Email Deliverability Archives - Act-On

Planning for a Successful Holiday Email Marketing Campaign

Brandon Blair — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:49:19 +0000

The holidays are the busiest time for email marketers. This is the time of the year where volume and frequency are adjusted to try and meet those year end goals. At that same time we need to remember that our subscribers are being inundated with holiday emails as well. In today’s blog, we’re going to discuss how to develop an effective holiday email marketing strategy using time tested email deliverability management strategies.

Email Volume and Frequency

During the holidays, ISP and Mailbox Providers (MBP’s) are on high alert because of the increased volume and frequency. Their job is to protect users’ inboxes from unwanted and unsolicited emails as well as to protect against malicious spam and phishing attacks. So whether you plan on increasing volume and/or frequency, it is imperative that you be prepared for the increased scrutiny on the receiver side.

Holiday Email Marketing Strategy

1. Benchmark Your Email Marketing Performance During Offseason

One exercise we advise – set up your baselines in the offseason (non-holiday times) so you can review how your holiday emails compare with your regular communications. This will allow you to set accurate and achievable goals during your holiday email marketing campaign.

Gather these essential metrics:

What are your delivery, open, click, hard bounce, soft bounces rates etc.
Understanding users’ inboxes are busier – what’s the best, most efficient time to send your email?

If you work with our Email Deliverability Team, this is the perfect time to complete a review or audit of your holiday email marketing strategy to get a sense of where you stand and how you can improve.

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2. Ensure Relevant Messaging & Email Frequency

Engagement is king and nothing gets you bounced out of your users inboxes faster than irrelevant emails. Holiday time is busy, for everyone. You’ll want to avoid wasting subscribers’ time with emails that don’t interest them or aren’t inline with what they originally signed on for. Relevancy is key but never more than during the holiday season.

Another thing to keep in mind is what frequency the subscriber signed up for. If you send a weekly email and then during the holidays start sending daily, you will drive list attrition at a much higher rate and your holiday email marketing strategy fill fall apart.

A good recommendation is to have an email communication preference center that allows users to adjust communication preferences like frequency as well as topics. Having a preference center in place will help avoid reputation detractors such as subscriber complaints. Having the preference center allows them to opt-down instead of opting out completely or worse yet, clicking the “this is spam” button.

3. Focus on Segmentation and Data Hygiene

Data hygiene and keeping a clean list is always the best practice to avoid hitting un-mailable addresses, spam traps, and overall poor email deliverability and reputation. This is especially important during for your holiday email marketing campaign.

As you increase your sending volume and expand your audience (which might include inactive addresses), you should ensure that bounce rules are in place before you send any holiday emails. To help reduce the number of bounces before your first holiday send, we recommend using a service like Webbula or Neverbounce to help identify any inactive email addresses, spam traps or possible threats in your lists. We have both of these services at Act-On that run through our deliverability team. If you are interested, please contact your AM or CSM for more information!

Segmenting your audience and targeting small groups will help when mailing less engaged users. You can segment your audience by different demographics and behaviors to help you identify what users are engaging with.

Pro tip: Will you be increasing your sending volume this holiday season? We recommend that your holiday email marketing strategy includes a ramp up in sending frequency. This will help get ISPs familiar with you sending that type of volume and will help reduce some volume-related issues. As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn’t increase your email volume by more than 50% of your previous day’s level or previous week’s highest point.

A Successful Campaign Means Planning Ahead

The holiday season is a busy time for ISPs and blocklist networks. With an influx of mail we commonly see delays in email delivery and sometimes temporary deferrals on senders that raise any flags. If you’re working with our team of deliverability experts, you should talk with your consultant to develop a plan to send and monitor your holiday emails.

If you plan to increase volume, our team can help develop a ramp plan to safely reach your targeted audience. Even if you’re planning to change your sending habits during the holiday season, there’s still a chance that your domain or IP could face issues. We highly recommend that you still always monitor your email performance, before, during and after the holidays.

Deliver the Gift of Joyful Holiday Emails

If you’d like to learn more about how you can develop effective holiday email marketing strategies using marketing automation, please schedule a brief demo with one of our experts.

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3 Email Deliverability Myths Debunked

Brandon Blair — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:38:11 +0000

At Act-On, we love to separate the truth from the myths in marketing and email. As email deliverability experts, we often educate customers on misconceptions that can misguide even seasoned marketers. Understanding the truth behind these myths is crucial for optimizing email deliverability and engagement.

Here, we’ll debunk three common myths: that the Promotions tab is bad, unsubscribes are detrimental, and the largest list always wins.

Myth #1: The Promotions Tab is Bad

Many marketers dread their emails landing in the Promotions tab, believing it dooms their campaigns to obscurity. However, this perception is outdated and inaccurate.

Reality Check: The Promotions Tab Isn’t a Death Sentence

User Intent: The Promotions tab is designed for marketing emails, making it a place where users expect to find promotional content. When users check this tab, they are often in the mindset to discover new offers and products.
Increased Engagement: Emails in the Promotions tab can benefit from higher engagement rates. Recipients who actively visit this tab are likely more interested in promotional content, leading to higher open and click-through rates.
Deliverability Impact: The biggest impact occurs when recipients see emails in their Primary inbox that they expect to be classified as “promotional” or “marketing.” This can lead them to ignore the emails altogether, contributing to a negative impact on your domain’s reputation. In some cases, it may even prompt them to mark your emails as spam, further damaging your deliverability.

The bottom line:

Focus on creating valuable, relevant content that resonates with your audience. Encourage engagement through compelling email subject lines and personalization. Respecting the Promotions tab can enhance trust and long-term relationships with your subscribers.

Myth #2: Unsubscribes are Bad

Seeing unsubscribe numbers climb can be disheartening, leading many to believe that unsubscribes are inherently negative and should be minimized at all costs.

Reality Check: Unsubscribes Can Be Beneficial

List Hygiene: Unsubscribes help maintain a healthy email list by removing disengaged subscribers. A smaller, more engaged list is far better than a larger, disinterested one.
Engagement Metrics: Having subscribers who want to receive your emails improves your engagement metrics, such as open and click-through rates. High engagement signals to ISPs that your emails are valued, which boosts deliverability.
Reputation Management: Allowing easy unsubscribes reduces the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam. Spam complaints can severely damage your sender reputation and deliverability. For more key info, check out email opt out best practices.

The bottom line:

Unsubscribes are a feedback opportunity. Unsubscribe feedback can provide valuable insights into why subscribers are leaving. Use this information to improve your content and strategy, ensuring that you retain and attract the right audience.

Myth #3: The Largest List Wins

A common belief is that a larger email list equates to greater success and revenue. While having a substantial list can be beneficial, the focus on quantity over quality can be misguided.

Reality Check: Quality Trumps Quantity

Engagement Over Size: A large list filled with unengaged or irrelevant contacts can hurt your deliverability. ISPs monitor engagement metrics, and low engagement from a big list can lead to emails being marked as spam.
Targeted Campaigns: Smaller, well-segmented lists allow for more personalized and targeted campaigns. Tailoring your content to specific segments of your audience can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates.
Sender Reputation: Maintaining a positive sender reputation is crucial. A smaller list with higher engagement rates can protect and enhance your reputation with ISPs, ensuring better deliverability.

The bottom line:

Focus on organic list growth through ethical practices. Building your list with genuinely interested subscribers leads to more sustainable and long-term success.

Our deliverability team helps customers get into the inbox and engage their audiences every single day. Read more about their services or sign up for a demo.

