Keeping your deliverability healthy
Learn what affects email deliverability and how to keep your messages reliably reaching customer inboxes using Pulse.
April 20, 2026
Deliverability is a simple idea with a big impact: it's whether your messages actually land in your customer's inbox, or whether they quietly disappear into spam, get bounced back, or never arrive at all.
You can write the best campaign in the world, but if it doesn't get delivered, none of that matters. This guide walks through what affects deliverability and how to keep yours in good shape using Pulse.
Where to check it
On your Marketing overview page, you'll find a dedicated Deliverability score, shown as a circle out of 100, alongside your overall Marketing Health score.
A high number here means your messages are reliably reaching inboxes. If it starts dropping, that's your signal to look closer before it turns into a bigger problem.
Underneath that score, three numbers tell you exactly what's feeding into it:
Bounce rate
This is the percentage of emails that couldn't be delivered at all, usually because the email address was invalid, mistyped, or no longer exists.
A rising bounce rate is one of the fastest ways to damage your sender reputation, so it's worth keeping an eye on.
Unsubscribe rate
This tracks how many people are choosing to opt out after receiving your messages.
A few unsubscribes here and there is completely normal, but a sudden spike usually means something about your recent campaign, the content, the frequency, or the targeting, didn't land well with that audience.
Spam complaints
This is the percentage of people actively marking your message as spam, rather than just ignoring or unsubscribing from it.
This one matters the most. Inbox providers pay close attention to spam complaints, and too many can start affecting whether all your future emails make it to the inbox, not just that one campaign.
Why this matters more than open rate
It's tempting to only look at your open rate and click rate and assume everything's fine.
But deliverability problems often show up quietly. Your open rate can look low simply because your emails never reached the inbox in the first place, not because people weren't interested.
Keeping deliverability healthy is what makes every other number on your dashboard trustworthy.
A few habits that help
Keep your contact list clean
Sending to old, invalid, or fake addresses is one of the biggest drivers of bounce rate. If you're importing a contact list, it's worth double-checking it rather than uploading it blindly.
Don't ignore a rising unsubscribe rate
If you notice it climbing after a particular campaign, that's useful information. It's worth reviewing what was different about that send before repeating it.
Watch your sending frequency
Sending too often, especially to people who haven't engaged in a while, is a common cause of both unsubscribes and spam complaints.
If your Marketing Health score shows low engagement, it may be a sign to slow down rather than send more.
Use your Channel performance table
Since Pulse tracks Email, Push, and WhatsApp separately, you can see if deliverability issues are specific to one channel rather than affecting everything.
This makes it easier to isolate and fix the actual problem instead of guessing.
Pay attention to what Pulse's Insights card tells you
Because Pulse's AI is already watching your campaign data in the background, it will often flag deliverability issues in plain language before you'd notice them yourself in the raw numbers.
It's worth reading that card regularly rather than skipping past it.
The bottom line
A healthy deliverability score isn't something you fix once and forget. It's something worth checking regularly, the same way you'd check your revenue or open rate.
Keeping it high is what makes sure the rest of your marketing efforts actually get seen.