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If you've ever spent any time in the dashboard of your email service provider (ESP), you've probably focused on the open or click rate of you email. Why aren't people opening your email? It's tempting to immediately start re-writing your emails, using stronger headlines perhaps, or maybe toning down your copy to sound less aggressive.
While those certainly may be problems, there is often a much simpler answer. A lot of issues with low open/click rates are really just delivery issues. Your customers can’t open/click on an email they never receive. If you’re seeing unusually low open/click rates for your industry, it’s very possible that it’s caused by delivery issues.
Instead of spending time and resources A/B testing subject lines or revamping the design of your CTA buttons, you might be better off making sure your emails are actually being received.
In the last post we covered some ways to monitor common issues that might stop your email from being delivered. And here, by delivered we really mean accepted by your customer's mail server (or service). That's half the battle. Once it's on your customer's server though there's a quite a few ways to monitor how that server delivers that email to the customer. That is, monitoring the so-called last mile -- does it get delivered to the inbox, sent to spam or hung up by some filter the customer never gets to see.
Unfortunately, deliverability is hard to measure directly because you can’t login directly to everyone’s mailbox to see if an email was delivered. Your ESP probably doesn't know. When it says an email was "delivered" it could well mean that it was delivered to the spam folder, or in the case of Gmail, the promotions folder. There are however, some services that can help you get a better idea of where your email is going.
The two big services in this space are [250ok](https://250ok.com/) and [ReturnPath](https://returnpath.com/). Using these services can give you quantifiable data about your inbox delivery rate. In other words you don’t just trust your ESP that their delivery is great, measure and monitor it.
Once you've got some mailbox delivery monitoring system set up, you can start looking at the data. The big question will likely be how much of your email is ending up in the spam folder and why. Now you know how much is ending up there -- the industry standard is somewhere around 20 percent, depending on who you ask, though we think you should aim for much lower than that -- the question becomes, how do you fix it?
Before you start hiring copy writers and running textual analysis on your keywords, consider that it might be something much lower level, like the quality of your ESP. Now that you have the tools to monitor delivery it's well worth your time to start comparing services. Just like you'd A/B test headlines, it's worth the time and effort to A/B test ESPs.
We've already showcased a few examples of how monitoring delivery rates can help you migrate to a better ESP. One is Childcare.co.uk, which helps connects parents and childcare providers and tutors. When childcare.co.uk switched from Amazon SES to Postmark, they saw their open rates [go up 11 percent](https://postmarkapp.com/customers/childcare-co-uk). That's a huge win, but it's one you can only make if you're monitoring where your mail ends up.k
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