This blog dives into how DOI can be your secret weapon for boosting email deliverability. We’ll explore how it improves list quality, protects your sender reputation, and safeguards against malicious attacks. By the end, you’ll understand why DOI is a critical step for ensuring your emails reach the inboxes that matter.

Understanding double opt-in (DOI)

Double opt-in, also called confirmed opt-in, is a verification process that involves two steps. Subscribers must confirm their email address and consent to receive communications by responding to a confirmation email. This extra step ensures that the provided email address belongs to the intended individual and is valid, thereby safeguarding both the sender and the recipient.

The benefits of DOI for deliverability

1. Enhanced list quality: DOI is the only way to be 100% certain that a) the email address exists, b) the owner of the email address is the one subscribing, and c) the email address owner definitely wants marketing emails from your brand.
2. Protection against reputation damage: DOI filters out invalid or potentially harmful addresses, protecting against hard bounces and spam traps that could damage sender reputation and impact inbox placement.
3. Defense against malicious attacks: DOI acts as a robust defense against abusive practices, such as bot scripts adding email addresses without consent. Additionally, implementing supplementary security measures like CAPTCHA further fortifies the defense against unauthorized additions to mailing lists, safeguarding both sender reputation and recipient experience.

Risks of neglecting DOI

1. Lower quality addresses: Neglecting DOI may result in more addresses being added to lists but at the cost of lower quality. Without DOI, there’s a higher chance of including disinterested or even fake addresses, diminishing the engagement metrics of your campaigns.
2. Damage to sender reputation: Sending to large lists with low engagement, especially without DOI, can damage sender reputation. This not only reduces inbox placement but also jeopardizes the overall deliverability of your emails.
3. Vulnerability to attacks: Neglecting DOI opens the door to various attacks, including list bombing, whereby malicious actors target email addresses with excessive emails making them unusable. Without DOI, businesses are more susceptible to malicious activities aimed at exploiting loopholes in subscription forms.

The DOI takeaway

Email marketing success depends on many factors, but one of the most crucial is deliverability. To ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients, it’s essential to follow best practices, such as using a double opt-in process. DOI helps to improve the quality of your email list, safeguard your sender reputation, and protect against malicious attacks. Before launching your next email campaign, make sure to implement DOI to increase your chances of success and protect your sender reputation.

We don’t recommend taking risks with your data ahead of the busy period – as recently discussed in our festive spam traps blog post. Expanding your sending volumes and engaging with less active recipients can be a great opportunity for your brand. However, it’s important to approach this strategically and keep a close eye on the results of every campaign you send. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions and ensure that your efforts are effective in re-energizing your audience.

In this blog post, we will delve into email deliverability analytics. We will set some expectations for what you may see over the next few months and discuss the factors that affect email deliverability.

Negative metrics are critical

Email marketers have long relied on opens and clicks as the primary indicators of engagement. However, email has advanced to the point where images are now pre-cached by many email providers such as Gmail, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Additionally, anti-malware filters have become more sophisticated and may click through links to ensure they are safe for recipients, which means that these clicks may not necessarily represent human interaction. As a result, relying solely on traditional open and click metrics is no longer sufficient to accurately measure engagement.

Let’s look at negative metrics. While interest can only be indirectly measured, senders are directly informed by recipients (and mailbox providers) when their expectations are not met.

Unsubscribes vs complaints – useful but not equal

If you are reaching out to your older lists, expect an increase in unsubscribes and complaints (recipients marking your email as junk or spam). You can learn more about your subscriber’s journey by analyzing where these interactions happen. If contact drops out at the beginning of their lifecycle, weak data capture or poor expectation setting are key. If you lose them mid life-cycle, content and frequency play an important role.

A healthy list interaction will show higher unsubscribe than complaints. Unsubscribes do not affect your sender reputation. However, if contacts mark your emails as junk or spam, it will have a heavily negative impact. If you’re seeing more complaints than unsubscribes, then this may be an indicator that your unsubscribe journey needs some attention.

Soft bounces

During the seasonal period, you may notice an increase in soft bounces. A sharp spike is likely to indicate that there’s a problem with the list you are targeting, especially if you haven’t sent it recently. However, a gentle increase overall could be due to the whole email ecosystem being put under strain and a healthy email program will recover.

Soft bounce data can provide insights into how mailbox providers view your emails and what impacts email deliverability. It’s important to note whether the bounces are temporary or persistent and whether they occur on a single domain or multiple domains. Focusing on these details can help optimize your email campaigns and enhance your deliverability rates.

If the volume of soft bounces has affected engagement (opens, clicks, etc.) that indicates the mailbox provider may be junking your mail. Tweak the contacts you are targeting and reduce the frequency at which you reach out to less engaged and unengaged recipients.

Replies

It’s important to remember that email is a two-way communication channel, so you should be checking the replies to your emails. The positive side of replies is that you can see real interaction here; a snapshot into what affects email deliverability. A healthy list will likely receive some questions and comments in amongst the out-of-office replies.

