follow predictable patterns across industries. For instance, sectors like government or nonprofit organizations may experience higher engagement, while others might see more modest results. In cold outreach campaigns, achieving a CTR that aligns with or surpasses industry norms is often a strong indicator of success.
The takeaway? Use benchmarks that align closely with your specific situation. For example, a SaaS company running cold outreach campaigns should compare its results to similar campaigns rather than retail newsletters. Many email platforms provide industry-specific reports to help guide these comparisons.
While industry benchmarks are useful, your own historical data is equally important. Tracking your internal baselines allows you to monitor trends and quickly identify changes in performance.
One effective method is to establish a 30-day rolling average for key metrics. This approach smooths out daily fluctuations, making it easier to spot meaningful trends. Be mindful of seasonal variations and note any configuration changes to distinguish normal shifts from potential issues.
It’s also helpful to segment your internal benchmarks by campaign type or infrastructure. For instance, if you're using a dedicated IP setup (like Infraforge), you might maintain separate baselines for each IP address or domain. This segmentation enables more detailed monitoring and faster troubleshooting.
Documenting significant changes - such as switching email service providers, updating content strategies, or improving list hygiene - alongside your performance data provides valuable context. This practice helps you understand why benchmarks may shift and reduces unnecessary troubleshooting.
Once you've established benchmarks, visualizing your data can provide clear insights into your campaign's performance. Many email platforms include built-in dashboards, but creating custom visualizations can offer a more tailored perspective.
For example, a color-coded dashboard can quickly highlight performance health:
Using dashboards and trend charts, you can compare your current metrics against both industry standards and your historical baselines. Regular review sessions - like weekly meetings - ensure this data stays at the center of your optimization process. By making data-driven decisions, you can continuously improve your email campaign deliverability and engagement.
The quality of your email infrastructure plays a huge role in how well you can monitor and improve email deliverability. While basic email platforms offer standard metrics, advanced tools provide deeper insights and more control over your campaigns. Here’s a closer look at the key infrastructure features and monitoring tools that can directly enhance your benchmarking efforts.
Dedicated IP addresses are a game-changer compared to shared IPs. They give you full control over your sender reputation by isolating your campaign performance from other senders. With Infraforge, you can provision dedicated IPs to separate different types of campaigns, ensuring consistent deliverability benchmarks without outside interference.
Pre-warmed domains and mailboxes give you a head start by establishing credibility right from the beginning. Infraforge offers pre-warmed infrastructure, allowing you to launch campaigns with immediate trust from email providers. This is especially useful when starting new campaigns, as it eliminates the variable of domain age from your performance analysis.
Automated DNS setup simplifies the process of configuring essential records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Infraforge’s automated DNS management ensures these settings are optimized across all your domains, providing a solid framework for accurate deliverability benchmarking.
SSL and domain masking let you experiment with different approaches without putting your main brand’s reputation at risk. By isolating testing environments from your production setup, you can gather cleaner data for your analysis.
These foundational features are critical, but the real magic happens when you combine them with centralized tools for real-time monitoring.
Infraforge’s Masterbox is a centralized monitoring solution that gives you real-time visibility into your email accounts. It consolidates performance data from multiple campaigns, making it easier to spot trends and quickly identify deliverability issues. This tool is invaluable for benchmarking because it streamlines the process of analyzing performance patterns.
The Infraforge API takes things a step further by offering programmatic access to key deliverability metrics. This allows you to build custom monitoring solutions or integrate with your existing analytics tools. For large-scale operations, where manual tracking isn’t practical, the API provides real-time data on delivery rates, bounce classifications, and engagement metrics. With this integration, your benchmarking dashboards stay up-to-date, aligning infrastructure insights with campaign performance.
When paired with sending tools like Salesforge, the workflow becomes seamless - from campaign creation to performance analysis. This integration centralizes performance metrics, enabling accurate comparisons across campaigns. You can analyze results across different IPs, domains, or time periods to pinpoint which elements of your infrastructure are driving success.
With advanced tools like Infraforge, benchmarking evolves from a reactive process into a proactive strategy. These platforms give you the insights and control you need to fine-tune your email campaigns and drive continuous improvement.
Once you've gathered deliverability data, the next step is turning those numbers into meaningful insights. Raw metrics alone don't tell the whole story - it's the patterns, outliers, and long-term trends that reveal what’s really driving your email performance. By analyzing these factors, you can understand why your results shift and take steps to improve.
Platforms like Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Power BI are excellent for creating dashboards that focus on trends rather than static data points. These tools let you visualize delivery rates over time, compare multiple campaigns, and even set alerts for when performance dips below your benchmarks.
For example, a line chart showing delivery rates over the past 30 days gives a clearer picture than a single percentage. Comparing this month’s performance to the same period last year can also highlight seasonal trends that may influence your strategy.
Dashboards like these are invaluable for spotting patterns and anomalies in your email campaigns.
