Deliverability vs. Mailability - Don't ignore it for your next email campaign plan!

The times are unusual (I know, it is impossible to start a conversation or write an article without this phrase these days, apologies if I've overused it already) and it has pushed marketing teams to depend far more on email reach-outs than any other medium, and trust me, as a sales guy, I know how heavily are we depending on the mail reach-outs :)

The power and ease of marketing automation with tools like Pardot (which is awesome!) does mean organisations are at risk of building, automating, and launching too fast without a mental checklist to ensure system integrity and team alignment.

One such key point from the checklist is measuring the Mailability Vs Deliverability on any specific prospect list before executing a campaign.

Mailability vs. Deliverability

Mailability and deliverability are two concepts that are often confused with each other in email marketing, especially in Pardot where both concepts utilise the same prospect fields. Understanding the differencebetween the two is crucial for informing how you will send certain communications to your customers, and what results you can expect from a given email send.

You can use mailability to estimate the potential reach your email will have. If you have a list of 100 prospects, but turns out only 60 are mailable, then you may decide to allocate less time and effort to this campaign or change your target audience.

Operational Emails

Operational emails are another Pardot email type for ‘non-marketing’ purposes, also referred to as transactional.

Operational email sends by-pass the ‘email opt-out’ field, which makes them suitable for communicating information that your organisation is legally obliged to do. It is your responsibility to ensure that your email content reflects one of the following:

• Necessary to health and safety regulation
• Communicates terms of service changes
• System status notices
• Internal emails within your organisation

There are other categories listed here, but I picked out the likely one for COVID-19 notifications.

Sending to Large Pardot Lists

Sending a mass email through Pardot can be damaging to your overall email deliverability. Luckily, there are some checks you can do while building your email and segmenting your prospect data.

• Split your lists: if your organisation is on a dedicated sending IP and large sends are not something you do often, consider splitting your lists using the built-in Pardot functionality. It’s better to send gradually and successfully, rather than all at once and risk kickback from recipient email service providers.
• Watch out for risky Prospect data: risky data can include prospects that haven’t double opted-in (confirmed opt-in), haven’t been active in Pardot for a certain length of time, were part of purchased lists, or even have come from an unknown source.
• Validate the Email Data: use an email validation tool to estimate how much of your database is predicted to cause an email bounce.

I know my friends in Marketing would thing this is all common sense and a well known fact for everyone in the business. Trust me, even if we know it all (at-least that's what we all think), we usually don't take the structured approach while planning and specially in executions.

I hope the above writeup was informative and if your inquisitive mind wants to know more, you know how LinkedIn messaging works, right :) Try it and see wonders!

Thanks, Prakash Jha

Source: Pardot blog, Salesforce, Salesforceben.