If it doesn’t land, it doesn’t matter: The real cost of poor email deliverability
Let’s be blunt: even the best email strategy in the world isn’t worth much if your emails never make it to the inbox. You can have beautifully crafted subject lines, laser-focused targeting, and the best AI-driven segmentation MarTech money can buy - but if your deliverability is off, you’re shouting into the void.
And yet, deliverability is still one of the most misunderstood - and under-monitored - pillars of email success in Marketing Operations.
1 in 6 emails never makes it to the inbox
Let that sink in.
According to Validity’s 2023 benchmark report, 1 in every 6 marketing emails never reaches the inbox. That’s nearly 17% of your carefully orchestrated messages being junked, filtered, blocked, or lost to the spam abyss. It’s not a minor technicality - it’s a direct hit on performance, ROI, and reputation.
Add to that:
70% of marketers rank deliverability as a top priority (Validity, 2023)
Poor deliverability can reduce engagement rates by over 20%, even among loyal audiences (Litmus, 2023)
Every percentage point of deliverability gain equals measurable increases in opens, clicks, and conversions - especially for high-volume senders
Major mailbox providers are now using AI to score your sender reputation in real time, meaning yesterday’s tactics might already be today’s red flags (Google Postmaster Tools, 2024)
In short: Deliverability is no longer just a hygiene metric. It’s a strategic lever.
How to track deliverability (properly)
Many teams still rely on outdated proxy metrics to "guess" deliverability health. But opens, clicks, and bounces only tell you part of the story. If you’re serious about performance, you need real tools that diagnose and solve deliverability issues at the source.
Here’s what the top MOPs teams are using:
Validity’s Everest platform
Gives a full 360° view of inbox placement, bounce classifications, sender reputation, and engagement by ISP
Includes seed testing (aka: simulated sends to test inbox placement) and blocklist monitoring
Real-time alerts if anything starts to wobble - before your metrics fall off a cliff
Dedicated IP Monitoring
Especially important for high-volume senders using platforms like Eloqua, Marketo, or SFMC
Shared IPs can tank your deliverability due to bad neighbors - yet many teams don’t even know if they’re sharing
Remember: You can’t fix what you don’t track.
And once something breaks, recovery is slower than most teams expect.
How Sojourn helped Citeline cut undelivered emails by 75%
Deliverability challenges aren’t just theoretical. They’re costing real businesses real revenue - and for Citeline, the problem was snowballing fast.
Before working with Sojourn, Citeline was seeing undelivered rates of 20%, meaning 1 in 5 emails was never seen by the intended recipient. And this wasn’t due to lazy copywriting or forgotten authentication. It was a mix of technical misconfigurations, inconsistent monitoring, and under-optimized infrastructure - issues that had built up over time.
What Sojourn did:
Ran a comprehensive deliverability audit, using Validity and in-platform Eloqua diagnostics
Identified major DNS and authentication misalignments
Helped move Citeline to a dedicated sending IP to protect reputation
Implemented best practices for list hygiene, engagement filtering, and domain alignment
Delivered training and playbooks for internal teams to keep the momentum going
The result?
Undelivered rates dropped from 20% to just 5%, and audience engagement climbed 30%.
For a company with high-value contacts and long sales cycles, this wasn’t just a nice metric - it was a business advantage.
Final thought: Deliverability is a team sport
Fixing deliverability isn’t a “once and done” project. It’s a living part of your MOPs strategy. It sits at the intersection of technology, data, content, and process. It needs visibility at the leadership level, ownership in the trenches, and constant optimization.
If you’re not monitoring deliverability, you’re flying blind. If you're not prioritizing it, you're leaking ROI. And if you’re not sure where to start - well, that’s where we come in.
Want to know how Sojourn can help?
Let’s talk. Whether you're bleeding engagement from poor inbox placement or just want to futureproof your sender reputation, our team has helped many clients like Citeline rewrite the rules - and see incredible results, fast.