You can use these to see what contacts really think about your emails, and from there work out if you have any weaknesses in other areas such as poor data capture or expectation misalignment at the point of collection.

It’s essential to keep an eye on replies during the festive period, as they’ll be a great indicator if you’re over-sending to your recipients. Failing to check replies could also mean missing questions from your customers about products or purchases, leading to lost sales or bad reviews for poor customer service.

Open rates

An open simply tracks the downloading of a pixel. It’s never been an accurate metric of a real open, because this is not the same as actual human eyes reading your emails.

It’s important to keep track of more than just open rates when it comes to email marketing. Metrics such as click-throughs, replies, and purchases can also be valuable indicators of your campaign’s success. It’s a good idea to monitor these metrics over time to spot trends and identify what’s working and what’s not. By doing so, you can address any potential challenges and optimize your email marketing strategy for maximum effectiveness.

Clicks

Clicks continue to be an important indicator of how engaged recipients are and whether emails have landed in the inbox or not. With the introduction of iOS 17 and Link Tracking Protection, digital marketers have started to question the future of click-based engagement tracking.

Pay attention to trends in clicks over time, especially if re-mailing to non-openers during the festive period. Clicks can be viewed holistically along with open rates, measuring website traffic, and actual purchase data. This versatile insight can indicate whether sending again to contacts who didn’t open the first time is actually worth the revenue, or whether it carries a high risk of damaging your sending reputation and could jeopardize the success of future sends.

As with open rates, B2B senders should now have enough data to know what impact non-human interaction (NHI) has (if any) on their click through rate reporting. If you are suddenly seeing NHI where previously there was none, this is a useful negative metric. Poor reputation is associated with an increase in filters checking links, so it could be an indicator that something is awry with your strategy.

Analyze your deliverability analytics to avoid list fatigue

Recipients can be overwhelmed with email during the holidays, and they may not engage with content as they normally would. By increasing the volume you send, you can decrease the average list engagement – this is list fatigue. 

Mailbox providers are also under heavy load receiving the influx of seasonal emails. An increase in volume coupled with a decrease in engagement is more likely to be interpreted as a sign that your emails don’t belong in the inbox. This can result in a further decline in the success of your emails, even when sending relevant content such as promotions to encourage interaction.

It’s a good idea to analyze the reporting data for your emails, but if you want to take it to the next level, our Deliverability Perspective package provides you with access to more comprehensive inbox placement data, including seeding. This package provides a wealth of information that can help identify potential issues, such as list fatigue, during critical business sending times.

Please get in touch if you’re interested in any of our deliverability products – or if you need any assistance with inbox placement over the festive season.

What is spam?

Spam, in a nutshell, is any unsolicited email that someone didn’t ask for or want. As an email user, whether for personal or business purposes, you’ve probably experienced a flood of unwanted emails regularly. As a marketer, it may be enticing to send spam emails, thinking that everyone wants to receive them. But, there are many reasons why this is a bad idea and why you should steer clear of this practice.

1. It annoys potential customers

Lots of people become nervous when they receive unwanted emails considered spam. It’s because they get hundreds of emails every day that they have to look through and they don’t want to waste their time and effort on useless information coming into their inbox.

2. It’s against privacy laws

Engaging in spam email practices can result in hefty fines and legal consequences across various countries. Regulations such as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) have been implemented to protect consumers and businesses from the misuse of digital technology, encompassing spam and other electronic threats. CASL aims to ensure businesses maintain a competitive edge in the ever-growing global digital marketplace.

To avoid legal headaches, businesses need to stick to email marketing guidelines set by relevant legislation. By adopting ethical email practices and respecting recipient privacy, companies can cultivate a secure digital environment and uphold their credibility.

3. It’s unethical

Spamming doesn’t just break laws and invade people’s privacy – it also wastes valuable resources and time, without any consideration for the recipients. Remember, many email users pay for their internet service based on usage or time spent online. So when you send spam, you’re essentially imposing financial costs on others. This unethical practice reflects badly on the sender and can seriously damage the integrity of their brand and relationship with customers.

4. You’ll lose customer trust

Customer trust is important for strengthening relationships, driving customer loyalty, and promoting positive word-of-mouth. Engaging in spam email practices can significantly damage this trust, impacting customer retention and brand reputation. When customers receive unsolicited emails, they might perceive a business as uncaring, pushy, or even invasive, leading to unsubscribing or marking emails as spam. 

To preserve your brand’s customer trust, focus on obtaining permission before adding recipients to your mailing list. Clearly communicate what customers can expect from your emails and tailor campaigns to suit their particular interests and needs. By prioritizing customer trust and implementing ethical email marketing practices, you can foster strong brand connections, improve customer retention rates, and boost your business success.

