Deliverability, whether your emails actually land in the inbox instead of spam, is the metric that determines whether every other email strategy even has a chance to work. A handful of numbers commonly cited in the industry give you a rough bar to check your own program against: open rate above roughly 33%, click rate above roughly 1.2%, and bounce, unsubscribe, and spam-complaint rates kept low.
Benchmarks Worth Checking Your Program Against
Why Deliverability Comes Before Everything Else in Email
A brilliantly designed welcome flow or a well-timed win-back campaign does nothing if the email never reaches the inbox. Deliverability is shaped by your sending reputation with each mailbox provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook), which is itself shaped by how recipients engage with your past sends, opens, clicks, and, just as importantly, how often they mark you as spam or unsubscribe.
A note on these numbers: The benchmarks above are commonly cited targets in e-commerce email marketing, but ‘good’ varies by industry, list size, and email service provider, and different ESPs (Klaviyo, Attentive, and others) publish their own benchmark reports with somewhat different figures. Check your own ESP’s current benchmark report and your specific vertical before treating these as a hard pass/fail line for your program.
Frequently Asked Questions
What hurts deliverability the fastest?
Sending to an old, unengaged list, buying or renting email lists, and ignoring rising unsubscribe or spam-complaint rates are the most common fast ways to damage sender reputation.
How often should we clean our list?
Reviewing engagement segments and suppressing or re-engaging long-unengaged subscribers on an ongoing basis (commonly quarterly) is a reasonable habit, though the right cadence depends on your send frequency and list growth rate.
Does a low open rate always mean a deliverability problem?
Not always. It can also reflect subject line or send-time issues. But a declining open rate over time, especially paired with rising spam complaints, is a signal worth investigating rather than ignoring.
How does this fit with Dia Creative’s retention work?
Deliverability health is one of the first things we audit as part of our retention marketing services, since no flow, segmentation, or loyalty program strategy matters if the emails aren’t reaching the inbox in the first place.
