Best Practices 101

Email Best Practices 101

15 Proven Tactics for Boosting Deliverability and Engagement

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Email Best Practices 101

Boosting your inbox rates begins with an understanding of how your tactics in several key areas can affect deliverability. Read on to learn how to improve the ROI of your email operations by applying best practices for:

The Dollars and Cents of Deliverability ...3

What’s at Stake ...4 Reputation ...5 Segregation ...6 Bounce Management ...6 Permission ...7 Frequency ...10 Relevance...11 Branding ...12 CAN-SPAM ...13 Suppression Lists ...14 Policy Requirements ...14 Technical Requirements ...15

IP/Domain Acquisition • Valid Reverse DNS • Role Accounts Authentication • How DMARC Works • Whitelisting Sender Score Certified • Spamhaus • Feedback Loops Email Delivery Platforms ...23

Adaptive Email Network...24

The Dollars and Cents of Deliverability

email alone accounted for as much in revenues as all other types of digital advertising combined–including social media, website, and display ad efforts. And other surveys repeatedly have found that email has a higher ROI than any other channel or format studied.*

Done correctly, high-volume email operations can deliver tremendous return on investment. But email only works if it actually reaches your customers. Most businesses achieve a deliverability rate somewhere around 87%. In other words, about 13% of their messages fail to reach their recipient. That’s simply not acceptable.

Whether your focus is email marketing, onboarding and user engagement, or customer service, every undelivered message is a missed opportunity — and a hit to your bottom line. Don’t let mediocre deliverability rates erode the value of your email operations. The best practices discussed in this e-book will help you ensure the best possible inbox rates — and the ROI your business deserves.

* See “How Much Revenue Does Email Drive?,” eMarketer, http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Much-Revenue-Email-Drive/1013001

$7.30

$19.72

$10.51

$22.24

$40.56

ROI on email marketing

is nearly double that of

other programs.

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What’s at Stake

You can’t afford to be complacent about middling deliverability rates. Even rates that might seem “good enough” still translate into lost revenue. Consider two examples based on typical industry

metrics. Can you really afford to lose $100,000 for every million messages you send?

BUSINESS A: 95% Deliverability Rate

Subscribers:

1,000,000

Delivered Messages:

950,000

Missed Messages:

50,000

Average Sales:

5%

Lost Sales:

2,500

Avg. Value Per Sale:

$20

Lost Revenue:

$50,000

BUSINESS B: 90% Deliverability Rate

Subscribers: 1,000,000

Delivered Messages: 900,000

Missed Messages: 100,000

Average Sales: 5%

Lost Sales: 5,000

Avg. Value Per Sale:

$20

Lost Revenue:

$100,000

Sender reputation is one of the most important

concepts in deliverability. Every IP address and domain has a reputation based on factors such as past rates of bounces and spam reports. Domains and IP addresses with a good reputation have a better delivery rate — so building and maintaining a good reputation should be central to the mission of your email operations.

Reputation

A Few Tips to Begin With:

Avoid sending risky content, especially on new IP addresses with unproven reputations.

Don’t use language that could seem suggestive

(“sexy,”“hot”) — even if your meaning is entirely innocent. Don’t send too much, too soon, from a new IP address.

Start slowly and increase gradually.

Maintain good list hygiene. Respect user permissions, pay attention to feedback loops (FBLs), and remove inactive users.

Authenticate. Use DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.

Segment and mail your active subscribers to build a positive track record.

Monitor the inbox rates of your IPs to identify emerging problems.

Watch out for deferral messages from your ISP, which can indicate impending blacklisting of your emails. Most fundamentally, make sure each email you send will be welcomed by its recipient — instead of being reported as spam.

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Each message that bounces or gets reported as spam counts against the reputation of the originating IP. This reduces deliv-erability for future messages from that IP — or leads to them being blocked entirely.

Using the same IP for every type of email — user, marketing, transactional, alerts — means that a rogue email in any of these areas can jeopardize the deliverability of every message your company sends from that IP.

By segregating your IPs according to function, you help ensure that your mail receives the best delivery possible.

A high bounce rate can have a negative impact on your overall delivery rate. If your IP address is associated with too many “unknown user” bounces at a particular ISP, you risk being blacklisted or blocked by that ISP.

