What is Deliverability Monitoring?

First, A Quick Refresher: What is Email Deliverability?

Before we dive deep into monitoring, let’s quickly recap email deliverability itself. It’s a term we hear a lot.

Beyond “Sent”: Reaching the Inbox

Email deliverability refers to the ability of an email to successfully reach the subscriber’s inbox. Notice I said “inbox,” not just “delivered.” Your email server might report an email as “sent” or “delivered” because the receiving server accepted it. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t go straight to the spam folder, a promotions tab, or get silently filtered out. True deliverability means your message lands where it can be seen.

Why It’s Critical for Your Clients (and You)

Why fuss over this? Simple.

• For your clients: If their marketing emails, newsletters, or even transactional emails (like order confirmations) go to spam, they lose sales, frustrate customers, and damage their brand.
• For you, the web creator: Understanding and helping clients with deliverability elevates your service. You’re not just building a site; you’re helping them build a successful communication channel. This means happier clients and longer relationships.

Defining Deliverability Monitoring

Now that we’re clear on deliverability, let’s define what monitoring it involves.

What Does It Mean to “Monitor” Deliverability?

Deliverability monitoring is the proactive and ongoing process of tracking key metrics and using specialized tools to understand how effectively your emails are reaching subscribers’ inboxes. It’s about:

• Tracking Key Metrics: Watching specific data points that indicate inbox placement, sender reputation, and recipient engagement.
• Identifying and Diagnosing Issues: Spotting problems like blacklisting, high bounce rates, or spam complaints early. Then, figuring out why they’re happening.
• Verifying Authentication: Ensuring email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are working correctly.

It’s an active, continuous effort to maintain and improve inbox placement.

Why Isn’t “Set It and Forget It” Enough?

You might think, “I set up my email system correctly, isn’t that enough?” Unfortunately, no. The email world is constantly shifting.

• The Ever-Changing Email Landscape: Internet Service Providers (ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) constantly update their filtering algorithms to combat spam. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.
• Impact of New Campaigns and List Growth: A new type of email campaign, a sudden surge in sending volume, or changes in your list quality (e.g., adding many new, unverified subscribers) can all impact how ISPs perceive your emails.

Without monitoring, you’re flying blind. You won’t know there’s a problem until your client calls asking why no one is opening their emails.

Key Metrics to Track in Deliverability Monitoring

Effective monitoring means knowing what to look for. Here are the essential metrics:

Inbox Placement Rate (IPR)

This is arguably the most important deliverability metric.

• What it is: The percentage of your emails that actually land in the main inbox, as opposed to the spam/junk folder, promotions tab (in Gmail’s case, which is still considered a success), or going missing entirely.
• How to measure it: This usually requires specialized tools that use a “seed list.” You send your campaign to this list of email addresses controlled by the tool, across various ISPs. The tool then reports where your emails landed.
• Why it’s the ultimate metric: It directly tells you if people are seeing your emails.

Sender Reputation Scores

ISPs assign reputation scores to sending domains and IP addresses.

• Domain Reputation: The overall health and trustworthiness associated with your sending domain (e.g., yourclient.com).
• IP Address Reputation: The reputation of the mail server’s IP address sending the email. This is crucial, though often managed by your Email Service Provider (ESP) if you’re on a shared IP. Dedicated IPs place more direct responsibility on the sender.
• Tools for checking: Services like Google Postmaster Tools (for Gmail-specific data), SenderScore.org by Validity, and Cisco Talos Reputation can provide insights.

Engagement Metrics (as indicators)

While not direct deliverability measures, engagement heavily influences it. ISPs look at these.

• Open Rates: Percentage of recipients who open your email. Important Caveat: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has made open rates less reliable as a standalone metric for users with MPP enabled, as it can pre-fetch email content, inflating opens. Focus on trends and combine with other metrics.
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): Percentage of recipients who click on one or more links in your email. This is becoming an even more vital engagement signal.
• Conversion Rates: Percentage of recipients who complete a desired action (e.g., make a purchase, fill out a form).

Consistently low engagement tells ISPs that recipients may not value your emails, which can hurt your inbox placement.

Negative Metrics

These are red flags.

• Bounce Rates:
  • Hard Bounces: Emails to invalid, closed, or non-existent addresses. These should be removed from your list immediately.
  • Soft Bounces: Temporary issues like a full inbox or server downtime. Monitor these; if an address consistently soft bounces, it may become a hard bounce.
• Complaint Rates (Spam Reports): The percentage of recipients who mark your email as spam. This is a very strong negative signal. Even a low complaint rate (e.g., above 0.1%) can cause problems.
• Unsubscribe Rates: While some unsubscribes are normal and healthy (it means people are self-regulating your list), a sudden spike can indicate a problem with content relevance or list acquisition practices.

Authentication Status

Are your emails properly authenticated?

• SPF, DKIM, DMARC pass/fail rates: DMARC reports (if you have DMARC set up with a reporting address) will tell you if your emails are passing or failing SPF and DKIM checks at receiving servers, and what policies are being applied. This is crucial for ensuring your emails are trusted.

