An email’s journey, from sending to inbox

Email is still the channel with the highest average return on investment. That’s why you most likely decided last year to invest your marketing budget in a series of email campaigns. You must have worked hard to make all your campaigns flawless. But it may well be that your hoped-for outcome (and investment return) has not arrived, with opening rates below expectations and disappointing interactions. Why these low performances?

The answer must be found upstream: did the campaigns you sent actually reach your recipients?

In recent years, only 80% of emails sent worldwide on average were actually delivered to the inbox. This means that, on average, 20% of the emails sent never reached the recipients.

Among all the possible causes of your low performance, the most important one almost never receives the attention it deserves: we are talking about Deliverability, or how your emails end up in the recipient’s inbox.

Good Deliverability means increasing the chances of your emails reaching people’s inbox and being opened by multiple recipients. You’re in good hands with MailUp. We have a team of the world’s leading Deliverability experts. And they’ve been working for twenty years to improve customer deliverability.

But let’s go back to the 20% of emails that, on average, do not reach the recipient. What happens to these messages? And most of all, why don’t they reach inboxes? The answer is in this infographic, where we reconstruct the path that an email follows after you hit send.

From the moment you press “Send”, the email starts a journey full of obstacles: non-existent or momentarily unavailable addresses, spam filters, unauthenticated sender, poor domain reputation and much more.

Each obstacle occurs at a precise moment of the journey and determines possible outcomes:

• failed email
• email arrives and is opened
• email arrives but is not opened
• email arrives but is marked as spam

But that’s not all: these possible outcomes affect the entire Deliverability of the sender domain. In other words, they impact the chances of delivery and travel of all subsequent sendings. That’s why Deliverability must be cultivated over time: analyzing its status and intervening once and for all to improve it are two excellent starting points, but they are not enough. Deliverability must be monitored, optimized and maintained with constancy, if you want real results.

When you discover how an email travels you’ll have the key to knowing and acting on delivery problems, the basis of your performance. So: download this infographic and find out where and when you can improve your deliverability basing on the risks that your email can encounter.

Download the infographic for free here.