Sometimes that pressure focuses on legal arguments. When having conversations about email deliverability, and specifically when I’m giving advice on who to send to, I frequently get the response: ”but it’s legal”. Just because you can send it all, doesn’t mean you should. 

Mailbox providers don’t consider legality when they’re deciding whether or not your email belongs in the inbox. Their priority is to deliver wanted mail to their users, and so the critical art of deliverability is all about meeting recipient expectations to achieve great inbox placement.

If your sole priority is legality, you’re taking the whole focus away from what the email deliverability conversation should really be about.

Email deliverability: wanted vs. unwanted

The core of the conversation should be: do the recipients of the emails you’re sending want to receive those emails?

Consent and setting expectations are both key to having a successful, revenue-generating email program. As we come up to the busy holiday period, it’s easy to let the pressures that come with it change this key part of the message. But there are no exceptions because of timing.

Mailbox providers have a job to do: make sure that the emails being sent to recipients are wanted. They measure whether or not an email is wanted through many different indicators. Some thresholds they’ll be measuring include:

• The proportion of recipients deleting emails without reading them
• Recipients actively mark messages as spam
• Sending to an email address that’s being used to identify senders collecting email addresses without consent or continued consent (a.k.a ‘spam trap’)
• Sending to recipients that no longer exist at that mailbox provider

Once you reach one or more of those thresholds, mailbox providers (such as Gmail and Yahoo) can see clearly that you’re sending emails that their users do not want. This leads to emails being more likely to hit the spam folder – even for fans of your messages.

If your biggest argument for sending an email is, “oh, but it’s legal”, then you need to refocus. You run the risk of alienating people who actually do want to hear from you. These are the contacts that drive revenue or any other intended outcome of your email program.

How to build a robust email sending plan

Repairing your reputation is hard; it’s better to build your sending plan for the busy upcoming holidays in a way that protects your reputation while maximizing revenue. Here are four email deliverability tips:

1. Plan volume increases strategically

If there is consent and data to show a larger audience wants to hear about your holiday deals, then plan any volume increases accordingly – slowly build to the volumes where you need to be.

2. Analyze previous years’ data

Use previous years’ data to understand how your recipients interact with your emails. Look at the demographics of your recipient base and what they want to know.

3. Stay updated with ongoing trends

Don’t discount any changes or trends seen since the last holiday season. How your recipients interacted last Black Friday, for example, may not be how they respond this year (there is a recession after all).

4. Consider the risks of sending to inactive contacts

Consider carefully before sending to inactive contacts who may still be opted in. Sending to this kind of data presents a higher risk of negative outcomes and you will need to balance this against the potential reward. 

Some basic advice is to send less frequently to contacts who have not engaged with your brand for a while. Sending to highly engaged recipients acts as a buffer to a certain extent when it comes to your reputation and inbox placement. Tolerance for sending to less engaged recipients will vary between senders and mailbox providers.

If you want to level up, find the data point where revenue or other KPIs drop when charted against the date of the last interaction. At what age of inactivity does the lack of revenue make sending to that data set irrelevant compared to the risk? Remember, the answer to this question will be different for each sender.

Who should I be sending to?

Want to have a conversation about who to send to or how to reduce risk to your email deliverability and improve the success of your email marketing during the busy festive period? Get in touch with your account manager to set up a consultation.

What did Gmail announce?

They’re actually only asking senders to do three simple things: 

1. Authenticate emails
   • Let mailbox providers (MBPs) know who is sending the emails and back it up.
2. Enable easy unsubscribes
   • Provide recipients with an option to stop receiving emails from you without any hurdles
3. Ensure wanted mail is being sent
   • Send emails to recipients who are expecting to hear from you and only send wanted emails

Those are the best practices we (and our email deliverability colleagues across the industry) preach every single day. We hammer these concepts home to the point where our internal colleagues are sick of hearing us say these things.

