Focus on email deliverability, not email delivery

Email delivery and email deliverability are not the same thing—and confusing them can put your enrollment results at risk.

In recent months, I’ve seen enrollment CRMs start to offer “deliverability dashboards,” featuring delivery rate as a headline metric. This shows how far the enrollment world has come in recognizing the importance of email deliverability, but it also is a good reminder of how, with something as complex and mission critical as deliverability, details matter.

It’s harder than ever to break through the noise in student inboxes, and if your message isn’t opened, read, and acted upon, it may as well never have arrived at all.

What does “delivery rate” really tell you?

Delivery rate is a legitimate metric—but it has a narrow scope. Delivery rate simply tells you if your sent emails are successfully received by the recipient email provider service. If they aren’t, that’s called a bounce.

Bounces come in different flavors:

• Hard bounces reflect permanent problems with the email address or domain
• Soft bounces usually result from temporary issues, like a full inbox or a server problem

Modern email sending systems automatically sense bounced emails, both hard and soft, and handle them appropriately so that future messages don’t get sent to problematic addresses. Therefore, you’d expect to see a consistently high delivery rate in your dashboards: unless your email sending system is broken, your delivery rate should be in the high 90th percentile pretty much all the time.

Sadly, a 99% email delivery rate tells you almost nothing about your email deliverability: whether a successfully sent email makes it past spam-detection algorithms, email categorizers, and AI message assistants so your recipients can read and respond.

Avoid This Email Strategy to Improve Your Deliverability

What real deliverability looks like today

In 2025, deliverability involves more than a couple of dashboard metrics. Here’s what you actually need to monitor:

• Infrastructure health: Assess the health of your sending infrastructure; not just the originating IP address, but domain and subdomain health as well.
• Send-time signals: Review all the elements of in-the-moment email sends, like bounces and seed inbox placement.
• Engagement insights: Evaluate engagement in actual emails beyond overall open, click, and unsubscribe rates to differentiate among types of recipients and the nature of human or AI interactions.

Doing this frequently and at scale requires not just good dashboards, but AI and algorithmic monitoring, plus a framework that turns monitoring results into action.

Three must-haves for deliverability in 2025

How to take control: Management beyond monitoring

Monitoring is just a piece of the deliverability puzzle—an important one, but not the only success factor.

Engagement is the single most important driver of deliverability, and the hardest one to control. The prime directive of email deliverability is the same as it has been for years: send emails that recipients open or click. That advice remains confoundingly simple and yet frustratingly difficult, which is why we’ve had our best creative minds and technologists working on various aspects of the email deliverability challenge for years.

These days, improving email engagement is not only a matter of writing better subject lines, more compelling calls to action, or using more relevant imagery. Engagement rates are, increasingly, a reflection of your underlying campaign architecture and orchestration.

Your Guide to Hyper-Personalized Enrollment Marketing

Our Enroll360 teams have deployed predictive models and harnessed machine learning techniques to redesign the back end of our email campaign streams. Using these AI-powered tools, we vary the intensity of email cadences based on expected levels of engagement. We’re already seeing positive signs in our global email monitoring, suggesting that a vigorous and proactive approach to managing engagement is going to benefit our partners across the coming months.

But these gains aren’t just about better analytics—they’re about real enrollment impact. If a student never sees your messages, they may never explore your programs, start an application, or take the next step toward enrollment. Strong deliverability is what ensures your communications can actually convert interest into action.