Email deliverability for people who would rather be making dough

Here is a question that most pizza shops cannot answer: what share of your marketing emails actually reach the inbox? Not opened, not clicked. Just delivered to the place where people look.

For many senders the honest answer is that nobody knows. Some of the email lands in a promotions tab, some in spam, and some is quietly dropped. The open rate goes down a little each month and everyone assumes people have lost interest.

Why it happens

Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and the rest have one main job when it comes to marketing email: protect their users from things they do not want. They decide where your email goes based largely on how their users react to it.

If people open your emails, reply to them and move them out of spam, that helps. If people ignore them, delete them without reading or mark them as spam, that hurts. The more of your list that never engages, the more likely your messages are to be filtered for everyone.

The technical basics

There are a few technical settings that prove your emails really come from you. They have names like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and they live in the settings for your domain. Large email providers now expect bulk senders to have them in place.

You do not need to understand how they work. You do need to make sure whoever runs your email has set them up correctly for the address you send from. If you send from a free email address, this is a good reason to stop.

Bulk senders are also expected to include a clear, one click way to unsubscribe. Make it easy. People who cannot find the unsubscribe link will often hit the spam button instead, and that is much worse for you.

Keep the list clean

The single most useful thing most shops can do is stop emailing people who never engage. If someone has not opened anything in six months or so, send them one last message asking if they want to stay. If they do not respond, stop sending them marketing email.

Your list will get smaller. Your delivery will get better, and the people who remain will be the ones who actually read what you send.

Watch the warning signs

• Open rates falling steadily over several months.
• Spam complaints creeping up after a particular campaign.
• A sudden drop in opens at one email provider but not others.

Any of these is worth investigating straight away. Getting a sender reputation back after it has been damaged takes much longer than keeping it healthy in the first place.

None of this is glamorous. It is the plumbing under every email you send, and when it fails it fails quietly.