Deliverability Is The New Open Rate [How To Track It Right In 2025]

Jul 01, 2025

Email deliverability has become the key metric for outbound and cold email campaigns in 2025, overtaking the traditional focus on open rates. With more inboxes tightly guarded by spam filters and strict domain authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, just getting your messages into the main inbox matters more than whether they get opened right away.

Poor deliverability doesn’t just hurt campaign results—it can stall your career and stall sales pipelines if emails never reach their targets. This shift means understanding how to measure and improve deliverability is crucial for sales development reps and outbound teams who want to stay ahead. In this post, you’ll get clear, practical insights on tracking deliverability the right way and actionable tips to boost your email success—plus why having the right tools, like Mailerr’s automated setup and monitoring, can make a real difference.

Understanding Email Deliverability

In today’s outbound email world, knowing whether your message actually lands where it matters is everything. Email deliverability isn’t just a buzzword—it’s the foundation that decides if your hard work turns into real conversations and sales. Before we break down deliverability, it helps to clear up what it actually means and why it’s truly different from just “delivery.” Getting these definitions right will sharpen your focus on what really impacts your cold outreach success.

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the measure of how often your emails arrive inside the recipient’s inbox rather than getting lost in spam or promotional folders. It’s about reaching the “main stage” of email—the primary inbox where your prospect is most likely to see and engage with your message.

This is more complex than simply sending an email successfully. Many emails get “delivered” to mail servers but then bounce into spam or get hidden away in less-used folders. Deliverability looks beyond the first step of delivery to check whether your email makes it to the right place.

Email deliverability depends on several factors such as domain reputation, email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and ongoing monitoring against blacklists. Tools that automate and manage these setups can help keep your campaigns running smoothly with higher chances of landing in inboxes instead of spam.

For more in-depth insights on the concept, you can visit Campaign Monitor’s explanation of email deliverability basics.

Deliverability vs. Delivery

The terms “deliverability” and “delivery” might sound interchangeable, but they cover very different ground.

• Delivery means your email was accepted by the recipient’s mail server without bouncing back.
• Deliverability is about where your email ends up once accepted—does it land in the inbox, the spam folder, or some other tab?

Think of delivery as arriving at the airport and deliverability as getting your luggage safely to the baggage claim—not all delivered emails get “claimed” by your prospect’s attention.

High delivery rates can actually mask poor campaign health since emails could be sitting in spam, unseen by your recipients. A strong deliverability rate, on the other hand, means your emails have passed strict checks by spam filters and are ready for your audience’s eyes.

Dig deeper by checking out how Litmus breaks down email deliverability vs. delivery.

Role of Deliverability in Cold Outreach

Cold outreach faces a tough gatekeeper—email providers that aggressively filter unfamiliar, unsolicited messages. If your deliverability slips, your emails might never hit the inboxes of your prospects, no matter how compelling your message is.

The success of cold email campaigns hinges on maintaining a healthy sender reputation. This means using verified domains, properly configuring DNS records, and staying clear of spam traps. Some key practices include:

• Setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC automatically to prove email authenticity.
• Using fresh, high-quality domains that haven’t been flagged.
• Monitoring blacklists, spam reports, and bounce rates to catch issues early.
• Sending moderate volumes per mailbox, typically between 30-50 emails daily to avoid raising flags.

Investing in a tool that simplifies these tasks can pay off big. Platforms like Mailerr automate domain purchases, mailbox setups, and monitoring — so you spend less time troubleshooting and more time connecting with leads.

For practical checks and tips tailored to cold outreach, Woodpecker’s deliverability tips offer a solid read.

Photo by Eslam Mohammed Abdelmaksoud

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Clear understanding and careful management of email deliverability will set you apart from the crowd. It’s the gatekeeper between your outreach effort and the real results you want. Getting a handle on this now shapes your campaign’s future outcomes and keeps your pipeline flowing steadily.

Why Open Rates No Longer Tell the Whole Story

Open rates used to be the shining star metric for email campaigns. But these days, they’re like a rearview mirror — showing where you’ve been but not what’s truly ahead. Thanks to privacy changes, tracking quirks, and inbox sorting quirks, open rates have lost much of their reliability. For outbound sales teams and cold email pros, it’s time to shift focus toward more meaningful indicators. Let’s explore why open rates don’t capture the real picture anymore and what clouds their accuracy.

Privacy Changes Affecting Open Tracking

Privacy updates, especially from major email clients like Apple Mail, have reshaped how opens are tracked. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection preload images and hides a user’s real open behavior by pre-loading all email content for users who enable this feature. This means an open may register seconds after an email hits the inbox, whether or not the recipient actually reads it.

With these changes, open events don’t necessarily reflect genuine user engagement anymore. Apple’s strong stance on privacy has offered users more control but broken the reliability of open tracking pixels. Other email services are following suit, making it harder to count opens as a pure measure of interest.