Each bounce has a unique meaning and needs to be treated differently based on its associated SMTP code. The art of classifying and treating bounces is called

bounce management.

Permission is the consent consumers grant to receive emails from you. It’s important because email is so much more personal than TV, radio, direct mail and other marketing channels, and calls for a higher standard of privacy. It’s also an area of intense attention by government regulators in the U.S. and around the world. Most importantly, permission affects deliverability. An AOL User Behavior study showed that email newsletters using “double opt-in” had a much lower average unsubscribe rate (7.6%) than “single opt-in” messages (22.2%). There are two main forms of permission:

Permission

Single Opt-In:

The user enters an email address in a web form and checks a box agreeing

to receive marketing emails, alerts, and other messages from the business.

Double Opt-In (a.k.a. closed-loop opt-in)

The recipient needs to actively respond to a confirmation email sent after

the form is filled out, either through a click in the email or by responding

to the message itself.

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While permission is a key issue for email marketing, it may be less relevant for other types of commercial email — for example:

Current balance alerts sent to a bank’s account-holders.

Activity notifications sent by social networks or online services.

Flight updates sent by an airline to ticket-holders. New listings sent to members of a job search site.

In cases like these, a user’s messaging preferences are often set by default to receive email. Instead of triggering the spam reports and damaged IP reputations that unwanted marketing emails can bring, though, the context and relevance of these emails are more likely to provide welcome value for the recipient. Let your customers be your guide. Your engagement metrics (both positive and negative) will tell you whether they truly find your content relevant to their needs and whether your practices are aligned with their preferences. Handled carefully, prefer-ence-aware messaging can be a win-win for your business, your customers and your deliverability rates alike.

Beyond Permission: Really Listen to Your Customers

Monitor Metrics

Such as opens, click throughs, and changes in communication preference settings to make sure you’re giving customers what they really want.

Increase Messaging Intelligence

Implement customer-adaptive messaging capabilities to fine-tune your emails by variables such as timing and frequency according to your customers’ preferences and other factors.

Make Emails Worth Receiving

Work to optimize your messages by every means possible, including more relevant content, subject lines and targeting.

Keep Data Clean

Send a confirmation or welcome email to make sure that addresses are deliverable and you’ve correctly captured customer preferences before repeatedly mailing them. Purge unknown users and non-responsive addresses.

Get Permission Anyway

Even if you know your customers will welcome your messages, you should make sure to capture their complete preference profile (including what they prefer you not do, such as data sharing) and act on them in every action you take.

Guidelines for Preference-Aware Messaging

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Frequency

It’s important to ask your customers, through the sign up

process or a preferences center, how often they want to receive emails from you. While respecting their wishes, you should also be aware of the right frequency strategies for different types of emails.

Marketing emails are typically looking for an action — a click, a purchase, a registration for a new service. Higher frequency can increase these conversions, but after a point customers may feel harassed or start tuning them out. Start slowly and monitor unsubscribe rates closely as you increase frequency. The last thing you want to do is damage your list through overuse.

Engagement emails such as newsletters should be sent at regular intervals so customers know when to expect them. Again, sending them too often can cause burnout — quality is more important than quantity.

For account alerts, activity notifications, and other customer service messages, let customers set their own preference for real-time, daily, weekly, or other messaging schedules. You should also pay attention to the aggregate frequency of all the emails of any type each customer receives to ensure that your brand isn’t showing up in their inbox more often than they might want it to.

The more relevant your emails are, the more likely they’ll be welcomed by consumers. Of course, relevance is in the eye of the recipient — but a few guidelines can help you hit the sweet spot.

Target the Right Audience. Use past purchases, traffic logs, on-site search, and other data to learn what your customers are most inter-ested in, and tailor their content and offers accordingly.

Don’t Be Too Broad. While some messages may be relevant for your entire list, most won’t be. Avoid the temptation to blanket the world with a single email in the name of efficiency; sending multiple waves of more targeted messages will be much more effective — and better for your list and your reputation.

Send Valuable Promotions. Who doesn’t love a good offer? Don’t just tell customers about your latest products; make it worth their while with a significant discount or package deal.

Use a Good Subject Line. Remember that many customers won’t see more than the first few words — especially on mobile. Put the most relevant and targeted terms up-front, and make the value to the customer immediately clear.