5. Disappointing marketing results

Unsolicited spam emails can lead to poor marketing results. When your emails land in recipients’ spam folders, they’re less likely to be opened, read, or acted upon. This means you will have low conversion rates from your spam emails. Investing time and resources into a marketing strategy that employs spam is, ultimately, a waste of effort.

6. It’s malicious

Sometimes, spam emails can contain dangerous malware, such as viruses and other harmful programs designed to damage devices or steal personal information. Avoid sending spam emails to help protect recipients from these risks and safeguard your brand reputation.

7. It’s not targeted

Spammers often brush aside the preferences and needs of their recipients, resulting in emails that miss the mark with their intended target audience. This is a massive no-no for a successful email marketing campaign. Instead, marketers should personalize their emails by segmenting their mailing lists and sending targeted messages. With this approach, marketers can deliver tailored content that resonates with their recipients, ensuring higher open rates and conversions.

8. Lowers inboxing rates for genuine emails

Internet service providers (ISPs) follow specific codes of conduct prohibiting unsolicited emails, both for their communication and for their users. When spammers send unsolicited emails through these providers, they risk losing their internet accounts, which can impact their legitimate email communications. Also, excessive spamming can harm the deliverability of consented emails, leading to lower inboxing rates and hindering overall email marketing campaign effectiveness.

9. Has a low ROI

While campaigns carried out by an efficient email marketing agency can have a very high return rate, spamming has usually a return rate of 0,001%. So, spammers have to send 10,000 emails to get 1 person to respond.

In short, spam isn’t likely to bring benefits or reach set targets like grabbing public interest and maximizing public response. Marketers looking to enhance sales and secure higher ROIs should consider using an email marketing platform to effectively streamline and support their campaigns.

10. Damages your brand reputation

Not only does spamming hurt your relationships with potential customers, but it can also leave a lasting negative impression on your brand’s reputation and credibility. To maintain your business’s image, avoid spam at all costs, and build an ethical, results-driven email marketing program.

Say no to spam

Spam emails are a nuisance for everyone involved. They can be irritating for the recipients, harmful to businesses, and make the digital world a less pleasant place to be. So, let’s agree to avoid spam and concentrate on responsible email marketing instead.

What is the better alternative? Create genuine, targeted email campaigns that show your customers how much you value their business. When you prioritize trust and develop content that suits your audience, you’ll see impressive results, boost customer engagement, and enhance your brand’s reputation. Let’s leave spam behind and give our customers the inbox experience they deserve.

Businesses have lofty revenue goals to reach and leaning on their email marketing by sending a lot of mail is usually a part of the strategy. This causes recipients to receive more in their inboxes than they receive during other parts of the year, and can exacerbate list churn – and not all list churn is equal.

Your recipients may decide to unsubscribe from your emails over time. It may be because they subscribed to an email five years ago that might not be what they’re interested in now. They may have just signed up to get a welcome reward, they might have found a better offer elsewhere, or they may just be overwhelmed with too many emails. 

Use preference centers

We’re always saying that email marketing is all about recipient consent, and having power over the emails they receive is critical to this. You can leverage your preference center so that recipients can choose: 

• Which mainstreams do they receive – newsletters, sales, transactional only, etc.
• What types or themes of content they’re interested in?
• How frequently do they want to receive emails? (maybe they want a weekly digest or a pause over the holidays) 

Maybe a specific holiday is tough for them – this year or every year – and they’d rather not hear about it. You can use your preference center as a way to show empathy and respect for your contacts and allow them to opt-out.

If someone is no longer interested in your emails, it’s best to offer them a way to opt-out option. This allows recipients to easily remove themselves from your contact list with no negative impact at all. 

Unsubscribing from an email list is a free method of maintaining data hygiene and it helps with list attrition without damaging your reputation. In short, it’s a win-win situation for both parties.

Unsubscribes are great

During the holiday season, it’s normal to see an increase in unsubscribes if you have a healthy holiday email marketing strategy.

As we said before, you won’t be able to keep everyone on your marketing list engaged, especially during the festive period. 

If someone wants to leave they usually have two options: hitting the unsubscribe button or hitting the “this is junk” button – aka complaint. 

If a recipient marks your campaign as junk it will cause mailbox providers to associate risk with the emails you are sending. Complaints are considered a strong sign of emails being unwanted, and they are a heavily negatively weighted metric when it comes to mailbox providers determining your sender reputation. Receiving a lot of complaints is likely to hinder your email marketing success; mail in the junk folder doesn’t help you reach holiday revenue goals.

Simplify your unsubscribe process

It’s important to have an easy opt-out process. Complicated unsubscribe processes are more likely to be abandoned by recipients in favor of hitting the simple “this is spam” button. This is especially acute during the busy festive season when recipients are receiving more mail and have less time (and patience) for managing their inbox. 

Key steps for optimizing your unsubscribe process

You can have a best in class opt-out process by focusing on two steps your recipients will need to navigate: finding where they can remove themselves from your list in the email content, and what the process is after following that path. 