The full standards which are currently planned to go into effect in February 2024 can be found on their support page. I applaud their want to share these types of specifics with senders. Legitimate marketers now have a target to aim for – and hopefully, most will be aiming for far above that. 

So why is this news?

There are 2 reasons this is a big deal to me, even after 15 years of being in this industry and knowing the 3 things Gmail is asking for are standard best practices. 

First: Gmail is actually providing standards. Gmail has published actionable steps that can be taken to show them that senders are sending legitimate emails. Some of those include: 

• Keep spam complaint rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%
• Senders will need to have at least a p=none DMARC record on their sending domain to get Gmail delivery. Other receivers including Yahoo have indicated that they’re finally moving to “no auth, no entry” meaning that SPF and DKIM authentication is required on the sending domain otherwise emails will be bounced
• A one-click unsubscribe header is required
  • There needs to be a list-unsubscribe header that supports one-click unsubscribe – this is used by mailbox providers and mail clients to display an unsubscribe option in their user interface
  • There also needs to be an unsubscribe link in the email; this does not have to be a one-click process, but it should be simple. Landing pages that offer preference management and opt-downs are still perfectly fine, but there should be a clear and easy-to-find option to unsubscribe
• The authentication requirements won’t impact anyone sending fewer than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail
• Gmail will go p=quarantine for their own emails – to prevent those trying to spoof sending from gmail.com

What Gmail is doing is awesome. From my perspective, the collaboration with Yahoo is huge, and the second reason why I think this is news. Yahoo also published a blog, with messaging that supports Gmail’s new requirements. Gmail also quoted Yahoo in their blog that announced the new standards. They are aligning with expectations, which the industry has needed for quite some time. 

Are you compliant with the new standards?

For most senders using Dotdigital, all of the authentication pieces Gmail is laying out are covered. SPF is set up for all sending domains, all emails are always signed with DKIM using your sending domain, and you will have a DMARC policy by default. If you are using our shared dotdigital-email.com domain AND you send more than 5k, you’re going to be sharing your reputation with other senders and won’t get the inbox placement results you deserve.

Talk to your CSM about getting a custom from address – this is an industry best practice, allows you to build an independent reputation, and is a more trusted and fully branded recipient experience. Additionally, a “send via” configuration will no longer be compliant. We will work closely with customers who are using this to migrate them to one of our existing compliant solutions. 

The list unsubscribe header is automatically included by default for marketing sends, fulfilling the fast and easy unsubscribe requirement. As a best practice, we recommend reviewing the user journey for the unsubscribe link in your emails too.

If you’re using a default Dotdigital unsubscribe, these are set up to be quick and easy. If you’re using your own custom preference center for your unsubscribe, make sure there’s a clear option to unsubscribe from all emails, and that this is integrated with your Dotdigital account and any CRMs or other platforms you use so that unsubscribing requesters is fast and automated.

Keeping your complaint rates under 0.3% is where we’re going to need our customers to partner with us; this relies on marketers sending emails that are wanted by their contacts. Marketers need to send strategies that focus on meeting recipients where they are. Making sure they meet the expectations set around email content and frequency at the point of address collection is key to keeping spam rates low.

If you’d like help with updating your sending strategy to be in line with the new Gmail guidance (and solid old school best practices) then our deliverability experts are here to work with you. From a deliverability health check on your account to identify where you might be missing the mark, to monitoring your inbox placement, to full strategic consulting – we have a package that will suit your needs. Just ask your CSM about our Deliverability Products.

In conclusion: we’re excited

Sending wanted emails and making sure the digital messaging ecosystem is respecting recipients is why I and my team do what we do. This is a great step in the direction of making things clearer for legitimate senders. 

What is hack week?

Employees work in teams to work on innovative solutions for previously identified problems. These solutions could involve an emerging technology, a novel way to apply existing technology, or just simply making things better. It’s been exciting to see previous years’ hacks that have made their way into the Dotdigital product and the quality of the ideas this year were no exception.