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Email Deliverability Best Practices: The Best Guide Ever

Act-On — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 22:29:25 +0000

PART 1: Introduction

Email deliverability (aka inbox deliverability) isn’t yet a buzzword on the lips of every digital marketer out there. But it needs to be. Think about it. You work hard on your email marketing programs. All that work is wasted if your emails never make it to the inbox to fulfill their destiny. That’s why the best deliverability service team in the business came together to write this the Email Deliverability Best Practices. It’s the best guide ever. Read on for chapter one.

^{Email deliverability is worth careful strategy and study if you don’t want other elements of your email strategy to suffer.}

What is Email Deliverability?

In simplest terms, email deliverability is the overall health of a sender’s email program. You might have read online that deliverability is all about hitting the inbox. True, that’s the end goal, but that’s not all.

Email delivery rate is just one aspect of a holistic approach to email deliverability. Focusing only on delivery rate omits important aspects of your email program that contribute to your overall health and reputation as a sender.

A holistic approach to deliverability takes more than delivery rate into account. Before diving in, make sure you’re familiar with these common email marketing and deliverability terms.

10 key Terms

1. Authentication

Authentication is a process that confirms to ISPs that you are who you say you are, and that your marketing automation platform is sending on your behalf. Common authentication methods include DMARC, SPF and DKIM

2. Bounce

A bounce is an email that cannot be delivered to the recipient’s email server.

3. Hard Bounce

An email that bounces because the address does not exist.

4. Soft Bounce

A soft bounce is an email that bounces back for reasons other than a hard bounce (e.g., due to a full inbox or server outage). Soft bounces are often temporary, and senders can typically fix them.

5. Click Rate

Number of clicks divided by number of emails delivered.

6. Click-Through Rate (aka Click-to-Open Rate)

Number of clicks divided by number of emails opened.

7. Data Hygiene

The overall quality of your email list and the associated data. Effective email strategy, and strong deliverability, always rests on a foundation of high quality lists with the right information.

8. Delivery Rate

The percentage of emails that are delivered. Calculate it by dividing the number of emails delivered (total emails minus bounces) by the total number of emails sent.

9. Email Channel Health

Metrics like engagement, conversions, and even the ROI of your email program. You may be saying, “Isn’t that email strategy, not deliverability?” And you’re hitting on just the point we’re trying to make: you can’t separate solid email strategy from strong deliverability. And you shouldn’t try.

10. Inbox Rate

The percentage of emails that are delivered to a non-SPAM folder. It can be estimated, but as a sender, you’ll never know the exact inbox rate.

11. Open Rate

Number of emails opened divided by number of emails delivered.

Inbox Delivery: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

Let’s start with a scene. A marketer walks into Act-On (or, more likely, joins us on Zoom) and meets with our Deliverability Team. They’re understandably eager to get started. They kick things off with what should be a simple question:

“What is my inbox rate?”

The Deliverability Team hesitates, knowing their answer is going to disappoint the marketer a little. They reply:

“We can narrow it down to a relatively tight estimate…but it will always be a mystery.”

The marketer looks confused. How can this be? They came here to get answers!

Well, today’s inbox is not what it used to be. For starters, what do you consider the inbox? The major ISPs (Inbox Service Providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! and Microsoft) all have their own way of filtering incoming emails according to the user’s expectations and customizations.

For instance, Google has its customizable tab system that includes categories like Inbox, Social, Updates and Promotions. Microsoft uses its own tab system divided into Focused Inbox, Promotions, Social, and Other. And of course, most major platforms offer users customization options to filter and route emails to their own subfolders.

Further, the ISPs use their own “bucketing” systems based on recipient behavior to route emails. These systems are opaque from a sender’s point of view–you can’t see what’s going on behind the curtain. A different message to the same group from the same sender, based upon content and reputation at the time of sending, might have a totally different placement.

As a sender, you don’t have visibility into any of this activity. You’ll only know whether your email was accepted or not. If an email is accepted, you can’t know whether it hit the “Inbox,” or a “Clutter” or “Promotions” folder where it’s less likely to be opened.

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Find the Right Tools to help with Inbox Delivery

Having the right tool for the job is a key component of email deliverability best practices. Fortunately, there are tools available to give additional insight into the inbox—Act-On’s Email Deliverability team uses Inbox Monster, which provides reasonably accurate representations of the inbox.

For customers enrolled in Act-On’s Email Deliverability Services, we tailor a 250ok list to get an idea of the inbox landscape and to provide guidance on improvements. Other tools include Glock Apps and Return Path, to name a few. But all of these apps come with a hefty caveat: their information is an educated guess, and not guaranteed to be accurate.

Optimize and Test for Mobile

Roughly half of all emails are opened on mobile. Making sure a send is renderable on both computer and mobile is a necessity. Not only that, but many inboxes are configured completely differently on mobile devices compared to desktop. Often, ISPs will route an email directly to spam if it isn’t rendered properly on mobile. Avoid poor performance on mobile devices by using your marketing automation platform’s mobile preview feature to check how your email looks and reads on mobile devices.

Sender Reputation and Email Deliverability Best Practices

When you have a good sender’s reputation, your messages are more likely to hit the inbox. Likewise, a bad reputation will make emails bounce or hit the SPAM folder at a higher rate. Each ISP and filtering company puts different weight on different factors to determine a sender’s reputation.

Reputations can often be found on the postmaster page of the major ISPs. For instance, Google’s postmaster site rates domains on a 4-tier scale: bad, low, medium, high. Other ISPs have different scales and different reasons for affecting reputation.

A good reputation is paramount to a sender, as it can help compensate for any deliverability issues that arise. It also leads to a higher ROI for emails. Good reputation is based on hard work, adherence to best practices, and versatility in a changing landscape. Data quality will have the largest impact on your reputation, followed by maintaining an engaged audience.

Sender Reputation Factors
How they impact you, and whether you can see them

Visible to Sender/Negative Impact	Visible to Sender/Positive Impact
-Spam complaint (at most major providers) -Hard bounce -Soft bounce (from reputation) -Repeated emails to unengaged recipient -Unauthenticated sends -Unformatted/unrenderable content -Hidden links -Bad or blocklisted links -Unsecured links	-Opens -Clicks -Forwards -Replies -Authenticated sends –Double opt-in confirmation
Hidden from Sender/Negative Impact	Hidden from Sender/Positive Impact
-Sending to a spam trap -Deleted messages -Ignored messages -Email views less than 1 second -User reports as abusive or phishing -Spammy content -User hitting the “This is spam” button (Gmail and most B2B domains)	-Email views greater than 1 second -User creates folder for email -Email promoted to better folder (e.g., Promotions to Inbox) -Moving a message from SPAM -Adding sender to address book -Starring/marking as important

Fixing Your Bad Email Sender Reputation

Repairing a reputation requires tight control of all email sends and more granular oversight. This is your chance to convince the ISP that you’re following best practices, and that your messages are useful for your audience. Keep these tips in mind if you find yourself with a damaged reputation in need of repair.

Use only the very best data. Maybe this means that pile of leads from the trade show you just attended has to wait. But it’s better to wait until the repair is complete and your reputation is back on track than send to those untested leads right now.
Shorten your engagement segmentation period by one-third to one-half. Only email those who are actively engaging with your messages. You’ll likely need to sunset many emails during the repair.
Perform list hygiene. We’ll cover this in detail in Part 2. In short, you’ll need to perform both third-party list hygiene and sunsetting on your unengaged contacts to ensure data integrity.

Once reputation repair is complete, you’ll need to continue to follow best practices to avoid your reputation slipping. ISPs have long memories; with each reputation hit, it becomes a little more difficult to repair.