For a deeper look at how these privacy updates disrupt open rate tracking, you can check out this analysis on Apple’s Mail Privacy changes.

Inaccurate Open Rates and False Positives

Even before privacy rules, open rates were vulnerable to inaccuracies and false positives. Sometimes, automated systems like spam filters, preview panes, or email scanning services “open” emails, artificially inflating open numbers.

Some common reasons for false positives include:

• Preview snippets being loaded automatically without user interaction.
• Spam filters scanning emails on receipt, triggering opens.
• Recipients quickly scrolling past messages without genuine interest.

This means that a spike in open rate doesn’t always translate into meaningful engagement or sales opportunities. Relying on open rates risks misreading how prospects actually interact with your emails.

If you want to understand more about this problem, this article about inaccurate email open tracking offers helpful insights.

Limitations of Open Rate Focus

Open rates only tell you if the email was potentially viewed, not how it impacted the recipient. They can’t reveal if your message was read thoroughly, forwarded, or moved to spam.

Putting your energy into boosting open rates could cause you to miss bigger issues:

• Your emails might be landing in spam folders, never truly seen.
• The “opens” may be inflated, fooling your strategy.
• You won’t know whether recipients respond, click links, or convert.

Focusing solely on open rates is like judging a book by its cover—you see some engagement but miss the whole story. Instead, metrics tied to deliverability, domain reputation, and engagement actions offer a fuller picture of campaign health.

For a useful read on why open rate is a limited metric, see this breakdown on the fall of open rates.

Impact of Spam and Promotions Tabs on Opens

Where an email lands in the inbox affects whether it’s opened. Nowadays, inboxes come with multiple tabs or folders like Promotions, Social, and Spam. Even if your email is delivered, it might be tucked away in a less visible place.

The Promotions tab, especially in Gmail, keeps marketing emails out of the primary inbox, where users are less likely to notice them. This naturally pushes open rates down without it being your fault. Similarly, emails landing in spam folders get neglected altogether.

Fighting against tabs is tough and often futile. Instead, focusing on improving deliverability to the main inbox and maintaining domain reputation gets your emails where they belong — where your prospects are more likely to engage.

To learn more about how inbox tabs affect opens without panic, this detailed article on Gmail tabs and email marketing is worth a look.

Photo by Pixabay

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Understanding the limits of open rates helps you avoid the trap of chasing vanity metrics. It’s time to dig deeper into true deliverability and engagement signals that drive real results.

Key Factors That Drive Deliverability

Getting your emails into the inbox is a mix of art and science. A crucial piece of this puzzle revolves around your sender reputation, which email providers scrutinize heavily before deciding where your messages land. Building and maintaining a strong reputation takes more than just good intentions — it requires attention to several core factors. Let’s look closely at the elements that shape your sender reputation and how they impact your deliverability success.

Sender Reputation: Explain how domain age, sending volume, and consistent practices impact reputation.

Your sender reputation acts like a trust score for email providers. Imagine it as your credibility rating in the eyes of spam filters and inbox managers. The better your reputation, the smoother your emails glide into the intended inboxes.

Several factors influence this score:

• Domain Age
  Older domains enjoy a significant advantage. Email services see established domains as more trustworthy since they’ve stood the test of time without suspicious activity. Research shows domains aged 10 years or more can experience up to a 30% better delivery rate than newer ones. This is because spam filters often flag brand-new domains for extra scrutiny until they build a track record. Registering a domain and using it consistently over months helps build that credibility.
• Sending Volume
  The amount of email you send daily affects how inbox providers judge your behavior. Sudden spikes or massive volumes can look like spammer activity. Keeping your daily emails per account between 30 to 50 helps maintain a steady, human-like pattern that avoids triggering alarms. This consistent volume signals stability and reliability, reducing the chances of your emails landing in spam folders.
• Consistent Sending Practices
  Consistency goes beyond volume. Regularly sending emails on a stable schedule, avoiding bouncing addresses, and following authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are vital. These practices confirm your identity and reduce the chance of being blacklisted. Maintaining clean mailing lists by removing inactive or invalid addresses also protects your reputation. Think of it as keeping your house tidy to avoid any unwanted visitors.

By nurturing these areas carefully, you build a solid foundation that keeps your emails with your target audience, avoiding the hidden dark corners of spam or promotions folders.

Automating these technical steps pays off over time. Solutions like Mailerr automate domain setup, DNS management, and ongoing monitoring, so you can focus on sending emails without worrying about backend issues — all while maintaining a healthy sender reputation.

For a deeper dive into how domain age influences deliverability, you might find this article on “Domain Age: What Is It and Why Is It Important?” helpful. Also, exploring best practices for maintaining your sender reputation in this “10 ways to improve and protect your sender reputation” guide provides actionable tips.

Photo by cottonbro studio