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Branding is one of the most important elements of email marketing, helping you shape the way customers view your products and your company.

To ensure brand integrity, it’s essential that every aspect of your messaging — visual identity, voice, value proposition — is consistent and compelling.

A common pitfall is to use different systems or third-party providers for automated transactional emails, marketing emails, and other types of messages. This can lead the look and feel of the messages customers receive to vary widely, creating a confusing brand experience.

By managing all messages through a single system, you can build a stronger connection with your customers and make each email they receive feel part of a coherent and valuable relationship.

As part of your branding strategy, it’s a good idea to use your brand name in the “from” field that shows up in the recipient’s inbox. Some marketers use an individual’s name in the belief that it will seem more personal, but this can also make it seem like spam. Instead, use a name customers will expect to see, then stick with it consistently across all emails to build recognition and trust.

Also known as the Controlling the Assault of

Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, CAN-SPAM is an attempt by the U.S. Congress to protect consumers from unwanted marketing emails. While enforce-ment of the law is difficult and its effectiveness has been debated, its provisions offer useful guidance for treating consumers appropriately and maintaining a healthy online reputation.

CAN-SPAM

Key provisions of CAN-SPAM include:

Don’t use false or misleading header information. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. Identify the

message as an ad.

Tell recipients where you’re located.

Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.

Honor opt-out requests promptly.

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Suppression Lists

The CAN-SPAM Act requires commercial email senders to maintain a list of consumers who do not wish to receive their emails. These businesses must provide a functioning opt-out mechanism by which email recipients can unsubscribe their email address from future email messages. The unsubscribed email addresses are placed into a suppression list that is used to “suppress” future messages to that address. This list also includes bad domains, traps and role accounts.

ISPs accept email from senders at different rates. Before you start sending email from a new IP, make sure you comply with as many published ISP acceptance policies and recommendations as possible.

Technical Requirements

In addition to the best practices above, there are several technical capabilities that can play a crucial role in deliverability. These include:

Sender Score

Certified

Whitelisting

Authentication

(DKIM, SPF, SenderID)

Valid Reverse DNS for

All Sending IPs

IP/Domain

Acquisition

Role Accounts

Feedback Loops

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Most businesses that send commercial email

will want to set up multiple web domains

and IP addresses for different purposes —

sometimes over 100 for the largest senders.

IP Addresses:

arin.net

The American Registry for Internet Numbers

Domain Name Registration Provider:

networksolutions.com Godaddy.com

It takes about 24 – 72 hours to propagate a new domain name.

As you acquire new IP addresses, you should be aware of the concept of IP warm-up. To combat spammers, ISPs and email providers temporarily block or limit the amount of email a new IP address can send, allowing higher volume only gradually as the sender’s reputation is proven. If you try to send millions of messages on your first day with a new IP address, you’ll quickly be blacklisted.

Becoming a high volume sender (millions per day to the big ISPs) is possible, but it takes time. One recommendation is to avoid sending more than 10,000 messages per day to the major ISPs (Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.), or more than 1,000 messages per day to smaller ISPs, and don’t increase volume by more than 2x per day. Watch your failure metrics carefully, and revert to a lower volume if you start seeing an increase in temporary and permanent failures.

IP/ Domain Acquisition

Computer networks use the Domain Name System (DNS) to determine the IP address associated with a domain name — for example, resolving host1.domain.com to 192.1.2.4. Reverse DNS Lookup works similarly, but

in the opposite direction, resolving an IP address to its designated domain name — so the IP address 192.1.2.4 turns back into host1.domain.com.

To ensure the integrity and operability of DNS data and servers, every Internet host is required to have a reverse DNS entry. In practical terms, mail servers with no reverse DNS will have a hard time getting mail to certain large ISPs.

Valid Reverse DNS

Role Accounts

A role account is an email address which serves

a particular function, not an individual person,

for example abuse@, sales@, or info@.

Every ISP, email service provider (ESP), and web host — including self-hosted senders of commercial email — is required to have two particular role accounts in order to promptly identify spam and abuse related problems on their network: postmaster@domain and abuse@domain.

Networks that do not tolerate spammers monitor their abuse@ email closely and take prompt action to stop any problems that arise.

