In this guide:
- Introduction and the meaning of Email Deliverability
- Reviewing the health of your email program
- What determines Deliverability
- What to do if an email isn't delivered to your constituent
- Protecting Deliverability: Sender Reputation
- Protecting Deliverability: Email List Hygiene
- Deliverability Checklist
Introduction
For nonprofit organizations like yours, effective communication with your supporters is essential. Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools to engage with your audience, drive donations and memberships, and share your mission. However, the success of your email campaigns hinges on one critical factor: deliverability.
Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach your constituents' inboxes, rather than getting lost in spam folders or bouncing back. Understanding and optimizing your email deliverability is key to ensuring your messages are seen, opened, and acted upon.
In this guide, we'll explore what email deliverability is, why it matters for your nonprofit, and actionable steps you can take to improve the health of your email program.
What is “Email Deliverability” and why does it matter?
Your email marketing program depends on emails landing in your constituents’ inboxes where they’ll see and engage with the information you’re sending to them. “Email Deliverability” measures how many of your contacts successfully receive the emails you’re sending to them. For example, emails bouncing or emails being sent to a spam filter can prevent them from being delivered or received as expected.
How can I check on the health of my email program?
To review your deliverability, go to Emails > Email Statistics inside your Neon CRM system and use the filters near the top of the page to look at email statistics for the past year.
Opened: Of all emails sent in the past year, what percentage were opened by the recipients? According to Campaign Monitor, the average open rate for nonprofits is 21-21.5%, but we’ve found that the average for emails sent by Neon CRM organizations is 28.59%. Continue sending valuable, relevant emails to your constituents to aim for a healthy open rate.
Clicked: Of all emails sent in the past year, how many recipients clicked on at least one link inside the emails? Click-through rates can be tricky, because some emails are informational rather than including a call-to-action. But click rates can be a indicator of a healthy, engaged subscriber list. The average click-through rate for organizations using Neon CRM is 3.29%.
Bounced: Of all emails sent in the past year, how many bounced? Bounced emails are messages that don’t reach your subscribers due to undeliverable email addresses. The average bounce rate for nonprofit organizations using Neon CRM is 1.72%. A bounce rate over 2% could indicate the need for your email lists to be cleaned up.
Unsubscribed: This is the rate of recipients who click on the “unsubscribe” link inside your emails to intentionally leave your email list. The average rate for nonprofit organizations using Neon CRM is 0.19%. If you’re seeing rates higher than 0.5%, that’s a danger sign that your email audience lists may need to be cleaned up, or you need to take a fresh look at the content and frequency of emails you’re sending.
For more details about email benchmarks and health, click here to review our Nonprofit Email Benchmarks guide.
What determines the deliverability of my emails?
There are many different factors that contribute to deliverability, including:
- Some email addresses may be entered incorrectly into your CRM or email accounts may be closed by the constituent. When this is the case, Neon CRM will attempt to check for the email address, but will get an error message returned indicating that the email address doesn’t exist.
- Each email that is successfully delivered is still handled by the recipient’s email service provider, meaning that the message could be sorted into a spam filter, the inbox, or blocked entirely. Examples of email service providers are Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
- Each email service provider has its own capabilities and methods of sorting new emails. How the email is delivered, sorted, and displayed is determined by the provider. And typically, email service providers don’t make their methods of sorting emails public, to avoid giving spammers information about how to bypass filters and sorting.
Can I see how my emails are being delivered? Partially. Neon CRM will know if an email bounces or the email address doesn’t exist, because we receive an error message. However, Neon CRM doesn’t have information about whether an email was routed to an inbox or spam filter by each email service provider.
My constituent says my email was never delivered. What happened?
If you hear from a constituent that they haven’t received your emails, log into Neon CRM and go to Emails > Sent Emails. In this list, filter for the day and type of email, or search by email address. If the email shows as “Succeed” status, then from Neon CRM’s side the email was sent, but it was likely sent to a spam filter or folder by the recipient's email service provider. Ask the constituent to check their spam folder or spam filtering system and mark your emails as “not spam.”
If the email has a Declined status, check the Bounce/Error note for more details. If there was a typo in the email address, you can edit the constituent’s account and then resend send the email from the Sent Emails page.
