Update: Please find our latest deliverability test results from Jan 2023 here.
A lot of email experts argue that email deliverability is the responsibility of the sender. Which is partly true – there are plenty of things you can be doing to reduce the likelihood of your email getting marked as spam.
But tell that to the marketer who has spent months cleaning email lists, building immaculately-coded templates, crafting spam-free copy, and running countless tests – only to find that a good chunk of their emails still aren’t getting through!
When it comes to email deliverability, it’s clear that there are some things that are out of our control. At EmailToolTester, this became all the more evident when we started trying out different newsletter services a while back, and getting different results using the same emails and lists.
So after several months of testing ten different email services (and a few thousand emails sent!), we’re excited to announce that we’ve now identified some clear winners in the email deliverability stakes. And, of course, those who aren’t performing so well. This time around we again used GlockApps to carry out the tests.
What’s more, we’ve now added ‘Email deliverability’ as a criterion in our reviews, so each of our reviewed email tools has a star rating based on how well they performed in our tests.
So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at the results of our latest round of testing, where we calculated average deliverability rate based on five separate tests.
PROVIDER | DELIVERABILITY RESULT % | OVERALL RATING* |
---|---|---|
ActiveCampaign | 96 | ![]() |
Constant Contact | 93 | ![]() |
Drip | 89.8 | ![]() |
MailerLite | 89 | ![]() |
ConvertKit | 88 | ![]() |
MailChimp | 82.6 | ![]() |
Aweber | 79.8 | ![]() |
GetResponse | 78 | ![]() |
Benchmark | 75.8 | ![]() |
Sendinblue | 75.6 | ![]() |
*Overall rating based on combined performance of this round + previous round of testing
Here are our main takeaways:
Now let’s take a closer look at the results to see how each tool performed in getting through to the main ISPs.
Although our tests were sent to 28 ISPs worldwide, the following table shows deliverability to the four main Internet Service Providers – Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft (Hotmail and Outlook), and AOL. For clarity, we’ve broken up emails to Gmail’s Primary inbox and their Promotions tab into separate columns.
PROVIDER | GMAIL PRIMARY % | GMAIL PROMO % | YAHOO % | MICROSOFT % | AOL % |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ActiveCampaign | 100 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
GetResponse | 100 | 0 | 97.5 | 20 | 100 |
MailerLite | 100 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
MailChimp | 0 | 100 | 100 | 24 | 100 |
Sendinblue | 100 | 0 | 100 | 7 | 100 |
Benchmark | 100 | 0 | 100 | 0 | 80 |
Aweber | 100 | 0 | 100 | 18 | 100 |
Constant Contact | 100 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Drip | 100 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
ConvertKit | 100 | 0 | 100 | 69 | 100 |
*Microsoft rates recalculated in May 2019 to include weighting
Reinforcing the results from our previous testing round, we can see that:
After two extensive rounds of testing that have yielded some fairly consistent results, we’re pretty confident that we can begin to draw some general conclusions around deliverability. It’s clear that some newsletter services are better at delivering emails than others, and specifically, at getting through to certain ISPs like Outlook.
There are also some tools (namely, MailChimp) that really struggle to be identified as senders of non-promotional email, which means that the performance of campaigns may take a bit of a hit.
We really do believe that deliverability should be an important factor to consider when evaluating different newsletter services, which is why we’re making this information available. That being said, results in the real world will inevitably vary. The best way to get your deliverability rates as high as possible is to follow best practice guidelines, and to trial different newsletter services to see which one gives you the best results.
Update: check out our latest deliverability test results here.