Performing a Hard Reset of Your Email Program

A hard reset is exactly what it sounds like: the marketer stops sending any emails from the affected domain/IP for a minimum of 30 days. This might seem extreme, and it can be extremely difficult to convince stakeholders at your organization. But desperate times call for desperate measures. (One reason we recommend that marketers maintain separate traffic streams for different types of emails on different domains: this way not all company email activity has to stop in the event of a reset or reputation repair).

Once the sending has been paused for the requisite 30 days, sending can resume with the following strict setup:

Only send to the most engaged email recipients
Ramp-up volumes must be observed closely
Pause immediately if volumes of emails are not accepted

Maintaining a good reputation is absolutely critical to ensuring inbox placement and avoiding the spam folder. While a bad reputation can be repaired, you should always follow best practices, maintain quality data, and keep your audience engaged to prevent damaging your reputation in the first place.

PART 2: Strategy

We always recommend that email marketers consider email deliverability best practices as a core element of their email strategy, not an afterthought. Remember that in Part 1 we discussed how engagement, performance, and overall channel health make a significant impact on deliverability. Addressing all the above elements in a comprehensive email marketing strategy will save endless time and frustration down the line. Sending one-off emails without fitting them into a strategic framework is a recipe not just for low performing emails, but for getting your content flagged as SPAM.

^{Going back to the drawing board isn’t necessary if you factor email deliverability into your strategy from the start.}

Segmentation: A Strategy & Deliverability Two for One

Ensuring your email is sent to the right audience is extremely important for deliverability and engagement. Without proper audience targeting, you risk wasting resources and dinging your reputation as a sender.

Of course, you’ll always have some necessarily broad emails to groups of contacts you haven’t learned much about yet. But these should be minimal compared to more targeted sends. Whenever possible, you should send emails to targeted segments who you’ve learned something about through your nurture efforts or lead gen campaigns.

Segmenting by Position Level in the Organization

We recommend segmenting by position level. Grouping your contacts based on their role within an organization will empower you to provide more relevant content and resources to assist them throughout the buying process. Collect this information via form fills and update your CRM to help your segmentation efforts.

Segmenting by Funnel/Journey Stage

Another smart segmentation strategy. Matching the content to their stage in the customer journey means your messages will be more relevant and persuasive. Near the top of the funnel, it’s more likely that you’ll receive opt outs. That’s okay! This is how the process should work. In a way, those contacts are doing you a favor by letting you know your marketing isn’t relevant to them. Find ways to learn more about your customers at this stage (e.g., interactive surveys) to aid your targeting efforts as they move down funnel. You’ll likely see fewer SPAM complaints for mid and bottom funnel contacts.

Finally, consider segmenting by engagement level. Segmenting your data is always important because it allows you to target the right people. But segmenting based on engagement is even more important for maintaining a good sender reputation.

Due to the individual nature of each sender’s engaged group, it is critical to define engagement for each sender. An engaged individual has taken some predefined action within a certain timeframe, such as clicking through to a piece of content. Your email marketing strategy should define the actions that point to an intent to buy based on previous closed/won deals.

Balancing Deliverability and Email Timing

When and how often to send email is a key part of your strategy, and can have unforeseen consequences for your deliverability efforts. Consider the factors below when scheduling out your campaigns:

Email Volume

Your email volume can have a drastic effect on deliverability and reputation. High volumes require a good reputation, lower volumes less so. Best-in-class senders can get away with sending millions of emails in under 20 minutes, whereas a low reputation sender may struggle to get 20,000 emails accepted and delivered to the inbox in 3 hours.

It’s also important to keep your sends consistent. Intermittent and erratic email volumes can tank your reputation and deliverability; consistent sending can bolster it. ISPs want to see consistent sending without dramatic spikes or plummets week-to-week. At most, you can increase consistency by 2 to 2.5 times before it begins to impact your deliverability.

To increase your volume without dinging your reputation, plan a slow, steady ramp up in volume. Start with a very low sending volume. A weekly doubling of volume is a good rule of thumb for most ISPs. If you run into issues, pause your efforts at the previous volume until the issue is resolved or a week has passed.

Email Cadence

The cadence, or the frequency a sender wants a recipient to receive emails, should be a part of your overall email marketing strategy. Unsure how to determine the best cadence for your customers? The frequency of emails should be informed by the sales cycle of your product. For example, if you have a 9-month sales cycle, a weekly email cadence is too frequent for your average customer.

Top- and middle-of- funnel recipients and current customer emails should be spaced out to avoid fatigue. In contrast, bottom-of-funnel prospects and newly onboarded customers (including active renewals) demand a higher cadence of emails to support and inform.

Email Fatigue

We’ve all been there: you sign up to receive emails from a potential vendor because you’re curious about a product, only to be inundated with all-too-frequent emails. It’s sort of the email marketing equivalent of agreeing to go out for coffee only to show up and find your date on bended knee with an engagement ring in hand. To avoid the SPAM reports and disengaged recipients that can result from email fatigue, devise a strategy for who you target and how you target them.

Fortunately, marketing automation offers tools for managing and preventing email fatigue. Act-On allows users to set up email fatigue suppression rules to ensure that no single prospect receives more than your optimal number of emails within the timeframe that you define. You can also set up your automated programs to have waiting steps designed to lessen the number of emails received. By controlling your cadence based on user action, a program can be sped up or slowed down.

Data Cleanup and Sunsetting Emails

It’s important to remove (i.e., sunset) unengaged recipients from your programs at some point. Your sending cadence and level of contact should determine when you choose to sunset these emails. A prospect who is unengaged should be treated differently than a hand-raiser or a current customer. Reducing the number of opt outs, hard bounces, and unengaged recipients from email lists helps your automated email programs run faster.

Unengaged recipients drag down your stats and lower your reputation with every email without an action. Worse, they can also be a source of spam traps.

PART 3: Content

Developing and distributing relevant, compelling emails won’t do you any good if they all end up in the SPAM folder. On the flip side, emails that get delivered successfully won’t help engage your prospects and move them down the funnel if the content is lacking. Good email content needs to be optimized for deliverability and content best practices.

As a rule, any portion of an email can get you blocked or reported as SPAM. To make optimizing content more manageable, we’ve broken this chapter down into two separate sections: the first focused on optimizing for engagement (which improves sender reputation over time), the second focused on optimizing for inbox placement.

^{Send your key metrics up and to the right with content that maximizes your deliverability results.}

Content That Determines Engagement

The connection between open rates and deliverability should be obvious by now: ISPs consider an opened email the sign of an engaged recipient, which has positive impact on your deliverability. But click-through rates for your email content also contribute to your deliverability for the same reason. Recipients clicking through the CTAs in your email might not be relevant to inbox placement immediately, but it has a cumulative effect over time, as ISPs consider it engagement signal. (Learn more about how to re-engage disengaged recipients).

For engagement and deliverability, the top three lines of an email are the most important: the “From” line, the subject line, and the preview text. We’ll also discuss CTAs in this section.

“From” Addresses and Display Names Matter

The “From” address can have a huge impact on deliverability and engagement. Upwards of 40% of recipients decide whether or not to report something as SPAM based on the “From” address alone! We suspect that statistic has a lot to do with companies and employees becoming more savvy about increased hacking and phishing attacks around the web. With a more educated audience, it’s more important than ever to establish trust from the start, and that means the “From” line.

Similarly, spammers often try to trick their recipients with deceptive display names and mismatches between the display name and the email. (For example, using someone famous in the display name, like Warren Buffett, when the email address is something completely unrelated). For this reason, display names are very important for deliverability.

