Deliverability Tricks and Treats | Twilio SendGrid

Email marketing can be downright scary. In contrast to some other forms of communication, there is no “undo” button in the e-mail world. Fear can easily set in when you are ready to hit the big red “send” button on your subscribers. Are there any typos, broken links, etc.?

Outside of the big red “Send” button, email marketers have other concerns that keep them up at night. Whether you fall into spam traps, land on a blacklist, or go to the spam folder, just getting your email into your subscribers’ inboxes can be a daunting task.

With Halloween around the corner, we wanted to dive deeper into 3 different topics that send chills down the spine of email marketers.

How can we make sure we don’t scare the email filters with our Halloween campaigns?

Halloween is the time of year when you shop for costumes and look for pumpkins. but Trick-or-treat online isn’t that much fun, especially for the mailbox providers (MBPs).

When Halloween comes, MBPs start to see senders increase in volume. This was offset by Amazon Prime Day in June, but nonetheless, this is the time of year when the filters are expecting higher volumes.

Here are 3 things to look out for to avoid having MBPs chasing your dreams.

consistency

Filtering love patterns, and having consistent email volume is the first step in building a pattern. As a sender, you might want to try out new campaigns and offers around the holiday season, but not until you’ve really warmed up.

If you are expecting higher volumes, an additional IP address is the way to go. A good rule of thumb is to see if your sending volume will more than double your current volume in the coming weeks. Remember that spammers also warm up IPs but usually send as much as they can before switching to a new one.

However, as the sender, we do not want to exhibit any of these behaviors. When MBPs see higher volumes, the first reaction is to throttle email streams. If you think your email traffic is already high, check with your email platform manager for additional IPs so that your email delivery doesn’t slow down.

It’s important to keep in mind that adding the IP late into the holiday season can be counterproductive. MBPs look at intellectual property history, which can take more than 30 days to build reputations. For this reason, you should determine the reputation of the IPs and domains / subdomains long before your big broadcast season.

Testing and Monitoring

Now that you are done with your Halloween creatives and can’t wait to start developing your creativity with your audience, hold on to it – you need to test your email and examine the metrics carefully. Are the filters picky about content? Are your authentication and custom URL tracking working as intended? (Tip: Did you know that the domain reputation is based on your DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) domain?)

If all looks good, send out a small campaign to your most engaged users and build trust for the campaign before digging deep into your database and pulling those dead email addresses from the grave. Take it slow and try to spread your campaign as widely as possible. There may be time sensitive offers, but this is also a common spammer tactic to show a false sense of urgency. Any day Over 80% of the traffic that MBPs see is spam, and as a sender, it is imperative that you stand out from the crowd.

By A / B testing your campaigns, you ensure that you not only stand out from the crowd, but also from other emails in your recipients’ inboxes. Don’t expect last minute quick fixes as the postmasters take a break during the Christmas season. MBPs have a moratorium around the holidays that would make it difficult to drive inbox / reputation changes.

Contributor: Sri Chandran (Sr. Email Deliverability Advisor)

The open rate is dead

Email marketers didn’t have to wait until Halloween to get a good scare this year. Following the release of iOS 15 on September 20, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). When a user has MPP enabled, the Apple Mail application will pull the message (and any images in it), which will trigger the tracking pixel. Since the tracking pixel fires, an “open” is reported even though the user may not have seen the email yet.

When the news of the release of this new feature broke, email marketers everywhere panicked. MPP is a topic that has caused many sleepless nights to email marketers. Will that kill the open? How do I know who is interacting with my email? How does this affect my sunset readings?

Twilio SendGrid has published a Full guide to MPP to answer all of these questions. The guide covers Apple’s new feature from all angles: What exactly is MPP? What is the data like so far? How can broadcasters adapt?

It has been 3 weeks since MPP was published. Is the open rate “dead”? If you look at the first 3 weeks since Apple released MPP, we can see that 9.2% of all openings are in MPP protected mailboxes. You can continue to rely on your open events not triggered by Apple computers thanks to a new field with “Open Events” in our events webhook to identify “nonhuman” opens. Please contact us for more information on this new field found here.

However, some adjustments are required as the senders lose access to some open data. As a deliverability consultant, I’ve seen customers interact with MPP in different ways. Some of the methods we are sponsoring are being updated Sunset steps this factor in machine open data, improving the automation and approach of re-engagement campaigns using machine open data compared to non-machine open data.

Contributor: Denis O’Sullivan (Sr. Email Deliverability Advisor)

What Brendan Fraser and E-Mail have in common

No matter who or what messes with a mummy, that mummy will wreak havoc.

Jokes aside, with Halloween and the less scary holidays approaching this year, it’s important that senders don’t give in to the temptation to bombard uninterested consumers (“mummies”) with email. While it might just seem like a scary campfire warning, the adage “Sending an email to anyone who hasn’t been engaged in 6 months is the kiss of death for your email program” is mostly true. (Also, this quote is from Microsoft’s anti-spam team, which we love to listen to.)

We recently had a customer who was blocked by Spamhaus. With an outstanding engagement rate over the past year on almost every campaign, We were surprised they are listed where we usually see some of the worst senders. After further investigation, it turned out that the customer decided to run a Christmas campaign from targeting the 90-day engagements to its entire database. Serious repercussions occurred within 24 hours (blacklisted, deferred, and eventually banned by many ISPs). The cause? A number of “mummies” hanging around in his database mean that the e-mail falls into both spam traps and dormant mailboxes.

While this was a one-off scenario that we were able to quickly resolve by going back to normal targeting the customer, this may not be the case with all senders. If you decide to target recipients who haven’t engaged in the last 6 months – especially if you plan on sending them multiple Christmas campaigns – the results could potentially be apocalyptic for your email program.

How to avoid database mummification

If there is a business use case for targeting a mummified cohort of your database, here are some precautions you can take to minimize the negative impact:

• Run a test campaign that includes recipients who haven’t engaged in 6 months but have engaged in the past 9 months. If this works well, you can run another campaign targeting those who have been engaged for 12 months. Then use this to gauge how much leeway you have to widen your audience segments for the rest of your vacation shows.
  • However, if none of the 9- or 12-month tests do well, this is your sign that you shouldn’t be targeting cohorts this old.
  • For the past 12 months, we cannot even recommend in good faith that you send out a test campaign.
• Only send campaigns to non-dedicated email recipients who have also recently interacted with your brand on other channels (e.g. active on your website and / or making a purchase).
  • In general, we recommend sticking with consumers who have had some type of brand interaction within the past 12 months, preferably within the past 6 months.
• After sending campaigns to highly engaged recipients, consider waiting at least an hour before sending test / live campaigns to your mummies.

Note that all testing should begin at least a week before your actual vacation campaigns are published. This should give you time to assess the effects, mitigate issues, and make adjustments / do additional testing.

Ultimately, however, we only recommend including mummies in your content images.

Contributor: Emily Thrasher (Sr. Email Deliverability Advisor)

The world of email marketing is constantly changing and senders have to constantly adapt. Apple Mail Machine Open Indicator from Twilio SendGrid, new guides on domain / IP warmups and smooth sunset stages are just three of these examples. If your team is looking for help navigating this ever-changing world, ours is ours Deliverability Advisor are ready to help.