What is a good delivery rate?
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For most senders, a delivery rate above 98% is healthy. Above 99.5% is excellent. If you're below 97%, something needs attention.
The thing to remember: delivery rate reflects how well your list is managed, not how well your emails perform. A 99% delivery rate means 1% of your sends are bouncing. That 1% is almost entirely addresses that don't exist or servers that actively rejected you. Clean list, high delivery rate. Stale list, falling delivery rate. It's that direct a relationship.
What drives delivery rate down: hard bounces from invalid addresses, soft bounces that keep failing until they convert to permanent failures, blocks from mailbox providers who distrust your IP or domain, and authentication failures where your SPF or DKIM isn't set up correctly. Any of these will chip away at your delivery rate over time.
One important nuance: a high delivery rate doesn't guarantee your emails are reaching the inbox. Delivery measures acceptance by the receiving server, not inbox placement. An email can be "delivered" into a spam folder. If your delivery rate is fine but your open rate has been declining, inbox placement is the next thing to investigate. Use your Google Postmaster Tools data to check your domain reputation, and consider running an inbox placement test to see where your emails actually land.
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