Follow these fundamental rules and best practices when configuring your display names and “From” lines:

Avoid Using “noreply@” in the Display Name

You should always send from an email that someone can reply to, even if the response is forwarded to another company email. ISPs check for this when scanning email, and if the reply-to link is broken, it may affect inbox placement. Further, even if your message lands in the inbox, using a “noreply@” address can discourage engagement. Send from an email that motivates your target audience to open and read your message.

Don’t Use Generic Addresses (e.g., postmaster@, admin@)

These addresses have specific meanings in the world of email and the internet, which means they should never be used for marketing and sales purposes. (For the same reason, senders should also avoid sending to these addresses).

Let’s say your from address is “marketing@skynet.com,” and the display name is “CEO of Skynet.” That’s a mismatch. If the email address and the display name don’t jibe, it’s a signal to the ISP that something phishy might be going on (pun intended).

Only Use a Personal Display Name Once You’ve Formed a Relationship

Although emails that have a personal email as the display name typically have slightly higher open rates, misleading an email recipient can have deliverabiliy consequences. Use more broad and general display names at first. (Think, “New Customer Team” or “Skynet Marketing.”) Later, you can introduce a specific person who will be emailing, and transition to emailing “as” them. (e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger / ahnuld@skynet.com).

Clarify the Sender When Using Broad Email Addresses

“Marketing” is an ineffective display name because nobody knows exactly who that is. Instead of using an email address that is hard to identify, use your display name as an opportunity to stand out and define your brand.

Avoid Deceptive Display Names

Whatever you do, don’t use a misleading display name. ISPs see that as a spammer signal. Think of all the emails you’ve avoided opening with display names like Crown Prince of Zamunda.

Use Proper Capitalization

Always follow the same capitalization format when writing your display name. Improper capitalization sticks out like a sore thumb and throws up red flags to SPAM detectors.

Do Not Use Emoji in a Display Name

There’s a place for emoji in email marketing (often, the subject line). It’s not the display name. Keep it professional when identifying yourself.

Subject Lines and Email Deliverability

Email marketers have some idea of how to craft engaging and motivating subject lines, but there’s always more to learn and new ideas to try. Think about it too long, and the challenge can seem daunting: you only have a few words to capture your audience’s attention, but you also have to avoid red flags and misleading words that can trigger the ISPs’ SPAM scanners.

For deliverability, it’s all about setting expectations and staying consistent. The subject line should set up the email to follow; if they’re too unrelated, you can send recipients bouncing back out of your message. Of course, from a content perspective, you want subject lines to be somewhat unexpected. If it’s the same thing they’ve seen over and over, your line is unlikely to break through and inspire action. Balancing these competing demands can be challenging. Follow these Dos and Don’ts along the way to ensure you don’t negatively impact deliverability as you pursue subject line excellence.

DO	DON’T
Clearly state why to open an email Check out this month’s promotional pricing	Mislead readers to trick them into opening If you don’t buy, you’ll regret everything!
Use urgency with specifics Conference registration ends Friday!	Use urgency without explanation Hurry! Last chance, don’t miss it!
Use correct capitalization Tips for optimizing SEO on your website	Use ALL caps or no caps SEO TIPS YOU CANNOT MISS
Use emoji sparingly Happy birthday! We value your business!	Use emoji throughout the subject line Save on for your
Personalize the subject line to make it personal Tiffany, seen our new blog on dental hygiene?	Personalize using confidential or sensitive information Tiffany, happy with your gum transplant?

Preview Text and Inbox Delivery

The final thing recipients see before deciding whether to open an email is the preview or first line text…if they actually see it, that is. Ultimately, the ISP and their platform determine which information to display. For instance, some ESPs always show the first line of the body copy of your email, even if you’ve provided specific preview text. Certain apps show as many characters as a reader’s screen and settings will allow but some limit preview text lines to as few as 40 characters.

There are a few mistakes related to the first line of email that senders commonly make.

When crafting your preview text, make sure to avoid the following:

Information About Website View Mode: Trouble Viewing? View online
Improperly formatted HTML Code:
Alt-Text for Image or Banners: [Banner][Banner][Banner][Banner]
Addresses or Other Location Info: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington D.C.

Calls to Action (CTAs) and Email Deliverability

Clicks on your CTAs improve deliverability in the long run because nearly every ISP interprets clicks as positive engagement. The CTA is the most important link in your email: it can make a huge difference in recipient engagement levels, even in the case of similarly designed emails. These best practices will help you craft CTAs that get seen and clicked to drive conversions:

Make Your CTA Separate and istinct

The most common way to make CTAs stand out is to include a button that is centered and separate from other text within the body of the email. Part of the reason this method is so common is that it is the easiest way to enhance your CTA and motivate readers to click.

If a button does not seem like the most appropriate choice for your email, you can embed your CTA within the text, but make sure to use elements like color and phrasing so the CTA stands out.

Avoid Images for CTAs

In our experience, image-based CTAs cause confusion. Recipients either don’t expect the image to be clickable, leading to depressed click-rates; or, they accidentally click on the image, leading to falsely inflated click-rates. In the latter case, this can often lead to an increase in SPAM complaints if recipients feel they were misled.

Choose a Single Primary CTA

Though an email may have multiple CTAs, it should always have one primary CTA that stands out from the rest. If you do include multiple CTAs, make sure it’s clear where users need to click, and what they’ll be clicking through to. Your main CTA should draw the reader in and serve as the focal point for the entire email.

Content That Gets Marked as Spam

Most of the elements discussed in this section don’t directly affect engagement, but they can affect inbox placement. Many senders fail to pay attention to these important elements, which can create deliverability problems for an otherwise quality sender.

Alt-Text and Email Deliverability

Every image in your email should have alt-text. Alt-text is an important accessibility feature for the visually-impaired. But it’s more than that; lack of alt-text can increase the probability of your email being marked as spam. Google and other ISPs check alt-text to make sure it matches the content of an image. For the best alt-text, use concise, accurate language to describe the image’s content. Descriptive is the watchword here: don’t try to stuff the alt text with keywords or marketing messages. There’s a time and place for that.

Links and Email Deliverability

Links and URLs in emails are one of the most scrutinized elements of an email by spam filters. Malicious actors often use links to external websites for malware attacks and phishing for personal information. Additionally, the reputation of the domains you link to in your emails is a major indicator of whether the email is spam or legitimate. For these reasons, we recommend following these best practices when dealing with links in emails:

Always Use HTTPS for all Your Linked URLs:
Linking to secured websites with SSL certificates improves trustworthiness and the likelihood of inbox delivery. ISPs routinely place emails with unsecured links in the spam folder due to the number of data breaches on the web.

Don’t Link to Blacklisted Third Party Sites:
If you link to a domain that’s on a spam blocklist, your email will likely bounce or be placed in a spam folder, regardless of your email reputation. (Protip: Act-On’s customers can use the built-in link validation tool of the Act-On platform to test their links).

Avoid URL Shorteners:
Using a URL shortener is one of the best ways to secure a one-way ticket to the SPAM folder. ISPs distrust shortened URL links because they’re an easy way for phishers and spammers to hide their true destination. (In fact, Gmail doesn’t even trust emails that contain links from Google’s own URL shortening tool!) Avoid shortened URLs altogether.

Make Links Clear and Easy to Identify:
Emphasize link text using the industry standard practices: a text color visibly different from surrounding text, and underlining. Also, make sure recipients can see the underlying URL when they hover over the link. Malicious senders love to trick users by hiding links where they’re least expected, and pointing them to dangerous or unsecured sites.