Protecting Deliverability: Sender Reputation
Sender Reputation is a score assigned to each email sender by each Email Service Provider. Each Email Service Provider uses different factors and weighting of the factors for their scores, but the concept is similar. For example, Neon CRM’s Email Sending as a whole has a reputation with each of the Email Service Providers, but also your Domain Name as a sender will have its own reputation.
Neon CRM’s Email Sender Reputation
Why isn’t your reputation entirely your own? With Neon CRM email sending (and this is similar to how other email sending services work, too), you’re sharing a set of IP addresses with other Neon CRM organizations using our services. Neon CRM maintains a set of servers specifically for sending emails and we protect the reputation of these servers carefully.
How Neon CRM protects sender reputation:
- We monitor all of the well-known email blocklist services and apply for our IPs to be allowlisted.
- We keep informed about changing standards in the email industry so we can update our services to better support your email deliverability.
- Organizations using Neon CRM are valid not-for-profit organizations that have undergone some review while getting started with Neon CRM. This naturally improves sender reputation compared with other email services that have mixed-use between individuals, not-for-profit organizations, and commercial companies.
Your Email Sender Reputation
Partially, however, Email Sender Reputation is determined by the quality of the emails that you send.
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Authenticity
Email Authentication proves to the recipient email service provider that your emails are legitimately from your organization, and not a spammer spoofing your brand. This is particularly important because when you send emails from Neon CRM, you’re sending emails from your organization’s domain name, but routed through Neon CRM’s email servers. Email recipients want to know that even though you’re sending from a different email server, the emails are legitimately from you.
Authentication requires a one-time setup with your Domain Name Service. Keep in mind that if your organization’s domain name changes (typically for a rebrand), you may need to complete these steps again. Click here for a detailed guide to complete authentication setup.
If you don’t complete these steps, Neon CRM has a fallback option for you that allows you to automatically authenticate using Neon CRM’s domain name, so emails can still be delivered. But, this gives you less control since your sender reputation is shared with other organizations using Neon CRM’s domain name. And your emails will appear to come from an @neonemails.com domain.
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Legitimate Content
When preparing your emails, be sure to send a test email to yourself and others to double-check the content. Internet Service Providers and Email Service Providers are more likely to filter your email into a spam folder if their review notices problems like:- Broken hyperlinks
- Misspellings
- Missing or hidden (white text on white background, for example) “unsubscribe” link
- Broken image content blocks - This typically happens if images are inserted using URLs (meaning that the image is hosted outside of Neon CRM’s image storage) and the URLs become inactive before the email is sent.
- Take care with using Emojis in your email subject lines, as well. Mission-relevant emojis perform well and can increase open rates, but some emojis have become associated with spam emails, such as the fire and alarm emojis.
This subject line:
Versus this one:
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Sending Frequency
When you start sending emails through a new service, such as starting to send emails from Neon CRM for the first time, you’re establishing a new reputation with email service providers. The best way to establish a good reputation is to start by sending to known engaged subscribers in smaller batches. For example, maybe create an email audience of your current donors, volunteers, or members and contact them first before expanding to a larger email audience including prospective donors.
Over time, email service providers will recognize patterns of your typical sending behavior and list size and adjust their metrics. This is generally to your advantage, but a sudden, dramatic change in your sending behavior could trigger blocking. For example, if you’ve been sending 1000 emails a month with a 0.2% unsubscribe rate but then suddenly purchase an email list with 200,000 email addresses and a 30% bounce rate, your sender reputation will drop dramatically and you will likely be flagged as a spammer.
Protecting Deliverability: Email List Management
When Email Service Providers decide whether to deliver your emails to inboxes or spam folders, they also factor in your email sending history. Your emails are more likely to be blocked or filtered as spam if you have been sending emails to nonexistent email addresses (the emails “hard bounce”), seeing high unsubscribe rates from your lists, or sending emails to “spam traps”.