Why Deliverability Monitoring is Crucial for Web Creators and Their Clients

As a web creator, you’re often a trusted advisor. Explaining and even assisting with deliverability monitoring adds immense value.

Protecting Client Investment

Your clients invest in email marketing expecting results.

• Ensuring marketing messages are seen: Monitoring helps ensure those carefully crafted emails actually get viewed, rather than lost to spam filters.
• Maximizing ROI on email campaigns: Better inbox placement directly translates to more opens, more clicks, and ultimately, a better return on investment from their email efforts.

Maintaining Brand Reputation

A brand’s email practices reflect on its overall image.

• Avoiding the spam folder stigma: Consistently landing in spam damages credibility and trust.
• Building trust with subscribers: When emails arrive as expected and provide value, it reinforces a positive brand image.

Proactive Problem Solving

It’s always better to catch issues early.

• Catching issues before they escalate: A dip in sender score or a rise in complaints can be addressed before it leads to major blacklisting.
• Faster diagnosis and resolution: Monitoring tools provide data that helps quickly pinpoint the cause of a deliverability problem.

Adding Value to Your Services

Go beyond the build.

• Offering insights beyond just building a site: You can provide ongoing value by helping clients understand and manage their email deliverability.
• Enabling long-term client success and retention: Successful clients are happy clients who stick around and provide referrals. Helping them succeed with email is a powerful retention tool.

Common Deliverability Issues Uncovered by Monitoring

Regular monitoring can bring various underlying problems to light. Here are some common ones:

• Blacklisting (IP or Domain): Your sending IP address or domain gets listed on one or more public or private blacklists, causing widespread blocking of your emails.
• Poor List Quality/Hygiene Problems: Sending to old, unengaged lists, purchased lists (a definite no-no!), or lists with many invalid addresses will trigger high bounce rates and complaints.
• Content Triggering Spam Filters: Use of spammy phrases, too many images, misleading subject lines, or problematic links can get your emails flagged.
• Authentication Failures: Incorrectly configured SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records mean ISPs can’t verify your legitimacy, leading to suspicion.
• Sudden Drops in Engagement: A sharp decline in open or click rates can signal that your content isn’t resonating, your frequency is off, or your emails are hitting spam folders more often.
• Issues with a Shared IP Pool: If you’re on a shared IP address with other senders who have poor practices, their bad reputation can sometimes affect yours (though reputable ESPs work hard to mitigate this).

Monitoring helps you catch these red flags before they cause irreversible damage.

Tools and Techniques for Deliverability Monitoring

So, how do you actually monitor these things? Several tools and techniques are available.

Email Service Provider (ESP) Dashboards

Most ESPs provide some level of reporting.

• What basic metrics ESPs provide: Typically, you’ll see open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates for each campaign.
• For WordPress users, a solution like Send by Elementor integrates communication tools directly. Its analytics features offer real-time insights into campaign performance, including opens, clicks, and even revenue attribution for WooCommerce stores, all within the WordPress dashboard. This provides a foundational layer of monitoring, giving you immediate feedback on how your emails are performing engagement-wise.

Dedicated Deliverability Monitoring Platforms (Third-Party Services)

For deeper insights, especially into inbox placement:

• Seedlist Testing: Services like GlockApps, EmailSuccess, or Kickbox allow you to send your emails to a list of “seed” accounts across many global ISPs. They then report on where your email landed (inbox, spam, promotions, etc.) for each provider. This is the most direct way to measure inbox placement.
• Reputation Monitoring Tools:
  • Google Postmaster Tools: Essential if your clients have a significant Gmail audience. It provides data on IP/domain reputation, spam complaint rates, authentication success, and more, directly from Google.
  • SenderScore.org by Validity: Gives you a reputation score from 0-100.
  • Microsoft SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) provides similar data for Outlook.com.

DMARC Reporting Services

If you’ve implemented DMARC with a rua (aggregate reporting) address, you’ll receive XML reports.

• Understanding DMARC reports: These raw reports are hard to read.
• Services that parse reports: Tools like Dmarcian, Postmark’s DMARC tool, or EasyDMARC can ingest these XML reports and present them in a human-readable dashboard, showing your authentication pass/fail rates and sources of unauthenticated mail.

Feedback Loops (FBLs)

• How they work: When a recipient at a major ISP (that offers an FBL, like Outlook.com or Yahoo) clicks the “spam” button, the ISP can send a notification back to the sender (or their ESP).
• Importance of processing FBL data: This data is crucial for identifying problematic campaigns or list segments and for promptly removing complainers from your list. Most reputable ESPs handle FBL processing automatically.

Implementing a Deliverability Monitoring Strategy: A Step-by-Step Approach for Web Creators

Helping clients set this up can seem daunting, but you can break it down.

Step 1: Ensure Proper Email Authentication Setup

This is the bedrock. Before you monitor, authenticate.

• Guide clients to correctly implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for their sending domain. Without these, deliverability will always be a struggle.

Step 2: Choose Your Monitoring Tools

Start simple and add as needed.