HTML and Email Deliverability

Many spam emails have sloppy HTML or include additional formatting, often used to hide misleading content, such as links that recipients can mistakenly click. As a result, ISPs and spam filters consider messy or unnecessarily complex HTML as a red flag for SPAM. Messy code can also increase the size of your email, causing long loading times, which can also get your email rejected. Avoid these worst practices:

Font color similar to background color
Embedded Javascript
Extra large font sizes
An invalid font face
Non-standard ASCII characters
Bad tags or too many closing tags
iFrame in HTML
Including attachments within the HTML

Words/Phrases to Avoid for Email Deliverability

ISPs and major spam filters process and scan the content of hundreds of billions of emails each year. They know which word combinations are typical of spam emails, and if your email includes these phrases, your deliverability prospects are not good.

Avoid these words and phrases typical of SPAM:

Free
100%
Try now, buy later
Save
Last chance offer

Copyrighted Images and Email Deliverability

Improper copyright usage complaints can be sent to anyone in an email transfer chain — including ISPs, data centers, filtering companies, and blacklists. Any of these agencies can take action to shut down emails with claimed copyright infringement violations.

The simplest way to avoid this is to make sure you either own or have permission to use the images in your emails and landing pages. If you’re using public open sourced images, make sure they’re also hosted on the open source site where they originated from.

Privacy Policies and Email Deliverability

Make sure all domains referenced in your email have a privacy policy on the domain website. Much like with SSL and link shorteners, a privacy policy is a requirement in the evolving world of deliverability. Many jurisdictions now require a privacy policy for websites that offer or sell any service, even if there is no ecommerce platform on the site itself. ISPs have followed suit and check links for privacy policies as part of the inboxing equation.

Did Our Email Deliverability Best Practices Deliver?

We’ve covered a lot of information in this email deliverability best practices guide, but deliverability, and maintaining a strong reputation as a sender, is literally a full-time job for email marketing professionals. Continually testing and optimizing your email marketing is the only way to ensure that deliverability, engagement, and other positive results continue to grow. Maintaining good list and email hygiene is key to ensuring your emails get seen and that you are targeting individuals who want to engage with your content.

To discuss your own deliverability concerns, and see how Act-On can help you with your sender reputation, get in touch with the best email deliverability service team.

(Current Act-On customers can reach out to their customer success team at any time for assistance.)

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Email Sender Name: Best Practices for Email Marketing

Act-On — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

What is the Email Sender Name?

Marketers often ask about the email sender name (also known as the email display name or “from” name). In email marketing, sender name refers to the visible name the recipient sees in their inbox. With 1-to-1 email, the “from” name is obvious: it’s the author of the email! But when you’re sending on behalf of a brand, you have a lot more options for the email display name.

The display name is different from the “From” address. Most email clients don’t display the address until the recipient opens the email. Some careful people will take the extra step to verify the “From” address is legit. (These days, authentication systems like DMARC keep most of us safe from spoofed emails). Reassuring your audience with a credible “From” address will help you build trust.

They may seem small, but the email sender name and the “From address” can play a role in whether someone opens your email, or ignores it; engages with it, or reports it. Here’s how to make sure you’re following the best practices for email sender names and addresses.

Email Sender Name Best Practices

Use a brand name your recipients can instantly recognize as yours. If your recipient gets an email from a company they don’t recognize, it’s a one-way ticket to the trash.

Keep the email display name as short as possible. You don’t want to risk the email client cutting off the text.

Consider altering the email sender name according to the content you’re sending. For instance, the New York Times might include “NEWS ALERT” in the from line for breaking news updates. For marketing messages, they may simply use New York Times. Southwest Airlines sends their offers from “Southwest Click ‘N Save” instead of “Southwest Airlines.”

Use a distinct display name for important emails that aren’t marketing, like “Act-On Support” or “Billing Department.”

Sender Name ‘Don’ts’

Do not change your email sender name too often. This gives your audience an inconsistent brand experience, and could even result in your emails ending up in spam. If you’re feeling indecisive about which display name to use, you can always try A/B testing before deciding.

Avoid using an email address as the from name. That’s a major red flag for spam bots and filters.

Do not use a person’s name as the email marketing from name. Make an exception if your brand is a person’s name, e.g., Charles Schwab. You might also make an exception if using a person’s name really fits your message. For instance, maybe you have a webinar coming up and one of your executives is speaking. It’s worth testing if the email gets more opens using their name as the email display name. If you do use a person’s name, follow it with a comma and the company name anyway. Including the brand name is always a email sender name best practices.

Email ‘From’ Address Best Practices

Use a “From” address that matches the display name. Remember, this builds trust and helps encourage your audience to open your emails more frequently.

Use your main website domain or a subdomain in the “From” address. Absolutely need to use a separate domain? Just make sure you get it as close to your brand name as possible, for reasons we mentioned earlier.

Create distinct “From” addresses that give the audience more information about what you’re sending and why. For instance, you might have “newsletter@awesomecompany.com” and “coupons@awesomecompany.com” to serve those respective content types.

‘From’ Address ‘Don’ts’

Do not use a no-reply address. This can ding your response rates and your deliverability. It suggests that you’re having a one-way conversation, not trying to build connections with your audience. Worse, it can make recipients think twice about adding you to the safe sender list or address book. You’ll also miss out on potentially valuable feedback from your email audience if you actually don’t monitor those replies.

Do not use free B2C webmail addresses like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. This might seem obvious, but you might be surprised how often marketers try it. It will usually get you nothing but a lot of bounce backs.

Email Compliance: Key Changes in 2024

Brandon Blair — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 19:39:43 +0000

Email marketing laws are constantly changing. Service providers like Google and Yahoo regularly update guidelines and evolve their standards to protect their email account holders. If you’re using email as a marketing channel, you need to stay abreast of the 2024 email compliance changes to avoid a negative impact on your campaigns.

For 2024, one significant change looms on the horizon: Google, Yahoo and other mailbox providers are making sender guideline updates scheduled to take effect in February 2024. These changes are designed to enhance email security, improve user experience, and ensure that emails reaching users’ inboxes are not only relevant but also safe. Read on to find out what’s changing, and how you can respond generally, and specifically in the Act-On platform, if you’re a current customer.

^{Prepare now for email compliance changes coming in early 2024.}

Tightened authentication requirements

Mailbox providers are tightening its authentication protocols to combat phishing and spoofing attempts. Starting February 2024, email senders will be required to implement the latest authentication standards, including:

This new email compliance requirement will help ensure that emails are verified and can be trusted by recipients.

Improved user engagement metrics

Providers are placing a stronger emphasis on user engagement metrics to determine the relevance and quality of emails. Senders with consistently low engagement rates may find their emails filtered out of the primary inbox. To maintain a positive sender reputation, businesses are advised to focus on delivering content that resonates with their audience and encourages user interaction. It will be important to implement a behavioral segmentation strategy to focus on the correct audience.

Optimization for mobile devices

The majority of email opens happening on mobile devices. Due to this mailbox providers are urging senders to optimize their emails for mobile viewing. Non-responsive or poorly formatted emails may be penalized in terms of deliverability and user experience.