With well-designed dashboards, you can uncover trends like seasonal fluctuations, variations by day of the week, or even issues caused by high email volumes. For instance, a sudden drop from 94–96% deliverability to 87% could signal a performance issue that needs immediate attention.
One often-overlooked factor is geographic variation. Deliverability can differ significantly by region due to variations in email provider preferences and filtering rules. Segmenting your data by recipient location can show whether your system performs consistently across all markets.
To spot anomalies effectively, you need to establish normal ranges for each metric. Without this context, a deliverability rate of 87% might seem fine when, in reality, it’s a red flag.
Once patterns and anomalies are identified, the next step is to drill down into the specific factors influencing your results.
Breaking your data down by campaign, sender, infrastructure, or time can help you pinpoint what’s affecting your deliverability. This level of detail can reveal which email content, IP address, or sending schedule is driving - or hurting - your success.
Tools like Infraforge allow you to segment performance by IP or domain, giving you a clearer view of what’s working. For example, if Domain A maintains a 96% deliverability rate while Domain B lags at 89%, you’ve identified an area that needs attention.
Time-based analysis is another critical tactic. A single day of poor performance might indicate a temporary issue, like a provider outage. But if the decline lasts a week, it could point to a broader problem, such as a damaged sender reputation or ineffective content strategy.
You can also analyze content performance by segmenting dashboards to see which subject lines, email lengths, or calls-to-action perform better. While correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, these insights can guide your A/B testing efforts.
For the most detailed insights, combine multiple segmentation factors. For instance, you might find that cold outreach emails sent from specific IP addresses on Tuesday mornings consistently outperform similar emails sent at other times. This kind of granular analysis is only possible when your infrastructure tracks detailed data and your dashboards support multi-layered views.
To stay ahead of issues, make it a habit to review your dashboards weekly. Look for emerging trends or shifts in established patterns. The goal isn’t just to fix problems as they arise - it’s to spot opportunities for improvement before they impact your overall metrics.
Benchmarking email deliverability is not a one-time task - it’s an ongoing effort that relies on tracking key metrics, maintaining a strong infrastructure, and analyzing performance regularly. The core metrics to watch include delivery rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints. These numbers act as your early warning system, signaling when something might be off with your campaigns.
But metrics alone aren’t enough. The backbone of successful deliverability lies in a robust infrastructure. Tools like Infraforge offer real-time monitoring and allow you to dissect performance by factors such as IP address, domain, or sending patterns. This granular view is critical for pinpointing problems, whether it’s a domain underperforming or identifying the best times to send emails.
While industry benchmarks provide helpful context, your own historical data is the real goldmine. Comparing your current performance to your past results helps you spot significant deviations that could indicate issues. For example, if a campaign suddenly performs worse than usual, it’s a sign you need to dig deeper and address the root cause quickly.
To make the most of your data, real-time dashboards are invaluable. They transform raw numbers into insights you can act on. Regularly reviewing these dashboards can help you identify emerging trends before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, you might notice that your campaigns excel in North America but struggle in other regions due to differences in email filtering systems.
Think of benchmarking as your roadmap for continuous improvement. By spotting patterns - like the best times to send emails or subject lines that drive engagement - you develop a playbook that sharpens your strategy and boosts results over time.
If your email delivery rate isn't hitting the 95% benchmark, it's time to take a closer look at a few key areas. Start by checking your email authentication settings - SPF, DKIM, and DMARC - to ensure your sender reputation is solid. A strong reputation is essential for getting your emails into inboxes.
Next, keep your email list in top shape by removing invalid or inactive addresses. Segmenting your audience can also make a big difference, as sending tailored, relevant content tends to improve engagement.
When using new domains or IPs, warm them up gradually to establish trust with email providers. Pay attention to engagement metrics like open rates and click rates; low numbers here can hurt your deliverability. For more advanced help, platforms like Infraforge offer tools like private email infrastructure, pre-warmed domains, and optimization solutions specifically designed for cold outreach campaigns.
To boost your email deliverability using past performance data, start by diving into key metrics like bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, and spam complaints. Spotting patterns - like a spike in bounce rates or an uptick in spam reports - can reveal potential issues. From there, you can tweak your sending practices, fine-tune audience targeting, or revamp your email content to address these challenges.
Keeping a close eye on these metrics regularly allows you to fine-tune your strategies and safeguard your sender reputation. Over time, this leads to better inbox placement and more impactful email campaigns. For more advanced needs, tools like Infraforge offer features such as dedicated IPs, pre-warmed domains, and automated DNS setup. These can simplify scaling and optimizing large-scale outreach efforts, ensuring smoother operations.
Using a dedicated IP address puts you in charge of your sender reputation. This means fewer chances of your emails being delayed or marked as spam, which is crucial when running large-scale email campaigns and aiming for consistent delivery.
On the other hand, pre-warmed domains help you build trust with email providers before sending high volumes of emails. By gradually establishing a positive reputation, you improve the chances of your messages landing in inboxes instead of being filtered out or rejected.