Email Deliverability
Email deliverability measures the rate at which your emails actually reach recipients' inboxes instead of landing in spam or bouncing.
Email deliverability is the measure of how successfully your emails reach the intended recipient’s inbox rather than being filtered into spam, bounced, or blocked by email providers.
This metric matters enormously in GTM operations because even the best-crafted outbound sequence is worthless if it never lands in front of the prospect. Poor deliverability tanks reply rates, wastes SDR time, and can permanently damage your sending domain’s reputation.
Several factors influence deliverability: your domain’s sender reputation, email authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), bounce rates, spam complaint rates, and the content of your messages. Sending too many emails too quickly from a new domain is one of the fastest ways to get flagged.
For example, if your team sends 500 cold emails per day from a domain that was registered last week with no warm-up period, expect most of those to hit spam. A better approach is gradually ramping volume over 4-6 weeks while maintaining strong engagement signals.
Teams that take deliverability seriously monitor inbox placement rates, keep bounce rates below 2%, and maintain separate domains for outbound prospecting versus transactional email. They also regularly clean their contact lists to remove invalid addresses.
If your SDR team is struggling with low reply rates, check deliverability before rewriting your copy — the problem might be that nobody is seeing your messages in the first place. Tools that support SDR operations often include built-in deliverability monitoring to catch issues early.