Minimization of unsubscribed emails and spam complaints

Providers are placing a heightened focus on reducing unwanted emails. Senders should ensure that their email opt out mechanisms are clear, easily accessible, and promptly honored. Failure to comply with unsubscribe requests promptly may lead to negative consequences for sender reputation. They will also be focusing on instances where they are seeing a 0.3% or over spam complaint rate. Consistent periods of time hitting 0.3% or over will result in lower reputation and possible deliverability issues.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, staying compliant with email provider guidelines is essential for maintaining a positive sender reputation. Ensure successful email deliverability by proactively adapting to the upcoming Sender Guideline changes. By doing so, businesses can enhance the security, relevance, and overall effectiveness of their email communications. Take the necessary steps now to ensure a smooth transition and continued success in your email marketing efforts.

How to Respond for Act-On Customers

If you send 5,000 or more messages to Yahoo or Google domains in a day, you will have to abide by the new sender guidelines. One of the biggest takeaways from the 2024 email compliance changes is that mailbox providers will now be requiring a DMARC record in order to fully pass authentication. For more on how to ensure your Act-On emails are deliverable, check out this guide.

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Email Authentication Is Key to Successful Email Marketing

Act-On — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 19:30:10 +0000

by Matthew Volkman, Email and SMS Deliverability Consultant

Email authentication is an important process that happens behind the scenes any time you send an email. Proper authentication makes sure emails are legitimate and secure. The process involves various methods to verify the origin and authenticity of an email sender. This helps prevent phishing attacks, email spoofing, and other forms of email-based fraud.

In simpler terms, email authentication is like a bouncer checking IDs at the door. It confirms the purported sender of an email is really the sender. This is particularly important for businesses that send out large volumes of emails for marketing or other purposes. Without authentication, it would be all too easy for spammers to steal your identity and use it for nefarious purposes.

^{Email authentication helps prevent phishing scammers from stealing confidential information.}

Think of email authentication as a language that honest emails use to prove their authenticity to recipients’ email servers, providing an added layer of security and trust.

Gone Phishing: How Email Authentication Protects Us All

For senders, email authentication is the foundation for ensuring your messages are genuine and trustworthy. Proper authentication should really be implemented before you start emailing your list. Requiring authentication protects customers from outside spam and phishing attacks. Keeping proper technical records of the authentication are essential for security and inboxing.

Email providers use two main methods to verify the authenticity of your email messages, SPF and DKIM.

SPF: Would You Leave Your Sender Domain Unprotected? Spammers Would.

The SPF (Sender Policy Framework) email authentication method helps prevent email spoofing, phishing, and spam by malicious actors from getting through. This method proves the sender’s domain is authorized to send emails on behalf of that domain. Remember our driver’s license example? When an email is sent, the receiving email server checks the SPF record of the sender’s domain to verify that the sending mail server is authorized to send emails from that domain.

By confirming that the email is sent from a legitimate and authorized mail server, SPF helps improve email deliverability, preventing your emails from being marked as spam or getting rejected by the recipient’s email server. To set up SPF, you’ll need to add a DNS record to your domain’s DNS settings. If you’re unfamiliar with DNS, ask your IT team for assistance. (If you’re an Act-On customer using our Deliverability Services, your deliverability consultant can help answer your questions. If you’re not…well, that’s easy to fix!).

^{You may need help from your IT administrator to set up SPF and DKIM email authentication: and you’ll be glad you did.}

DKIM: Keys To Your Success

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is another email authentication method. It adds a digital signature to an email’s header -similar to your car keys and the car lock. DKIM is important because it shows that the email was sent from a verified sender and not a spoofed or fraudulent email address. Implementing DKIM is relatively easy, but it does require some technical knowledge. You’ll need to generate a DKIM signature and add a DNS record to your domain’s DNS settings. Most email service providers support DKIM, so check with your provider to see if it’s available and how to set it up.

If It Looks Like Spam and Sends Like Spam, It’s Spam

Prevent getting added to email providers’ spam lists by building in smart sending habits from the beginning. Here are some best practices for email sending that scammers and spammers would never bother to do:

Build a quality email list: Your email list should include people who have opted in to receive your emails. Don’t buy email lists or add people without their consent. If you have previous bounces or opt-outs, upload them into the system before sending.
Create engaging content: Your emails should be interesting, informative, and relevant to your audience. We recommend sending to your most engaged users first to build trust.
Set a soft bounce limit: Decide how many soft bounces you’ll receive from an account before pausing sends to the user.
Optimize with A/B testing: Use A/B testing to see what works best for your audience. Test different subject lines, send times, and content to see what resonates most.

The Last Word on Email Authentication

Email marketing is a powerful tool for reaching and engaging with customers, but it’s important to ensure your emails are authentic and trustworthy. By implementing email authentication methods like SPF and DKIM, you can improve email deliverability, enhance the reputation of your sender domain, and build trust with your customers. Remember: email authentication is just one part of a successful email marketing strategy.

Interested in hearing more from our deliverability team? Check out our webinar, Deliverability Clinic: Diagnosing the Symptoms that Lead to Email Failure.

Closing Time: Google Unveils Plans to Delete Inactive Gmail Accounts

Alex Cunningham — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:47:51 +0000

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”
-Semisonic

Google is announcing closing time for inactive Gmail accounts. (Taking a cue from Semisonic, maybe?). Starting December 2023, Google will begin a new initiative to identify and remove all inactive users from its platform. Google’s definition of an inactive account is one that has not been used within a 2 year period. Evidence of activity would include any of the following:

Reading or sending an email
Using Google Drive
Watching a YouTube video
Sharing a photo
Downloading an app
Using Google Search while logged in under said account
Using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service

^{Google plans to start deleting inactive Gmail accounts, which will impact email deliverability. Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash}

Google will be administering service notifications to any account that has been deemed inactive (including notifications to recovery emails, if one exists). Still, we expect some fallout. To stay above the fray, and to ensure that there is no negative impact to your email deliverability, you’ll want to plan and prepare accordingly. With this in mind, let’s take a quick look at how this inactive account policy could impact your email deliverability and what you can do to prevent that from happening.

Sending to inactive accounts damages your deliverability and reputation

As marketers, I think it’s safe to assume that we’re aware of the problematic nature of email bounces and blocks. However, in 2023, we must place just as much emphasis on the number of unengaged subscribers we have in our lists. Repeatedly sending to unengaged subscribers can actually hinder your ability to consistently reach the inbox, even to the contacts that ARE actively engaging. These addresses are more likely to bounce, mark an email as spam and they often turn into spam traps.

If these contacts are still in your active mailing lists, no need to worry – in a sense, Google is simply providing us with added incentive to make sure these contacts are no longer active come December. But how do we do that?

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List cleaning, segmentation and reengagement for inactive Gmail accounts

For healthy deliverability, your reputation as a sender is at the head of the table. While there are many factors that go into your sender reputation (authentication, historical engagement, content, etc.), the quality of your data is paramount. There are different ways in which we keep our lists clean and up-to-date, but let’s start with what we’ll need to do to prepare for this Google update first.

1. Identify Inactive Gmail Accounts

To do this, let’s lean on Act-On’s sophisticated segmentation functionality. We will want to create segment(s) from our contact base consisting of contacts that were created more than two years ago, and have not registered a single email open. These contacts should also contain an email address that includes “gmail.com”. Here’s an example of how we can build this segment of contacts:

^{Act-On’s sophisticated segmentation function allows you to set up a filter to segment based on inactive Gmail accounts.}

2. List Cleaning for Inactive Gmail Accounts

Now that we know which contacts to target, we’ll want to utilize either a list cleansing or list validation service. For a list cleanse, I suggest using Webbula. Webbula is going to be most useful when you’re concerned about the reputational impact of spam traps or blocklists, and we’re not sure how or when the addresses were collected. A Webbula list cleanse will help protect you from getting blocked due to mailing bad contacts.