The most important thing: Avoid buying email lists
When you purchase email lists, you’re setting your email marketing program up for high unsubscribe rates, recipients marking your emails as spam, high hard bounce rates, and delivery to spam traps. Although it may seem appealing to increase your subscriber count with a purchased list, unwanted emails sent to recipients who did not opt in to receive them harm your deliverability much more than the purchased list improves your numbers, leading to reduced engagement from your loyal constituents because emails are being sent to spam folders.
Avoiding hard bounces
When an email bounces, it indicates that the email address you’re sending to does not exist or is unable to receive emails.
Neon CRM has automation to help protect the bounce rate of your emails. Before attempting to send an email, Neon CRM will check all email addresses with the service Truemail, to verify that the email addresses exist and are able to receive emails. If an email address does not exist, we’ll remove it from the mailing list before sending the email, to protect your sender reputation by avoiding bounces.
It is still possible to see some emails bounce, however, even with Neon CRM’s automated check. Bounces can happen for a variety of reasons, including a temporary outage for the recipient’s email service provider or a full email inbox. If an email bounces or is found to be undeliverable five times, we’ll block the email address and it will be removed from your mailing lists automatically. Because bounces can happen because of temporary rather than permanent circumstances, we want to attempt to deliver several times before counting out that email address entirely.
Avoiding spam traps
Email addresses that have become dormant (no activity for 1 year) are at high risk for becoming "spam traps" - repurposed email inboxes where any email delivered to them (spam or legitimate content) is considered spam and can cause your emails to be blocked from delivery.
To avoid delivering email to spam traps,
- Make sure you do not purchase lists and only send email to subscribers who have opted in to receive communications.
- Follow an “email sunsetting policy” to automatically remove emails from your lists if the subscriber does not open or engage with your emails for a long period of time.
A sunsetting policy for emails is an email industry best practice that protects email sender reputation and allows your emails to continue to be delivered into inboxes. Click here for more information about email sunsetting from Spamhaus, a leading spam filtering service provider.
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Neon CRM’s Email Sunsetting Policy To protect against spam traps, Neon CRM has added an automated email sunsetting service. You do not need to take any action in your CRM to enable this functionally, it will run automatically behind the scenes in your CRM. The minimum requirement for an email address to be considered for sunsetting is:
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Avoiding high unsubscribe rates and keeping engagement (opens, click rates) healthy
High unsubscribe rates can also be an indicator to email service providers that your emails should be routed to spam folders. If your unsubscribe rates are high, review:
- The cleanliness of your email lists - has everyone receiving emails opted in to be contacted? Do you need to remove old, inactive subscribers?
- Your sending frequency - are you sending regularly but not too often so that recipients feel they need a break from being contacted? You may want to compare your sending frequency with other nonprofit organizations.
- Your content quality - are you sending wanted, relevant content to your audiences? Are you segmenting which emails are sent to which constituents, so only relevant content reaches each subscriber? Are you mixing in informational, engaging content with fundraising appeals? Is content personalized for your recipients by including tokens?
- Handling response emails - are you sending emails from an address that can receive replies? If constituents reply to emails, are you responding to their comments or inquiries?
- Personalization - Are you using Neon CRM tokens to personalize emails, for example addressing the email to “Hi <<First Name>>”?
- Sending times - If you always send emails around the same days of the week or times of day and haven’t tested other times recently, try experimenting with delivery times to see how timing impacts engagement.
Summary: Checklist for your Email Deliverability
Periodically review your email metrics to check your email program health. Watch out for any increases in unsubscribes or bounces, or any decrease in open and click rates.
Complete the email authentication setup with your Domain Name Service to prove your emails are legitimate. Click here for detailed instructions.
Never purchase email lists, only send email to contacts who have opted in to receive communications.
Regularly clean your lists by removing invalid or inactive email addresses to prevent high bounce rates and spam traps.
Send emails to engaged audiences first, especially when using a new email service.
Test emails before sending to ensure there are no broken links, misspellings, or missing unsubscribe links.
Use relevant emojis and engaging subject lines carefully to avoid being marked as spam.
Personalize content using tokens, and segment your audience to send tailored, relevant messages.
Send from an email address that can receive replies and actively respond to constituent feedback.
By following this checklist, your nonprofit can enhance its email deliverability, ensuring that your important messages reach your supporters’ inboxes.