1. Email content

Make it easy to find

• That “this is spam” button is right near the top, so your unsubscribe link needs to be easily identifiable in your email. Don’t hide it in the footer and make it stand out.

Provide instructions 

• “Please contact our support”, “send an email to dpo@example.com” or send us a letter will get you the “junk treatment”. Using a landing page is the best approach.

Clearly show where to click

• If you have a combined unsubscribe and preference center, make sure you still specifically include the word “unsubscribe” in the copy linked in your emails.

Make the process fast

• Two clicks should be all it takes for a user to unsubscribe. The first click is on the unsubscribe link in the email, and the second click should be on a button on the custom page that unsubscribes them from all emails.

2. Unsubscribe landing page

Allow easy recipient opt-out

• On your unsubscribe landing page, the ability to opt-out from all should be clearly visible (ideally at the top of the page) if you’re implementing a combined unsubscribe page and preference center.

Simplify the process 

• Unsubscribe should not require a login. If you require users to log in to manage preferences, you should have a second link in your emails that allows unsubscribe without logging in. Don’t send a double opt-out mail or add unnecessary hurdles.

Reduce email address input errors 

• The email address being unsubscribed should be automatically populated. Asking users to type their email address can lead to typos or the wrong contact being unsubscribed.

Prioritize mobile friendliness 

• With lots of us checking our email on smart phones, always make sure your unsubscribe process is mobile friendly. The greatest landing page won’t do you any good when it’s not really useable with a mobile device

Promptly remove contacts who have unsubscribed 

• We know it’s the holidays and you have a lot of great offers but you should remove a person from your list immediately upon getting the request. You lose the recipient’s trust if you continue sending to them for another two weeks – and they have multiple options to hit that “this is spam” button during this time. 

Summary

Mailbox providers agree with us that unsubscribes are great and that recipients frequently hit “this is junk” when they can’t easily find the unsubscribe link. This is why mailbox providers and senders worked together to implement List-unsubscribe in the technical email headers. 

This allows some mailbox providers and participating mail clients to add an unsubscribe button in their user interface for senders they trust. For users of these inbox services, this button is right at the top and easily visible – but this has not been universally implemented, so marketers still need to pay attention to their unsubscribe process.

The unsubscribe journey could be the last interaction this person has with your brand for some time; it must be a positive experience. Make it quick and easy for recipients to opt-out. Don’t make them jump through hoops and honor the request immediately. 

If they are getting fatigued, or there’s some other temporary reason they are choosing to not receive more emails their reason for leaving could easily be turned into a permanent one. If a recipient is happy with the process, maybe next time they come across your brand in a different channel or need your goods or services they will think of you fondly and be back in touch.

Sending emails to outdated or improperly obtained contact lists can significantly damage your sender reputation, making it harder for your emails to reach the inbox, even for those who are loyal to your brand.

Sending emails in this way can result in severe inbox placement issues or even cause your emails to be blocked, particularly if they are sent to a spam trap. Reputation damage can be long-lasting and may negatively affect your ability to generate revenue from email marketing for weeks or even months.

In this post, we’ll guide you on how to avoid spam traps. We’ll explain what spam traps are, why they can harm your email deliverability, and provide tips to help you maintain a healthy and strong inbox placement during the holiday season.

What is a spam trap?

A spam trap is an email address that would not actively sign up to receive marketing communications. They are part of the toolbox used by anti-abuse networks, security appliances, and mailbox providers to identify emails that would be unwanted or even harmful to recipients – and then to prevent senders of those emails from reaching the inboxes of real people.

There are different types of traps:

• recycled traps – these are email addresses that were once valid but have been abandoned and repurposed as a spam trap
• typo traps – these are entire domains that look similar to popular mailbox provider domains (e.g. gmial.com instead of gmail.com) that are used as traps 
• pristine traps – these are email addresses created to be spam traps and never used by an actual person to send or receive email

Why is sending to a spam trap so bad?

A mailbox provider’s priority is to protect its users from unwanted and malicious emails. Regardless of your intentions, if you’re indicating that you’re a bad actor by sending to spam traps then your sender’s reputation will be negatively affected. 

This means your emails are more likely to land in the junk or spam folder, may take much longer to be delivered, or may be rejected outright and not even delivered to junk.

Negotiating the removal of a block listing and repairing the reputation damage caused is not fast or easy. It can take weeks or sometimes months to fully recover from a bad block listing due to hitting a spam trap. If your business is hit at the beginning of the holiday season, that could mean you’re only just back on your feet again in time for Valentine’s Day.

How to avoid spam traps during the holiday season

Most commonly we see clients hitting traps when they’ve succumbed to pressure to increase their sending volume and send emails to recipients they don’t usually send emails to. This a bad idea for a few reasons:

1. Mailbox providers a) like to see consistency from senders and b) are often on the verge of being overwhelmed given mail volumes at this time of year. 
2. Recipients are also overwhelmed with far too much email and are less likely to engage with and more likely to complain about receiving emails they don’t remember signing up for.
3. A lot of the ways marketers try to quickly increase volume at short notice significantly increase the risk of hitting spam traps.