Additionally, for Act-On customers, we offer the ability to perform list validation via Neverbounce. Neverbounce is useful when you are either sending to new, unverified email addresses, or contacts you haven’t emailed in over 6 months to a year. A Neverbounce list validation helps find out which emails are invalid. If you’re a customer, please contact your Account Manager for more information on how Act-On can assist you with your list cleaning practices!

With results from Webbula and/or Neverbounce, we now know which addresses to remove immediately. This includes both harmful, or “dirty” data, as well as invalid, typo email addresses. These addresses will need to be imported directly into your account’s Opt-Out list.

3. Reengagement Opportunity and Sunset Policy for Inactive Gmail Accounts

Lastly, let’s give these subscribers a final opportunity to confirm their interest with us and ensure that they have provided an address to an account that is still in use. A reengagement campaign or email is a great way to do that – it has one purpose and includes only one call to action: “Do you still want to get our emails”? It should serve as the last touch point with a user before you remove them from your email list.

If you’ve never created a reengagement campaign before, we have you covered! Our Campaign Playbook takes a deep dive into how you can go about getting this setup.

4. Plan Ahead for Google’s Inactive Account Policy

Utilizing segmentation, list hygiene services, and reengagement strategies shouldn’t be a one-time initiative. Moving forward, we suggest implementing a sunset policy. This will help you filter and remove unengaged or inactive subscribers on a regular basis. The goal of implementing a sunset policy is to improve your engagement rates and email deliverability.

We also want to use confirmed opt-in processes. This is the best way to keep clean, high-quality contacts. It will also preserve your sender reputation from bounces, spam traps, and blocklists. Best of all? It keeps your subscribers happy!

Conclusion: Be prepared, and ask for the help you need!

As the saying goes, preparation is everything. These best practices will go a long way in ensuring we are in Google’s good books and while there is still time to put these processes in place, let’s not wait too long. And remember, for current Act-On customers, our dedicated deliverability team is here to help!

Not a customer? Want to have the assistance of a world class deliverability team on your side? Sign up for a demo of Act-On!

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Email List Management Worst Practices (And How Best to Avoid Them)

Act-On — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 23:18:32 +0000

We all want to emulate the best practice in our industry or area of expertise. But sometimes, thinking about the worst practices is just as worthwhile. Learning what to avoid can be just as instructive as what to emulate. Take email deliverability. As part of Act-On’s in-house team of deliverability experts, I help our customers hit the inbox and avoid spam filters and block lists every day. This is the first part of a new series where we turn best practices on their head and look at some of the worst practices for email deliverability.

^{Taking notes? It’s time to learn about best practices in email list management. (Photo by Cytonn Photography via Unsplash)}

This time around, we’re focusing on three common mistakes for email list management, or list hygiene as we like to call it. We’ll cover sign-up and acquisition, email volume and frequency, and ongoing maintenance. While this is not a comprehensive list of best practices surrounding list hygiene, these are some of the more important ones.

These observations and recommendations come from my perspective as a professional with 18 years in the Email Deliverability industry. Some of these scenarios and worst practices are examples I’ve seen from the sending side, I have seen plenty on the receiving side. So, what are the best practices for managing your email list? And what will get you blocked and spam filtered faster than you can say “Mailer Daemon”? Read on to find out!

Purchase All of Your Lists

Let’s jump right in where most email programs start out: email sign-up and list acquisition. The best way to add contacts to your marketing list is still gathering organic sign-ups through an online form. List contacts who give your company explicit permission to receive marketing emails consistently outperform purchased lists.

It’s true that gathering contacts organically can take a lot longer than purchasing lists, but there are no shortcuts to quality list-building. Purchasing lists might seem like you’re saving time, but you’re really trading quality for quantity.

https://act-on.com/learn/blog/email-marketing-data-permission-and-acquisition/

If you do end up purchasing your lists, it’s imperative to run them through a list hygiene service such as Webbula or Neverbounce. Ultimately, this will shrink the overall size of the list, but it will also go a long way in improving your overall list quality and protecting your reputation from spam traps and other nefarious bad data.

Don’t Ask Too Many Questions

It’s understandable to want entrance into your opt-in list to be as quick and easy as possible. Still, it’s a best practice to collect more information on signup than just an email address and first and last name. Requesting more information might cause some potential subscribers to abandon the sign-up process, but it’s worth it to build a high quality list.

In your sign-up form, collect extra data like demographics, geographic location, and even subjects the subscriber is interested in. It helps build trust and reduces the likelihood of unsubscribes and your emails being reported as SPAM.

https://act-on.com/learn/blog/3-proven-tips-to-avoid-the-spam-folder/

Overall, it’s important to be as upfront and informative as possible during the sign up process. Avoid seemingly deceptive practices like making the font small in the explanatory text that accompanies your list sign-up boxes to encourage unintentional signups. You want to avoid any confusion or misinterpretation on the part of your new subscribe. If they’re unclear what they’re signing up for (topics, cadence, etc.), it becomes more likely they’ll hit unsubscribe (or worse, report as SPAM).

Skip the Welcome Email

Another time-tested best practice: after sign-up, send subscribers a welcome email (or series) to explain the kind of content you’ll be providing in the email program and the benefits they can expect as subscribers. This might lead to some subscribers unsubscribing, but that number will likely be marginal. And at least you’ll know the subscribers on your list want to receive your communications.

^{Your welcome email, a list management best practice, is like the “Welcome” sign hanging in a brick and mortar business; it tells customers what to expect from your brand. (Photo by Aaron Burden via Unsplash)}

It’s also best practice to avoid adding subscribers to lists they didn’t sign up for, even if it’s tempting. This can erode trust in your email campaigns, and in your brand. Always allow email subscribers to pick their cadence and volume by offering an easy-to-find communication preference center. Letting them tailor their experience with your marketing materials builds trust.

Send as Many Emails as Often as Possible

Frequency and volume has an impact on overall list hygiene. New subscriber engagement is a sign that they should stay on the list. If a subscriber isn’t opening or engaging after signing up for your list, it’s not best practice to keep sending and hoping you’ll find the right message eventually.

Continually sending to addresses that have never opened an email is great way to end up on the Spamhaus Blocklist. Repeat offenders of the Spamhaus SBL may even be forced to re-permission their entire email database. Having the correct frequency for your audience is crucial to maintaining high engagements which in turn feeds your sender reputation.

^{Following best practices for email frequency and volume is crucial to your email list management. (Photo by Campaign Creators via Unsplash)}

Largest List Wins!

Performing ongoing list maintenance is crucial to overall list health and hygiene. Best practices encourage email marketers to use engagement filters to reduce or stop sends to those that remain unengaged after a specified period of time. Furthermore, we recommend sending a re-engagement campaign every 3-4 months to try to win those subscribers back before finally removing them.

Set soft bounce protocols for ongoing email list maintenance. (Photo by Lukas Blazek via Unsplash)

Another email list maintenance best practice: set soft bounce thresholds to remove emails from the list after five consecutive soft bounces. It might be frustrating to see your list size shrink, but remember in the long run it’s better to maintain a smaller list of high-quality contacts than a large list that isn’t well-maintained.

Again this is by no means a comprehensive list of the worst practices for email list maintenance, but we have gone over some of the more important ones I’ve seen that have the biggest impact on a sender’s reputation during my time in the industry.

https://act-on.com/learn/blog/the-best-email-deliverability-guide-ever/

Hard Bounce vs Soft Bounce & How To Fix Them

Matthew Volkman — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 23:23:37 +0000

Email marketers know to watch out for soft bounces and hard bounces in their email campaigns. A single bounced email isn’t usually cause for concern. But when they start to add up, it can be signal that deliverability is becoming a problem for your email marketing. What are soft bounces? How do they differ from hard bounces? And how can you prevent them to ensure your entire audience is receiving your sends? Read on to find out.