Thirteen teams had three days to bring ideas to life and create a video showcasing what they had created. A panel of judges then identified winners in four categories, plus a fifth ‘bragging rights’ award for the best team name, voted on after the presentations.

This year, hack week was lead by Simon Letch, our Software Development Manager and the judges included a member of HR, a member of Customer Success, along with members of the Product and Technology team. The entries were strong, making the decisions very hard. Let’s get to the winners.

Most Innovative

The unacceptables – Next Generation Dotdigital took the award for most innovative. Their goal was to enable simple and consistent integration of our scripts in the latest and greatest of front end Javascript frameworks.

Most Wanted

The team Moebius theory and their project: RPP (Rapid program pollination) was given the Most Wanted Award! They worked on creating a feature for the program builder that adds an “execute immediately” option for programs which will execute enrollments based on the current enrollment rules.

Chief Product & Technology Officer Award (awarded by our very own Steve Shaw)

The Explosive Architects – C4 was the winner of our CPTO award! Using Structurizr, this team is championing creating living C4 models of our architecture and proposed goal state architecture to ensure any changes we plan are moving towards that goal state.

Best Hack

Team Plan for Success introduced Omnibox which is a calendar view of scheduled Email and SMS campaign activity.

Bonus Award: Best Team Name

And last, but not least, the Sheriffs of Noteingham took the bonus award and bragging rights for Best Team Name!

Join us and hack too

If experimenting with new technology and solving customer engagement problems in new and innovative ways seems like something you’d excel at, have a look at our open positions over at careers.dotdigital.com. We are always on the lookout for outstanding additions to our team!

By now, most will have a plan in place that is well on its way to ensuring holiday success. Here are three ways you can double check your strategies to make sure they are not trading long-term gains for short-term wins.

1. Will your list expect to hear from you?

The holiday sending period is known for increased volumes. Audiences are naturally larger and there are more things to communicate.

As a customer, I want to know what’s going on with the brands I love and I’m more likely to have some purchase goals to take advantage of seasonal deals. Targeted emails from marketers who are smart with their data analysis show me exactly what I want and are highly valuable. Unwanted messages clutter my inbox, hiding the ones I’m really looking for – this makes for a frustrating experience and I’m more likely to complain or move messages to the spam folder.

As you’re preparing to communicate the wonderful things you have to offer to your recipients, take a hard look at the risk of sending to those that aren’t expecting to hear from you and proceed with caution.

2. Are you giving your recipients choices?

There are always going to be people who, for one reason or another, don’t want to hear about a specific holiday or sporting event.

For people experiencing grief or hard times, they may not be looking forward to Thanksgiving as much this year. For the World Cup specifically, it’s no secret that there‘s some controversy about the host country chosen by FIFA. When it comes to social issues, you need to ask if or how you as a brand have chosen to respond, and whether it will alienate your recipients and jeopardize ROI.

Along with giving recipients the ability to opt-out of holiday emails, give them the ability to choose not to hear about the World Cup as well. This makes sure you’re maximizing your efforts to give your recipients what they want.

3. Have you incorporated all channels?

Take a look at what you have planned for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – is it cohesive with your World Cup strategy?

Having a strategy that elegantly combines both will ensure your recipients needs are the focus and ultimately get you the best success. Remember that there are other ways to communicate with your recipients. Make sure to use SMS or other channels where email doesn’t make sense.

Using an approach that strategically incorporates all methods so that everything is working together will make for the best success.

This is a fun time of year, and all of us are doing what we can to make sure we are prepared and helping our businesses be successful. It’s important to be reviewing the plans we have in place to make sure we are set up for wins. Look critically at your strategies, and then go enjoy something festive – I’ll be having some pumpkin pie.

