How you can increase email marketing deliverability in Outlook

Published in october, 17 of 2014


In 2013, Hotmail has returned to market with new design and name, settled as Outlook.com. Although the theme refers to a move that happened last year and it’s no longer a question of a novelty, it’s worth highlight it since many people still have questions about it.

So how can we improve deliverability with the change? Keep reading because we will answer it in this post.

Surpass the email providers’s filters with relevant content

All email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook...) use different filters to determine how email marketing campaigns will be delivered into the Inbox. The most important item that should be considered to ensure the deliverability success is the relevance or user engagement.

Outlook receives about 1.8 billion emails per day, in other words, 1.800.000.000 every 24 hours. Within this group, nearly 80% are reported as spam. The remaining percentage, 7 of every 10 emails are not opened, nor create any interaction from user.

These data lead to a very large cost for Outlook, a spending no one wants to keep or increase in the budget. Therefore, a decision was made very simple: a not opened email will also not be delivered.

Segmentation : keep the active from inactive users apart in lists

So how can we have a good deliverability rate in Outlook? The answer is quite simple. Keep the rate of active users, who generate interaction, above the inactive users. In practice, the campaigns you send to Outlook shall maintain the percentage of interactions above 50%.

It may seem a hard task, almost an impossible mission, but it’s not like that. We'll show you how you can do this with emailmanager.

Create a segmentation for addresses from Outlook, including all its variants (Live, MSN and Hotmail), who had some interaction in the past six months, for example.


Export the contacts found by filtering parameters and make a new list as "inactive Outlook", for example.


This way, you can create your email marketing campaign as you are used to and when you select the contact lists that will receive the message you can leave the inactive Outlook out.


Thus your campaigns will be sent to the entire base, plus Outlook contacts that generate interactions. Just that, by itself, already improves the deliverability rate since it will reach directly the Inbox of those interested in receiving your emails, besides showing Outlook your company’s content is relevant. So you get deliverability and reputation, which also improves.

Many people consider the high cost because removing the inactive contacts with Outlook addresses will imply the removal of 70% of your base.

If you applied the steps that we showed up here so you will have a separate list of all inactive Outlook contacts. Gradually, you can retake these emails in small amounts and incorporate them into your master list again. The good reputation you’ll win by following our tips will act as a support to reach your inactive contacts and thereafter your campaigns will also reach their Inbox more efficiently and with more chances of open rates and interaction.

Remember the most important thing here is to keep the proportion of inactive at low levels, the enough to not compromise the performance of your master list and thereafter the deliverability rate and reputation of your company.

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