Email Marketing Fuels Ecommerce Brands

Email marketers are sometimes the unsung heroes of an ecommerce brand's marketing strategy to retain customers, gain conversions, and bolster brand loyalty. However, with all the effort that goes into a well thought out and planned email campaign, sometimes you’ll find that the email fails to land in the inbox at all. A businesses domain health, engagement rate, and email warm up are all important factors affecting email deliverability. Afterall, great content is only effective if it gets seen. 

While email marketing might seem like it adds to inbox clutter, it’s proven to consistently deliver high conversion rates and remains a powerful tool for driving engagement. For instance, automated email campaigns such as abandoned cart reminders or follow-up emails are a major revenue driver for businesses, generating 30 times more revenue per recipient compared to general marketing email campaigns. That means for every $1 spent on a regular targeted email campaign, an automated email campaign might earn up to $30 more per person due to higher engagement. This personalized approach based on the customer’s previous actions feels more relevant to consumers, making them more likely to convert. 

Now if that email never lands in your customers inbox, that's a lot of money you're potentially leaving on the table. So how do we ensure that your ecommerce’s emails reach customers? We dive into what email deliverability is, factors impacting the effectiveness, and how we can optimize your email engagement in 2025. 

Understanding Email Deliverability & Domain Health

In a world before technology, sending mail and ensuring it was delivered to the recipient was never 100% promised. Sometimes your letter would return to the sender if there was an unknown address or issue in delivery, and the same thing can happen with emails. Just because you send an email, doesn’t mean it will end up delivering. Oftentimes, internet service provider  (ISP) systems will flag unknown sender emails and direct them straight to a junk or spam folder, never to be seen by the recipient. When this happens, poor email deliverability is likely the culprit. 

Email Deliverability

Email deliverability refers to the amount of emails that are delivered to an inbox, a crucial factor when it comes to the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing. Deliverability issues can arise due to a myriad of factors such as:

• Poor sender reputation
• Spammy or untrustworthy email content
• Lack of email authentication protocols, such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC
• Low email engagement. 

When a user is sending hundreds of emails per day, such as an ecommerce business ramping up their email marketing campaigns, this can impact the sender's domain reputation. By sending hundreds or thousands of emails per day, this mimics spam sending patterns, signaling to ISPs that the user’s emails are not to be trusted and could potentially hold spammy content. When an ISP flags your email domain as a spammer, this will automatically send your emails directly to junk inboxes, resulting in wasted time and effort going into email campaigns never to be seen by consumers. 

Domain Health

Beyond email deliverability, a brand's domain reputation is influenced by its overall “domain health.” ISPs evaluate several factors to determine the trustworthiness of a brand’s domain, including:

• Bounce Rate - the number of emails that “bounce” or do not deliver to the recipient's inbox.
• Email Engagement Rate - the number of people who engage with your email such as opening, replying to or forwarding the email.
• Unsubscribes - the amount of recipients who have unsubscribed from your emailing list after receiving an email.
• Delete Rate - the number of people who have deleted your emails.
• Spam Report - the amount of times people have reported your emails and your domain as spam to their ISP. 
• And many more factors

ISPs will take into consideration all of these combined factors, and together they will influence the overall “health” or legitimacy of your domain. A poor domain reputation can significantly affect your email marketing efforts, preventing your emails from reaching your intended audience and lowering your email marketing ROI.

How to Optimize Your Email Engagement

With an average return on investment of $40 for every $1 spent, email marketing serves as an impressive converter, while remaining affordable for smaller scale brands. This highly sought out channel however is only as effective in return if promotional emails are delivered successfully. Warming up your email or domain is an essential step in improving your sender reputation, yet a lengthy process that can take from 3-4 months to complete. 

When it comes to optimizing your email marketing engagement, there's a few approaches ecommerce brands can take:

• Authenticate your domain - set up SPF, DKIM, and SMARC records to verify the legitimacy of your domain and start to build trust with ISPs and email providers. 
• Start Small - Begin your email campaigns with sending low volumes of emails to establish a positive sender reputation. Slowly increase your sending volume overtime, keeping in mind most email providers only allow 500-10,000 emails to be sent per day. 
• Focus on Engagement - prioritize improving your brand’s email engagement metrics such as open rates, click rates, and replies. A good benchmark to aim for is the average open rate of 32% for email marketing across all industries, however this rate can vary by sector. 
• Establish a Natural Sending Pattern - Avoid sending high volumes of emails too quickly as this will mimic spammer sending behaviour and land you on blacklists. Gradually increase email sending patterns to establish a consistent pattern. 
• Personalize Your Emails and Copy: Tailor your content to include the recipient's information, preferences or interests using your customer data. The increase in personalization can boost engagement and reduce your risk of being seen as spam. Personalized emails were found to increase revenue by 760% and is one of the most effective strategies for email marketing.  
• Invest in Warm-Up Tools - If you don’t have the time or resources to manually warm-up your domain, consider using specialized services or tools to automate this process for you!

Stay Ahead with Strategic Email Marketing 

Going back to the example above, consider the stakes a successful email campaign can have on your ecommerce business. If your business aims for a $30 return per automated email sent, and plans to send 1000 emails, the email deliverability rate determines how much revenue you could potentially generate. With a strong email deliverability rate (such as 95%), 950 emails could reach a customer’s inbox, maximizing the potential ROI of the email campaign. Multiply that number by the potential $30 spent per recipient and your campaign could generate up to $28,500 in revenue.

However, if your ecommerce brand suffers from poor domain health and a low email deliverability rate, fewer emails will make it to customer’s inboxes. This not only reduces engagement and conversion opportunities but also significant revenue losses, undermining your marketing efforts and overall business growth. If emails don’t reach consumer’s inboxes due to spam filtering, poor authentication, or disengaged recipients, ecommerce brands lose vast revenue opportunities and the funds needed to scale their operations. Ensuring strong email deliverability isn’t just best practice, but a necessity to maintain profitability and growth momentum for brands. Don’t let your emails go unnoticed in the new year, start optimizing your email marketing strategy for success today.