• Begin with what your client’s ESP offers. If they’re using a WordPress-integrated solution like Send by Elementor, its built-in analytics provide an excellent starting point for campaign performance and engagement trends.
• For clients with significant sending volume or past deliverability issues, consider recommending a dedicated seedlist testing service or a DMARC reporting tool.

Step 3: Establish Baselines

You need to know what “normal” looks like.

• After setting up tools, monitor key metrics for a few campaigns or a few weeks to establish average performance. This baseline helps you spot deviations quickly.

Step 4: Set Up Alerts (if available)

Many tools offer alerts.

• Configure alerts for critical events like a sudden drop in inbox placement, a spike in complaint rates, or a blacklisting notification.

Step 5: Regular Review and Reporting

Make it a habit.

• Schedule regular checks – daily for high-volume senders, weekly or bi-weekly for others.
• Translate this data into understandable reports for your clients. Show them the trends and explain what they mean.

Step 6: Diagnose and Remediate

When monitoring flags an issue:

• Use the data from your tools to investigate the potential cause. Is it a specific campaign? A new list segment? A content issue?
• Take corrective action promptly. This might involve cleaning a list, revising email content, fixing an authentication record, or warming up a new IP address.

How Send by Elementor Facilitates Effective Communication and Supports Deliverability Awareness

While Send by Elementor is primarily a communication toolkit for sending emails and SMS within WordPress, its design and features inherently support the foundations of good deliverability, which in turn makes monitoring more effective.

WordPress-Native Integration for Data Cohesion

Good data is the start of good deliverability.

• Because Send by Elementor is built for WordPress, it seamlessly integrates with data sources like WooCommerce customer information and Elementor Forms submissions. This data cohesion means contact lists are more likely to be accurate and up-to-date. Clean data reduces bounces and improves targeting – both positive for deliverability metrics that you’d monitor.

Built-in Analytics as a First Line of Monitoring

Immediate feedback is powerful.

• The real-time analytics within Send by Elementor for email campaigns (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and even revenue attribution for e-commerce) provide an immediate, accessible layer of performance monitoring. Web creators and their clients can quickly spot engagement trends or issues with a specific campaign directly within their WordPress dashboard. This is your first checkpoint.

Focus on Relevant, Automated Messaging

Relevance drives engagement, which drives deliverability.

• Send by Elementor includes features like pre-built marketing automation flows (e.g., Abandoned Cart recovery, Welcome Series). These encourage sending timely, personalized, and contextually relevant emails. Such emails inherently receive higher engagement and fewer spam complaints. This builds a positive sender reputation, a core element tracked by broader deliverability monitoring.

Empowering Web Creators to Offer More

Send by Elementor handles the sending and basic tracking. Understanding deliverability monitoring allows you to provide deeper strategic advice.

• You can use Send by Elementor to execute solid email strategies. Then, by understanding the broader concepts of deliverability monitoring (like seed testing or DMARC analysis), you can advise clients when they might need to look at more specialized third-party tools if issues arise or if they scale significantly. This positions you as a knowledgeable consultant, not just a technical implementer. Send by Elementor helps ensure the emails being sent are set up for success, making any subsequent monitoring efforts more fruitful.

Send by Elementor Lays a Strong Foundation

Send by Elementor’s WordPress-native architecture, integrated analytics, and emphasis on relevant automated communications help establish strong fundamental email practices. These practices contribute positively to sender reputation and engagement, which are key areas that comprehensive deliverability monitoring tools would then track and validate.

Challenges and Limitations of Deliverability Monitoring

It’s important to be realistic.

• Cost of Advanced Tools: Sophisticated third-party monitoring platforms can be an additional expense.
• Complexity and Data Interpretation: Some tools provide a vast amount of data that can be overwhelming to analyze without expertise.
• No Guarantees: Monitoring helps you improve, but it can’t guarantee 100% inbox placement all the time due to the complex nature of ISP filters.
• ISP Algorithms are Black Boxes: ISPs don’t reveal exactly how their filtering algorithms work, so there’s always an element of inference.

Conclusion: Making Deliverability Monitoring a Priority

If you or your clients are serious about email, deliverability monitoring isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.

Recap: Monitoring is an Ongoing Necessity

It’s the only way to truly understand if your emails are reaching the inbox and to proactively manage your sender reputation in a constantly changing digital landscape.

The Benefit for Clients: Sustained Email Effectiveness

For your clients, diligent monitoring means their email marketing, sales communications, and transactional messages consistently achieve their purpose. This leads to better customer relationships and improved business outcomes.

The Benefit for Web Creators: Enhanced Value and Stronger Relationships

For web creators, guiding clients on deliverability monitoring adds significant value to your services. It moves you beyond a one-time project provider to an ongoing strategic partner. This fosters client loyalty, opens opportunities for recurring revenue through management or consultation, and solidifies your reputation as an expert who delivers comprehensive solutions.

By embracing deliverability monitoring, you empower your clients and yourself to navigate the complexities of email with confidence and achieve greater success.