Delivery vs. Deliverability

Delivery vs. Deliverability

Understanding the difference between delivery and deliverability is essential to managing successful email campaigns. Both play key roles in whether your messages are seen — and acted upon — by your subscribers.

Delivery

Delivery occurs when a message is accepted by the receiving server (the inbox provider).

When we talk about delivery rate, we're referring to the percentage of emails that were successfully delivered to the intended recipients. As long as a message is not bounced, it is considered delivered.

Deliverability

Deliverability, on the other hand, refers to where a message lands after it has been accepted — specifically, whether it appears in the subscriber’s inbox or is filtered into the spam folder.

Approximately 80% of deliverability is influenced by your sender reputation, while the remaining 20% is determined by the content of your email.

  • Sender reputation is primarily shaped by subscriber behavior (how they interact with your emails).
  • Content is assessed by spam filter algorithms, focusing on things like keywords, formatting, and links.

Because inbox providers prioritize human behavior over algorithmic checks, your sender reputation will always carry more weight in determining deliverability.

Key Players in Deliverability

Email Service Provider (ESP)
Your ESP is the system you use to build and send your email campaigns. Delivra is your trusted ESP.

Inbox Providers and ISPs
Inbox providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook) are the organizations that manage email inboxes and protect them from unwanted messages. Internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, AT&T, and Charter can also act as inbox providers.

Inbox providers and ISPs are strict because they aim to reduce spam, protect their users, and minimize hosting and data costs.

Sender
That’s you — the business or individual sending emails to a list of subscribers.

Subscriber
Subscribers are the recipients of your emails. Their behavior (opens, clicks, replies, spam reports) is the most influential factor inbox providers use to assess your reputation.

How Subscribers Impact Deliverability

Inbox providers closely monitor how your subscribers interact with your emails. Their behavior directly impacts your sender reputation and, in turn, your inbox placement.

Positive subscriber actions that help your deliverability:
  • Opening your emails
  • Clicking links within your emails
  • Replying to your messages
  • Adding your email address to their address book
  • Marking your emails as “important”

Open rates are particularly critical. Strive for an open rate of 17% or higher to avoid deliverability issues. Repeatedly unopened emails can negatively affect your reputation.

Neutral actions, like deleting an email or unsubscribing, do not significantly hurt your sender reputation unless they occur at unusually high rates.

Negative actions that harm your deliverability:

  • Marking an email as spam
  • Moving an email to the spam/junk folder manually

Spam complaints are serious. A complaint rate above 0.02% (2 complaints per 10,000 emails) is considered high and can damage your sender reputation.

If you have additional questions, feel free to reach out to our Support team at support@delivra.com — we’re happy to help!


    • Related Articles

    • Email deliverability: What it is & how it works

      Deliverability can be broken down into 3 sections, all of which can significantly influence the success of your long-term email deliverability. While there are other variables in the deliverability equation, we believe Messaging Infrastructure, Data ...

    • A recipient of my email reported that they did not receive my emails, but reports show their emails are successfully sent.  What can I do?

      Chances are, the receiving email server is accepting the campaign but preventing it from being delivered to the inbox. As long as the recipient is at a private/business domain, they can contact their IT team to white list our sending domain or IP ...

    • CASL: Canadian Anti-Spam Law

      While we cannot offer formal legal advice, below are a few tips and notes you may find helpful; we've also attached a more detailed report for reference if you want to dig deeper. CASL Guidelines Make sure you have clear, explicit consent (opt-in) ...

    • Why are my campaigns being marked as spam or not delivered to me?

      It's quite common for customers to receive their own messages as junk or spam. The reason? The campaign contains your company's domain in the From and To fields which is normally interpreted as internal email. However, your receiving server sees that ...

    • Whitelist (Safe Sender) Instructions

      Your email subscribers may be relaying to you that your campaigns go to their junk folder. Whitelisting is a one-time action that can be performed by your recipients to allow an email address or domain name to pass through an email filter. It adds ...