3 risky strategies to avoid

To ensure your email deliverability stays strong during the holiday season, steer clear of these risky strategies:

1. Sending to lists that haven’t been sent to for over 12 months. Or ever.

Risk: Recycled traps tend to be found in old data, even if it was originally collected using permission marketing best practices. 

If you’ve found a segment missed by your automation or some other permissioned data you haven’t sent to for a while, and you know you’re going to want to send to them over the holidays, our advice is: start now. It’s much better to do this early to give you time to resolve any issues before critical sending days.

Send slowly over days or weeks, include a reminder of why contacts are receiving your emails (in case they’ve forgotten about you) as well as a clear unsubscribe link, suppress any soft bounces and remove anyone who continues to not engage. If you’re a Dotdigital customer and you want help with re-activating lapsed contacts, contact your Customer Success Manager to start a conversation about our re-engagement package.

2. Trying to“reactivate” contacts from the suppression list

Risk: Abandoned email addresses will usually hard bounce for at least 6 months before being repurposed as a recycled trap. A good email service provider (ESP) will automatically suppress contacts that hard bounce, so these traps are likely to lie within your suppression list.

3. Purchasing or renting some more data to send to

Risk: Not only is this against most ESPs T&Cs which means you risk having all your sending suspended when they spot the purchased data, but lists for sale or rent tend to contain a lot of scraped data. Spam traps, especially pristine type traps, are very commonly found in this kind of data – and they tend to be the ones that cause the most serious kinds of block listings that have the widest impact across mailbox providers and take the longest to resolve.

If you are importing data into your Dotdigital account during the holiday period (or any other time of the year) then our Watchdog will be taking a look and flagging anything suspicious. An import that’s got a high-risk score is more likely to contain spam traps. So we’ll block the upload while you take a look at the data sources and remove anything risky that’s made its way into your list.

What if you do hit a trap?

The key here isn’t identifying the specific spam trap you hit and removing it from your list. Spam traps are intentionally a closely guarded secret, and for every trap you find, there could be ten, fifty, or a hundred more in your list. That’s because spam traps indicate underlying problems with your data collection or management.

The first step is to use whatever information is available to try to identify the source of the problematic data. Different trap operators will offer up some information that’s redacted to a greater or lesser extent; some offer a rough estimate of the date and time when the trap was hit, and others will provide the subject line of the email sent that hit the trap.

The next step is to temporarily stop sending to all data that’s come from the high-risk source while you go through step three: segmenting out contacts who you know are engaged. Purchase history, opens, clicks, etc. can all be used holistically to identify recipients who are most likely to be real people who want to hear from you.

Finally, it’s time to plug the hole in your data collection. Depending on the type of trap, it can indicate different areas of vulnerability:

Pristine traps

Make sure your forms are secured with CAPTCHA, double or confirmed opt-in, and remove any third party data from your lists

Typo traps

Ask your web developers to add some basic validation to points of collection to check that the email addresses are valid. It’s pretty easy to add some logic that suggests someone might mean “hotmail.com” instead of “hotmial.cmo” in the email field. Plus double or confirmed opt-in at the point of data collection can help weed these out as well.

Recycled traps

Make sure you have a strategy for sunsetting contacts who never engage with your brand or who haven’t engaged for a very long time. Use knowledge of your sales cycle and typical customer journeys to plot the point at which the risk of keeping an address on your list outweighs the potential that they might convert into a customer. And engage a responsible ESP that suppresses email addresses that bounce.

Summary

It’s so easy to sabotage yourself in November by making some choices that temporarily boost revenue for Singles Day or Black Friday, but then tank your reputation so you’re in the spam folder throughout December and even into January. It’s far less risky in the short term – and more profitable in the long term – to be smart and stick to your sustainable sending and organic growth strategies to avoid jeopardizing inbox placement. 

If you need any help this holiday season with how to avoid spam traps or anything else related to inbox placement, our expert Deliverability team is always around to assist you in making the best choices for your business.

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.

• “My third party consultant says our emails land in spam because they contain words like ‘sale’, ‘offer’ and ‘discount’.”
• “Will including words related to Web3 such as NFT, blockchain, and crypto affect my inbox placement?”
• “Our company name includes the word ‘finance’ – do we need to not reference our brand to get to the inbox?”

Back in 2021, I collaborated with my Australian colleague Toshi on a blog post about spammy words in subject lines – TL;DR: no, including a spammy word or emojis in the subject line is not going to be the key reason your email is landing in the spam folder. This doesn’t just apply to your subject line but to all the copy in your emails.

