What's the difference between "sent," "delivered," and "delivery rate"?
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If you've looked at your ESP's campaign report and wondered why three of those numbers are different, you're not imagining things. Sent, delivered, and delivery rate each measure something slightly different, and conflating them is one of the more common errors in email reporting.
Sent is the total number of outbound attempts. Your ESP tried to deliver this many messages. It doesn't tell you anything about whether they succeeded.
Delivered (or "accepted") is the number of messages that the receiving server confirmed it took. When the receiving mail server responds with SMTP 250 OK, that send is logged as delivered. Emails that bounced or were rejected outright don't appear in this count. Importantly, "delivered" doesn't mean the email reached the inbox. It just means a server accepted it. Where the server put it next is invisible to your ESP.
Delivery rate is just the math: delivered divided by sent, times 100. If you sent 10,000 and 200 bounced, you have 9,800 delivered and a 98% delivery rate. It's the inverse of your bounce rate.
The metric that actually tells you whether emails reached the inbox is inbox placement rate. None of these three tell you that. If your delivery rate is high but your engagement is low, that's when to look at placement rather than delivery.
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