Deliverability 101: Understanding and Monitoring Deliverability

Deliverability is defined by how your emails perform once you send them to your customers. It’s a key factor for your newsletter campaigns and must be given full attention.

In this article, we'll break down what deliverability means, why it matters, and how you can keep an eye on it to ensure your emails reach their destination and get noticed. Whether you’re new to email marketing or looking to fine-tune your strategy, understanding deliverability is key to making your campaigns more effective.

Understanding your overall deliverability stats

You’ll find your overall deliverability stats on the main page of your dashboard. They are the last stat card on the page and will give you a lot of information about your deliverability over multiple campaigns. Let’s go over the details you can find there:

Total Sent: The total number of emails sent during the reporting period.
Delivered: The percentage of successfully delivered emails compared to the total number sent.
Bounced: The percentage of emails that resulted in a soft or hard bounce compared to the total number of emails sent. Learn more about Hard vs. Soft Bounces.
Open Rate: The total number of unique opens divided by the total number of delivered emails.
Click Rate: The total number of unique clicks divided by the total number of delivered emails.
Order Rate: The total number of unique orders divided by the total number of delivered emails.
Unsubscribed: The percentage of contacts who unsubscribed from the contact list after receiving an email.

Spam Rate: An acceptable spam rate for emails is typically below 0.1%. A spam rate exceeding 0.1% may impact your email deliverability and inbox placement. A rate exceeding 0.3% will have a noticeable impact on email deliverability. Maintaining a low spam rate is crucial to ensuring your emails are delivered to recipients' inboxes and to protecting your sender's reputation with email service providers. Learn more about List Hygiene.

Detailed deliverability information for individual newsletters

You can also see individual information on each of your newsletter campaigns by accessing them on your Campaigns page. This will give you a more solid understanding of how each of your newsletters has performed.

In the Campaigns tab, you’ll initially see a rundown of all your newsletters and text campaigns and their deliverability stats:

Title: this will show you the internal title given to each of your newsletters, your customers don’t see this information.
Subject/Preview: this will show you the subject set for each newsletter, this is what your customers will see on their inbox.
Status: there are four different statuses that can be seen here, they are: draft, scheduled, sending, and sent - they indicate the current status of your newsletter.
Delivered: this will show you how many of your emails were delivered to your customers, opposed to how many of your emails were sent initially.
Opened: this will give you more insight into how many of your emails were opened by your customers.
Clicked: this will give you more insight into how many of your emails were clicked by your customers, meaning they clicked on any of the links present in the newsletter.
Unsubscribed: this will show you how many of your customers clicked on the “unsubscribe” button.
Revenue: this will show you how many of your customers engaged with your newsletter and subsequently placed an order. Privy uses a last-touch model with a 7-day attribution window. If a customer has opened/clicked multiple emails within seven days preceding a purchase, the revenue will only count toward the most recent email.

By clicking on any of your emails on the Campaigns page, you’ll see an even more detailed page with more information about your newsletters. Let’s go over what you can find there:

Delivery Report

The Delivery Report shows how many emails were sent, delivered, bounced, and rejected.

Sent: the number of contacts sent the email minus the rejected recipients.
Delivered: contacts sent the email and whose email server sent Privy a response stating that the email was delivered.
Bounced: the number of contacts sent the email that had the email bounce back. Bounces are usually due to non-existent, invalid, or blocked email addresses.
Rejected: the number of contacts that met the email's segment criteria but were not sent the email because they had a malformed address or had previously unsubscribed, bounced, or marked an email as spam.

Engagement Report

The Engagement Report shows how recipients interacted with your email once they received it. This report has five metrics that can help you gauge the success of your email:

Delivered: contacts whose email server sent Privy a response stating that the email was delivered.
Opened: contacts who had the email delivered and opened the email. Privy embeds an invisible image into the email message when you send it. When your recipient views the email and the images load, Privy knows that the email was opened. If the recipient's email client doesn't allow the image to load, Privy will not track the email open.
Clicked: contacts who had the email delivered and clicked on any link in the email.
Unsubscribed: the contacts that decided to unsubscribe from your communications by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email.

Reported as Spam: the contacts that reported this email as spam.

Evaluating deliverability success

Now that you know where to look for your deliverability numbers, let’s go over the ranges that are considered ideal for each relevant statistic of individual newsletters:

Open rate: a good open rate stands at between 17% and 28%, though this depends on your store’s industry.
Click-through rate (CTR): a good CTR stands between 2% and 5%, but it also depends on your store’s industry.
Spam complaints: 0.1% and below is the ideal number for spam complaints, this would mean that only 1 customer is marking your email as spam per 1000 delivered emails.
Bounces: an ideal bounce rate will be 2% or lower. Anything between 2% and 5% is worth investigating, and anything over 5% is considered critical and requires immediate action for improvement.
Unsubscribes/opt-outs: the ideal range for unsubscribes in a single email should fall around 0.5% and below, meaning that 5 customers unsubscribe per 1000 delivered emails.