This wasn’t news in 2021 – it’s been a long time since the weighting attributed to Bayesian filters looking for specific words in content was drastically reduced by most major receivers and filtering software. 

Instead, mailbox providers look at how their users engage with your emails to decide whether or not they belong in the spam folder. A lot of positive engagement such as opens, read time, and link clicks indicates a wanted mail stream that belongs in the inbox, and a lot of negative engagement like deleting without opening or actively marking as junk indicates an unwanted email that belongs in the spam folder.

So, why does the outdated concept of spammy words refuse to die? I have some theories – and some more useful advice that’ll actually help you reach the inbox this holiday season.

Tackling email deliverability beyond spammy words

Everyone wants that silver-bullet quick change they can make to get their emails out of the spam folder and into the inbox – including me.

Marketers are busy people at the best of times, and the pressure is even greater around revenue critical sending periods like Singles Day, Black Friday, and Christmas. Changing words in subject lines or copy is faster and easier to do than the hard work of reviewing your sending strategy and implementing best practices. 

It’s also easier to report to your manager or CMO that the problem with a poorly performing database or campaign was a few specific words, as opposed to telling them you need to review your whole strategy for a mail stream (especially when you’ve got your holiday content calendar all lined up).

Unfortunately, simply asking WinstonAI for subject line alternatives to “huge savings this Black Friday” is not a golden ticket to the inbox. If your emails are landing in the spam folder, it’s going to be because you’re not hitting the key rule of deliverability: right person, right message, right time, and right frequency. Your recipients are interacting with emails in negative ways that indicate they’re unwanted, and you’re going to need to change your strategy to achieve your revenue goals this season.

Being told by an expert that you need to change up how you collect and manage your contacts, personalize and target your content, decide on the frequency at which you send, maintain consistency and meet expectations, or manage changes to your program is hard to hear and tougher to implement. That’s why you need to be looking at your strategy now, and not the week before Cyber Monday.

Email filtering and its role in modern deliverability

As discussed in the 2021 blog post, we do occasionally find some rare examples where there is more weighting placed on spammy words. Usually, the exceptions are older, regional ISPs that provide mailboxes or old versions of filtering software used by independently run corporate mail servers. However, the volume of emails sent to these receivers and filters tends to be extremely small, and this isn’t something used by major B2C mailbox providers like Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, and Yahoo, or modern corporate B2B mail exchange providers or filtering services such as O365, G-suite, Proofpoint, or Mimecast.

Bayesian filtering is still in use by receivers and filters but in a much more intelligent way. Blocks of content (including branding, images, copy, and footers) and technical headers for emails are sampled to create a “fingerprint”. A score is then created for the fingerprint based on recipient engagement to create a level of confidence as to whether emails that match the fingerprint are likely to be wanted or spam. The key thing is that engagement is used; a fingerprint isn’t spammy because of specific words. It’s spammy if actual recipients have previously marked emails that match the fingerprint as spam.

I rarely come across instances where fingerprinting is the cause of spam foldering. Usually, I’m able to work with senders to identify where they’re not following best practices, and once they change their strategy they’re back on track. 

Choosing the right deliverability expert

“My third party consultant says our emails land in spam because they contain words like ‘sale’, ‘offer’ and ‘discount’.”

This example came from a new Dotdigital customer who had previously commissioned a deliverability review from a third party “deliverability consultant”.

There are many deliverability consultancy companies out there, and most are reputable and have teams made up of people who are highly experienced and well-known subject matter experts and thought leaders in the industry. Most – but not all.

When you seek deliverability consultancy outside your email provider, keep in mind that less reputable companies may have different goals. They may want to provide what look like quick and easy wins with the minimum of time spent on their side to really analyze your sending strategy. 

They may partner with one or more ESPs and get a kickback from referring you by suggesting changing ESP will fix your deliverability issues (spoiler alert: your sending practices and inbox placement will follow you). Some consultants are simply inexperienced with deliverability or have knowledge that was relevant a decade or more ago but doesn’t align with modern mailbox providers, filtering software, or deliverability practices.

Always start out by talking to your email marketing platform’s deliverability experts – any ESP worth their salt should have dedicated and experienced consultants to talk to. They’re invested in your success on their platform and they can often provide added value when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the user interface and making strategy changes. 

They should also be up to date on the very latest and greatest trends and changes in deliverability because they’re so close to the actual sending daily. If they’re like the Dotdigital Deliverability & Messaging Operations team then they’re active in the deliverability community and are members of amazing groups like M3AAWG, where they work alongside postmasters on initiatives that better the ecosystem.

If you’re looking for an external deliverability consultant, be sure to ask for some examples of what they analyze and advice they commonly give clients, and if you see anything about looking for spammy words in content then run for the hills.

What can I do if my emails are landing in spam folders?

Our in-house team of deliverability experts here at Dotdigital wants you to be as successful as possible on our platform to keep you as a customer. We’re always going to take the time to really understand your sending, and we’ll be honest and give you the tough advice you need to hear and implement to actually achieve your inbox placement goals.