We know that many security filters automatically visit every link in an email to assess the validity and risk of the URLs. This is one of the ways MBPs protect their users. This non-human interaction (NHI) has been a topic of conversation in the industry for a long time. Security providers believe this automated link checking is a necessary precaution to prevent end users from downloading something harmful (like malware) or falling victim to phishing attacks. What’s more, link checking carried out by security providers is ramping up. In a recent industry report, as much as 20-80% of link clicks for B2B senders can be NHI (with B2C fairing much better with less than 10%). We’re seeing a distinct change with B2B domains protected by Microsoft Office 365 and Barracuda, where they’ve begun checking links more frequently than ever before. Many businesses are accelerating their migrations to cloud mailboxes during COVID-19. This surge of businesses turning to cloud services helps explain the increase in NHI.

The situation becomes even more complicated as security providers are looking to hide the link checking they’re doing. They do this because they don’t want ‘malicious senders’ to be able to detect their checks. Malicious senders are known to either change the URL redirection after the checks have been performed or present harmless content to known security filter IPs, but the harmful content to recipients. Security providers continually adjusting like this creates a moving target for those of us providing services to legitimate senders when it comes to differentiating between NHI and real recipient clicks.

How does this affect customers?

1. Increased traffic to websites

The increase in NHI can send a sudden (and unexpected) amount of visitors through to a sender’s website. This surge in visitors can cause some websites to become overwhelmed, suffer performance issues, or even go offline as a result.

The good news is there are some solutions senders can implement…

• Throttling sends: Sending a large campaign immediately may result in 1,000s of website visitors (which includes NHI clicks) over the course of just a few minutes. It’s possible to use our throttling feature to control the spread and send rate of a campaign (sends can be steadily completed in small chunks over 1 to 24 hours). Packaging up sends into smaller chunks and controlling the subsequent website visitors will reduce the risk of website performance issues. We’ve recently made our throttling feature more sophisticated which is explained in this article.
• Website robustness: Sender websites have to be fit for purpose. Investing in a solid website infrastructure that can cope with larger numbers of visitors is becoming increasingly important. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is often an effective strategy for managing high traffic and allows speedy delivery of website content to visitors. Whichever strategy is used, it’s important security providers can successfully access links to websites. Attempting to block or interfere with these checks will have profound negative impacts for senders.

2. An increase in click and open metrics

Of course, security filters are doing what they’re designed to do: protect end-users. But, as a consequence, open and click rates are artificially inflated in reporting data.

How can we solve this problem?

• Re-think engagement measures: Senders are re-thinking how they measure the success of campaigns and moving away from traditional open and click metrics to other more sophisticated engagement measures. There are many other useful metrics to measure email performance. Here at dotdigital, we often talk about holistic indicators. It’s about using all of the available data points to paint a picture. Senders need to redefine the click metric and where that belongs in that picture of holistic indicators. Holistic indicators are often described as using all the metrics available regarding the emails being sent together to get an accurate idea of how emails are performing.
• Exclude NHI from campaign reporting: Dotdigital has functionality (currently in beta) that searches click data for signals of NHI and stops them from reaching your reports. We’re still developing the feature, but it’s already showing signs of being very effective, which is why we’re offering it to a small set of customers now. If you’re interested in knowing more, see this help center article.
• Focus on building a positive reputation: We know sender reputation plays a huge part in the amount of NHI experienced. Senders with highly engaged recipients will receive less NHI. Building and maintaining a positive sending reputation is vital in reducing the overall impact of NHI. Using our sender reputation feature is a great way of keeping a pulse on it. If you’re looking for guidance in taking your reputation to the next level, we have a highly skilled team of deliverability consultants who can provide the best advice on achieving a great sending reputation. If you’re keen to learn more, ask your account manager/customer success manager.

We’re all working hard to solve these conundrums. There isn’t a single solution to these problems. Instead, there will be several mitigating actions senders can take themselves. In addition, an cross-channel marketing engagement platform like ourselves should provide useful advice and technological advances. In summary, senders should be ready for more NHI and website traffic than ever before, especially with the busy holiday season just around the corner.