Understanding Email Deliverability in Patch

Email deliverability is about more than sending an email. Use this guide to understand what happens after you send and how to improve the chance that your messages reach the right people.

In this article

• What email deliverability means
• Know the difference between sent, delivered, and inboxed
• Review the main email statuses
• Use the right contacts before you send
• Protect your sending reputation
• What Patch may recommend

What email deliverability means

Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach the inboxes of people who expect to hear from your business. It is affected by your list quality, consent practices, sending history, email content, and how people respond to your messages.

Patch helps you send email, organize contacts, segment audiences, and review performance. However, a successful send from Patch does not guarantee that every message will land in the main inbox. Receiving inbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, company mail servers, and spam filters make their own filtering decisions.

Know the difference between sent and delivered

• Sent means Patch attempted to send the message.
• Delivered means the receiving system accepted the message.

Review the main email statuses

• Opened: The recipient appears to have opened the email. Open tracking can be affected by privacy settings and email provider system features.
• Clicked: The recipient clicked a tracked link in the email.
• Bounced: The receiving system rejected the email or could not deliver it.
• Unsubscribed: The recipient opted out of future marketing email.

When reviewing a campaign, look at more than one number. A campaign with many sends but low clicks, high bounces, or high unsubscribes may need a cleaner audience or better targeting.

Use the right contacts before you send

Before sending a Blast or turning on an Automation, ask these questions:

1. Did these contacts give your business permission to email them?
2. Do they know your business name?
3. Have they visited, purchased, booked, joined, submitted a form, or engaged recently?
4. Is the message relevant to this exact group?
5. Are old, bounced, unsubscribed, or unengaged contacts excluded?

If the answer is no or unclear, build a smaller segment first.

Protect your sending reputation

Your sending reputation improves when people open, click, and expect your emails. It can decline when people ignore, delete, bounce, unsubscribe, or mark messages as spam.

Use these practices to protect it:

• Send to engaged contacts first.
• Use segments instead of sending every message to every contact.
• Remove or sunset people who have not engaged in a long time.
• Do not import purchased, scraped, or rented lists.
• Use double opt-in when collecting new leads.
• Use email validation when available.
• Use a custom sending domain. Patch's sending domains - mailgro.com and patchsend.com - are shared domains which means other account's sending habits affect the deliverability for all other accounts.

What Patch may recommend

If your account shows deliverability risk, Patch may recommend (or enforce) one or more of the following steps:

• Clean the list before sending again.
• Use email validation.
• Send to smaller, more engaged segments.
• Sunset inactive contacts.
• Use double opt-in for new form submissions.
• Pause or reduce broad sends until the list is healthier.

These steps are meant to protect your account, your customers, and overall email performance.

Customer Support

If you need help or are not sure which step to take next, contact Patch Customer Support at success@patchretention.com or 888.605.4429.