Whether you just want a quick deliverability health check before the busy season, are looking for data and insights on your inbox placement through Christmas and beyond, or want support from a dedicated Consultant for a challenge/project or on an ongoing basis, we have a deliverability package that will suit your budget and needs. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@dotdigital.com for more information on our deliverability products.

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. 

We’re here to provide resources for your cross channel strategies that will help you meet the rising expectations that your customers have. Here are some frequently asked questions and resources to help you kick off the holiday season.

Should I be sending to everyone on my list for [insert holiday season name here] to maximize my results?

Be strategic! Show recipients that you respect them and that they’re more than just a number in your marketing database. During the holidays, recipients can become overwhelmed by the high volume of messages they receive. So, resist the urge to send to all.

• Build an email sending strategy focused on consent and active recipients who are engaging with the emails being sent to them.
• Complement any email sending strategy with strategies focused on other channels, like SMS for example. Meet your customers where they are at, don’t make them work to meet where you are at. 
• Segment contacts who aren’t engaging with your emails regularly and target them on other digital marketing channels.
• Respect those who are actively saying they don’t want to hear from you – unsubscribes are really important

Where’s my email?

During busy periods mailbox providers are handling a lot; year over year, Dotdigital alone consistently sends over double our usual daily volumes on Black Friday.

The huge jump in the number of inbound emails can mean that the journey of mail through filtering and infrastructure to the inbox is slower than usual. Mailbox providers like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are likely to prioritize 1-to-1 emails if they’re busy, so you might receive Great Aunt Erma’s festive update email (she should really add an unsubscribe link) before marketing mail appears.

Additionally sending reputation matters. Particularly for larger sends, if you have a poor reputation or the MBP deems your email in some way suspicious (e.g. because you’ve sent to spamtraps), they may release some emails to the inbox and then wait and see what recipients do with those emails. Depending on how their users interact with this first batch, the MBP will decide whether to deliver the rest of your emails – and to where (inbox or junk). This is why email deliverability is important all year round, especially when prepping for the holidays when sales emails need to reach the inbox promptly.

If you’re struggling with deliverability to internal stakeholders, this can actually be a great opportunity to start a conversation. Take a look at our advice on how to handle your emails landing in the CEO’s junk folder.

Why is there an ongoing conversation about the value of opens and how do we use that metric to define success?

Email has evolved significantly in the last couple of years, and your open and click through rates may look significantly different this holiday season than in previous years. Using metrics like those need to be done holistically and measured against the goals of the messaging program. Compare opens to revenue or some other KPI to assess success. Gone are the days of being able to use opens and clicks on their own. We’ve written about navigating deliverability analytics over the busy period, and you can also take a look at the following blogs about the industry changes that are causing this question:

• Apple iOS 15
• Non-human interaction
• The value of an open and other ways to measure success

Help, I need to know more about deliverability

Learn about the 6 C’s of deliverability or check out our Deliverability 101 guide below to find out more about what it is and why email deliverability is important.

What’s playing out across the Atlantic in the USA is more of a slow wave than a sudden tsunami, but US businesses are still at risk of being swept away if they leave it last minute to scramble the flood defenses. 

One of the benefits of Dotdigital is we’ve been here before – we’re set up for these legislative changes as a trusted platform that knows how to navigate the waters this type of challenge brings. As you’re reading about what’s to come, remember we’ll keep you updated – we’ve got your back. We’re not your lawyers though – so remember to check with them for any legal advice. 

State legislation: the story so far

California blazed a trail in the USA when the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) went into effect on January 1 2020, granting Californian residents 6 rights that will feel pretty familiar to those of us fluent in GDPR: the right to know what data a company holds on them, the right to request deletion of that data, the right to opt out of sale of that data, making the sale of personal data for consumers under 16 years of age illegal without prior authorization, the right to not be discriminated against for exercising any rights and the right to privately initiate action if their personal data is breached. 

Jan 1 2023 was a busy day. The CPRA (California Privacy Rights Act) amendments to the CCPA came into force, granting a further two rights: the right to amend inaccurate data and the right to say what companies can do with and how much they’re allowed to share sensitive data about Californians. The Virginian VCDPA (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act) also went into effect for Virginian businesses that meet qualifying criteria.

Just this July, Colorado and my own adopted home state of Connecticut joined the GDPaRty with the CPA (Colorado Privacy Act) and CTDPA (Connecticut Data Privacy Act) respectively coming into effect at the beginning of the month. Colorado has gone further than other states so far by adding the right of portability: to be able to download and move your personal data to another platform.

US EU Adequacy Decision

On July 10 2023, the US EU Adequacy Decision was passed. This means that personal data can flow between the EU and US businesses that comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations – the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. 

