Email holds an important place among modern communication channels, and knowing whether a message actually arrived is essential for maintaining proper communication and its high effectiveness. This is useful not only for personal communication but also for how a company interacts with customers through business correspondence and marketing campaigns. In this article, we'll look at ways to check email delivery and answer questions about what's important to remember to give a sent email the highest chance of reaching its recipients.

Sending a test email to yourself

Sending a test message from one of your own accounts to another helps you understand whether a campaign is actually delivered before launching a full-scale marketing campaign. This lets you check the email against several criteria at once.

  • Correct formatting: the email displays correctly on different devices, and design elements scale properly for various screen sizes.
  • Not blocked by spam filters: the email isn't flagged as spam by popular email clients.
  • Everything works as it should: links, images, attachments, and other message elements display and function correctly.

Tools for checking email deliverability

There are several tools designed to evaluate email deliverability. Let's look at some popular options.

Mailtrap

The tool available on the Mailtrap platform lets you check an email before sending it to recipients, including checking HTML/CSS and display across different devices. You can also use it to find out whether the sender's server is on any blacklists.

Mail-tester.com

A free website that analyzes emails and the correctness of their content formatting. After you send an email to a newly generated address provided by the platform, Mail-tester analyzes it along with the sending mail server and the sender's IP address. The service provides a detailed report on how effectively the message will be delivered and how that metric can be improved. Once the service provides recommendations, this information stays available for seven days on a free account and 30 days on a paid one.

Analyzing email open rate metrics

The statuses collected by mail providers provide information on how many recipients actually open the messages sent to them. If the values are consistently low, this may be a sign that a certain portion of the audience is likely not receiving the company's campaigns.

  • Sent: the number of people the campaign was sent to.
  • Delivered: the number of people whose mailboxes actually received the campaign.
  • Read/Opened (open rate): the percentage of recipients who opened the email.
  • Soft bounces: a delivery failure due to a full mailbox, a large volume of sent content, or a technical malfunction on the recipient's mail server.
  • Hard bounces: occur when the specified address or domain doesn't exist.
  • Unsubscribes: recipients who unsubscribed from the campaign.
  • Sent to spam: an automatic sorting service or a person marked the received message as spam.
  • Click-through rate: lets you assess link clicks and recipient engagement.

Checking sender and address information

It's important to make sure the sender information (including domain authentication) is correct, since incorrect sender data can negatively affect deliverability. It's also worth checking recipients' email addresses to avoid sending emails to invalid or nonexistent accounts.

Useful rules for working with campaigns

Factors affecting email deliverability include:

  • sender reputation;
  • correct configuration of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols;
  • high-quality content and the absence of spam phrases and excessive links.

Improving email delivery quality is an ongoing process. High deliverability and open rates for brand notifications and updates are the foundation of successful customer communication, so a company should regularly monitor its metrics, test different strategies, and adapt them to audience preferences and insights from specialized services. «Check your open rates!» — that's our motto.