What is a Soft Bounce?

A soft bounce is a temporary email delivery failure caused by issues like a recipient’s full mailbox, server downtime, or an email exceeding size limits. Unlike hard bounces, soft bounces indicate that the recipient’s email address is valid, and the delivery issue may resolve on its own. These bounces should be monitored, and emails can be resent later. However, if soft bounces persist across multiple campaigns, the address may need to be removed to maintain list quality and sender reputation.

Hard Bounce vs Soft Bounce

A hard bounce occurs when an email fails to deliver permanently due to reasons like an invalid email address, a non-existent domain, or a blocked server. These should be removed from your email list immediately to avoid harming your sender reputation.

Too many hard bounces can damage your IP/Domain reputation, because they’re associated with spammers who are illegitimately guessing at large amounts of email addresses. Soft bounces are less severe than hard bounces.

What Causes Soft Bounces?

Soft bounces are a problem. They show that, even though the intended recipient address is real, a transient delivery failure prevented it from being received. A number of things can trigger them: spam-related concerns, temporary technical issues, or a full inbox. Spam-related concerns can be resolved with good sending practices, such as list cleansing, quality list sources, and engagement segmentation.

^{Full inboxes may not be a temporary problem. They can indicate a soon-to-be-abandoned address.}

Soft bounces can also indicate that, while an email address is still active, is isn’t being used. (Think about it: if an inbox stays full, it’s likely because no one is checking it regularly, or at all). If these addresses are abandoned, it’s important to identify the problem sooner than later. Abandoned email addresses spell trouble for email marketers for several reasons:

You aren’t reaching the right person with your message
The email will probably be shut down eventually, turning into a hard bounce (and potentially damaging your reputation)
Spam monitoring sites, like Spamhaus, will pick up these defunct email addresses and use them as spam traps, causing significant disruptions in your sending and damage to your reputation

How Can I Avoid Them?

Think of bounces as the dust bunnies of your email marketing list. They are an early indication that your list is old and may need to be cleaned. So, if the rate is high, first use a list cleanse. For your convenience, Act-On partners with some list cleansing services such as Webbula and Neverbounce. Webbula may be ideal for removing these bounces and providing a deeper cleanse. Second, you can try to automate the process of removing soft bounces. If an email has been abandoned, emailing this contact will continuously cause a soft bounce.

Continuous soft bouncing shows that the contact will not engage and could transform into a threat. Act-On offers a solution to its customers to automate the clean up process::

Click Contacts
Bounces and Opt-Outs
Hover over the Soft Bounces list, and click “Move to Inactive Soft Bounces after…”
Select how many bounces a contact should have in the drop down and the click “Save”

Not an Act-On customer? We won’t hold it against you. (But you should give us a try!)

How Many Soft Bounces Should I Allow?

How many soft bounces to allow depends on how often you typically email a contact and the risk level you are willing to take. Here are some guidelines based on your email sending frequency:

Daily sends – 10-20
Two sends per week – 4-7
One send per week – 3
One send per month – 2-3

These thresholds allow a buffer for temporary issues (e.g. blocklisting) while still removing repeat bounces in a timely manner.

This has been a guest post from Matthew Volkman on our Deliverability Team.

Should I Remove Soft Bounces From the Email List?

As these are temporary email delivery failures caused by issues like full mailboxes or server problems, they don’t need immediate removal. However, if they persist across multiple campaigns, consider removing them to protect your sender reputation. Monitor bounces, retry sending, and use email verification tools to maintain a clean list and improve deliverability.

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Apple MPP Adapt Series: Hide My Email

Act-On — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 21:41:00 +0000

The Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature from Apple has ushered in new changes for email marketers. These changes, ranging from data acquisition to general user privacy, force marketers to adapt and evolve their best practices. One of the latest updates is the Hide My Email (HME) feature, which will certainly affect marketing email collection and deliverability practices. Read on for more about how Hide My Email will affect marketers.

What is Hide My Email?

The Hide My Email (HME) feature creates randomly-generated and unique email addresses for Apple users. These email addresses can be used wherever an email address is required, including marketing forms, creating online accounts, or website downloads. Apple allows its users to generate as many HME email addresses as they’d like via iCloud or Sign In With Apple. Apple devices can also auto-fill generated emails on forms.

Users of HME addresses can turn the email forwarding either on or off at any time, which means messages may or may not be forwarded to their primary inbox. And, since HME addresses can be used instead of the primary email, marketers may never know the user’s real email.

How Will Hide My Email Affect Marketers?

Currently, Apple iPhone continues to rank as the top email client in the world. With over 47% of email opens coming from iPhones, HME could have significant implications for lead generation. In some ways, the impact will be similar to temporary or disposable email addresses.

Apple HME allows users to choose if they want to forward emails from these randomly-generated email addresses to their primary email inboxes or to deactivate them. If the user decides to deactivate, that means they are effectively blocking your messages. Further, if users turn off the ability to forward emails, messages sent to the HME address will hard bounce. And, marketers are paying close attention, because this has a huge impact on email deliverability metrics.

What Can Email Marketers Do to Adjust to Apple’s HME?

First, get inside the mind of the consumer. Consumers who use temporary/disposable email addresses typically want to take advantage of special offers or access a website’s content without wanting additional communication from the company. The underlying issue comes down to consumers who want to protect their email addresses while still being able to access content. One question to think about is whether you want those people in your database in the first place.

To ensure you’re attracting the best possible leads (who will hopefully use their real email address to sign up for your offer), continue to focus on the value of receiving future marketing communications from your business. Create campaigns that serialize messaging over time to build a relationship and establish an expectation of ongoing content. Provide value early in the customer’s journey.

To adapt, marketers should:

Focus on the benefits of receiving your emails during the sign-up process.
Set expectations on the type and frequency of messages with your welcome message.

Provide Value

The most important thing a company can do to maintain email deliverability in the face of Apple’s HME feature is provide value. By segmenting and maintaining clean lists, and sending resources each segment finds useful or inspiring, you can start to build trust with your audience.

Communicate with your leads and customers about the topics they prefer on the channels they prefer. Allow them to set preferences, react to the patterns you see in their behavior and keep their success top of mind. In the end, creating a valuable, impactful customer experience is the most important thing you can do to entice people to stay on your list.

Filter Certain Email Domains

If you are not currently reviewing your email bounce rates, it will be important to add this to your key metrics if you want to understand and combat the impacts of Hide My Email. If you see a jump in bounces, examine what percentage of email addresses end with @icloud.com, @me.com, @mac.com, or @privaterelay.appleid.com. If deliverability is becoming a problem, you can filter these domains from your reporting, or even refuse submissions on your forms when emails end with these domains. If you are a B2B marketer, you can also try accepting only business or corporate domains, and no longer accept domains like @gmail.com or @icloud.com at all.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Will Prompt Marketing Improvements

Overall, Apple’s continued privacy protection updates serve as good reminders to use best practices to communicate to your contact list. It is important to set expectations when consumers opt-in, regularly review key metrics (like hard bounce increases), and allow consumers to set preferences to help your overall email strategy. Features like Mail Privacy Protection and Hide My Email are meeting consumer demand for more privacy and greater control over the types of content they receive. Businesses of all types now have an opportunity to continue improving their strategies for providing value, and continuing to meet demand for content and information while respecting privacy.

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