This provides safeguarding for personal data about EU citizens from US government intelligence (outside of what is necessary and proportionate for national security). It also preserves rights established by GDPR, such as the right to be able to identify the data controller and how and why data is being collected and processed, and the right to access, correct, and have personal data deleted. Finally, it establishes access to free resolution mechanisms and arbitration if data is handled wrongly.

Where this is going

Utah’s UCPA (Utah Consumer Privacy Act) bill has been signed and is likely to become effective for qualifying businesses at the end of 2023. There are at least 5 more states which are due to have privacy laws come into effect by 2026. And while lobbyists, lawyers, and the FTC are skeptical about federal legislation passing, the writing is on the wall: state by state, more privacy laws are coming.

Targeted advertising is being, well, targeted by existing and upcoming legislation as consumers become increasingly aware of how they’re being tracked and the value of their personal data. Law makers are looking to crack down on the sale and sharing of personal data, including the transfer of data to third parties for monetary or other valuable consideration. The concept of a Universal Opt Out Mechanism (UOOM) – whereby if someone opts out on one device or browser, they’re opted out on all devices and browsers – is well within the realm of possibility.

There’s also increased talk of addressing “dark patterns” within privacy legislation or in separate legislation. A dark pattern is any technique that tries to manipulate people into doing something they would not otherwise have done. Examples include:

• trick or trap subscription programs, also known as negative option subscriptions; are free or cheap when you enroll, but if you don’t cancel then a fee is charged or the price goes up
• disguising advertising as editorial content
• junk or hidden fees
• manipulating people into sharing unnecessary data e.g. misleading people into selecting the highest data-sharing option
• uneven weighting on options; having “accept” or “reject” is evenly weighted, offering “accept” or “manage preferences” would be uneven
• creating a false sense of urgency; fake countdown timers that never hit 00:00, and those products where 99 other people always seem to have this item in their cart

What this means for US businesses 

While the specifics of legislation vary, the themes are the same – and it’s reasonable to expect future legislation to be similar. 

US businesses are going to need to be able to provide data subjects (people they hold personal data about) with ways to:

• find out what data has been collected
• find out why their data is being collected and processed
• obtain a copy of their data
• amend the data held
• restrict or opt out of the selling or sharing of some or all of their personal data with third parties
• restrict or opt out of the use of some or all of their personal data for profiling or targeted advertising
• request processing of their data be stopped
• port their data to another platform
• request the data held to be deleted

Consumers will be able to initiate action against businesses if their personal data is breached or in the case where they’re unable to exercise the above.

US businesses that have a robust opt-in process and where records are kept of explicit consent for data collection and processing are going to be in a much better starting place. In addition to keeping opt-in data, brands that understand what data they collect and process and why, who document their data flows, and who use integrated platforms are going to be better able to fulfill the rights of their contacts and data subjects, as well as more easily implement a UOOM for targeted advertising.

Dark patterns also need to be on your radar; just because something is a common technique in your industry or vertical doesn’t mean that it’s not a dark pattern, and you could be penalized.

How to prepare for the new changes

I love hanging out with our fabulous legal and privacy teams here at Dotdigital, but I understand that talking to your lawyers or DPO might not be your idea of fun. Unfortunately, it’s going to be needed so you can stay on top of the rapidly changing privacy landscape.

If you want to avoid the legal conversations being long ones, then you can always decide to implement best practices when it comes to personal data. Best practices almost always trump the legal minimum. So rather than arduous legalese on what you might be able to get away with, make it a quick conversation where you ask for a review of your best practice plans or implementation to make sure all the boxes are ticked.

 Here’s some homework to do before you go talk legals:

• get familiar with GDPR; the US legislation looks similar, and having an understanding of some of the terminology and framework will help you understand the new laws. We have some great resources in our GDPR advice center to help you get started.
• understand what personal data you are collecting/processing – and why. Ask whether the collection and processing are necessary, ensure you have consent, and map out your data flows to include where storage and processing happen.
• talk to your developers and your vendors’ solutions architects to identify opportunities for integration to improve the flow and oversight of your data. 
• identify any marketing or advertising strategies that include manipulative techniques that could be identified as a dark pattern, and start investigating best practice alternatives.

Dotdigital can help

We’ve seen the writing on the wall and, having held our UK and European customers’ hands a few years back, we’re in a great place to help our US customers adapt to the changing landscape. We’re ISO 27001 certified in Information Security Management Systems, meaning that you can trust us to do our part when it comes to managing your data safely and securely. Our trust center has more details, as well as contact information for our Security Team who are happy to answer questions. 

Dotdigital customers can also leverage our CXDP superpowers, using our many integrations to connect all your customer data. Our solutions consultants are always happy to discuss your needs and how the Dotdigital platform can help you manage your data effectively. Reach out to your CSM or Dotdigital Support so they can put you in touch.

And, as always, our Deliverability Team is here to help advise you on best practices to stay ahead of the legal curve. Just drop an email to support@dotdigital.com and we’ll get back to you.