[ Technical Requirements ]

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Email authentication validates the identities of the parties who participate in transferring a message — the sender and/or recipient — and can be an important factor in deliverability. Early authentication schemes, such as DomainKeys, have been superseded in recent years, and today the industry has coalesced around DMARC as the standard protocol.

DMARC

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, is designed to guard against phishing, spam and other email abuses. When a message is delivered to a recipient, the destination server asks the sender for a public key to verify that the signature is correct and that the sender is who they claim to be. What’s important for commercial email senders to know is that if their email is not DMARC-compliant, their deliverability can suffer significantly. Adopting DMARC is quickly becoming an essential requirement for high-volume email operations.

Authentication

The DMARC standard allows senders to employ either of two (or both) previously established authentication standards: SPF (Sender Policy Framework, a.k.a. SenderID) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). The critical mechanism with

DMARC is that it creates a dialog between senders and receivers, with senders providing guidance to receivers as to what to do if neither of the authentication methods passes. For instance, if a message fails DKIM, please junk or reject the message immedi-ately. Additionally, DMARC provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation.

SPF / SenderID

With SPF, records are used to authorize the IP address of the outbound mail transfer agent (MTA) to help ISPs detect forged email. Creating your SPF record involves determining the domains and IP addresses used to send your emails, then publishing the SPF to DNS.

DKIM / DomainKeys Identified Mail

DKIM authentication allows the recipient of a message to

confirm that a message originated with the sender’s domain and that the message content has not been forged. In effect, DKIM allows organizations to claim responsibility for messages they send and guarantee their contents.

How DMARC Works

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Senders and consumers alike want permission-based email to reach the inbox. To help separate responsible senders from spammers, many ISPs maintain a whitelist of approved domains or IP addresses. A whitelist will protect good senders from some (but not all) spam filters based on previous reputation and mailing history.

Being whitelisted by ISPs is a key step for increasing your email delivery rates. Whitelisting lets you send more email per hour, keeps you out of the spam folders, and gets more email deliv-ered. It also increases your email reputation score.

Major ISPs such as AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Verizon provide whitelisting as a free service. To be whitelisted, you provide the ISP with information about your mailing practices — which also has the effect of making it easier for them to identify email coming from you so they can monitor how recipients treat your email. This higher level of scrutiny is the price you pay for higher deliverability and a better reputation, but as long as you’re diligent in following email best practices, you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Whitelisting

Sender Score Certified is a certification program for

enhanced inbox placement run by a company called Return Path. Like a credit rating score, a Sender Score indicates the trustworthiness of an email source, and is a key reflection of your reputation.

A Sender Score is compiled based on data from ISPs, spam filters, and security companies. It can help you determine if you need to improve your reputation to improve deliver-ability, and can provide specific guidance in the changes you would need to make.

Return Path lets email senders check their Sender Score free based on their IP address, and provides its customers with more detailed reputation reports.

The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit orga-nization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations and sources, to provide dependable real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks and to identify and pursue spam gangs worldwide.

Spamhaus maintains a number of real-time spam-blocking databases (‘DNSBLs’) responsible for keeping back the vast majority of spam sent out on the Internet. These include the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), the Exploits

Block List (XBL), the Policy Block List (PBL) and the Domain Block List (DBL). These tools are highly valuable for senders in maintaining good relations with ISPs, which are on the “receiving” side of the email world.

Sender Score Certified

Spamhaus

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When an email recipient clicks “This is spam” for a piece of email, this is considered a “complaint.” If your complaint rates are too high, an ISP may not deliver your email.

By setting up a feedback loop (FBL) with the ISPs that provide this service, you will receive a copy of each complaint generated when this happens, and the recipient will usually be unsub-scribed from your list automatically.

As with a whitelist, an FBL means that you’re taking responsibility for your email practices. Monitoring FBLs benefits both mailers and ISPs, in that they help to manage mailing lists as well as providing early warnings of network security issues.

Major ISPs providing FBL include:

Gmail Hotmail AOL Yahoo! Comcast Cox Road Runner

Feedback Loops

[ Technical Requirements ]

The final major factor in optimizing email deliverability and maintaining best practices is the type of sending platform or infrastructure you use to send email campaigns and transactional messages. Senders have more choices today than ever, from open source MTA products, to advanced commercial platforms, to cloud offerings.

SparkPost leads all competing options by delivering the indus-try’s best inbox placement — 97.8%. SparkPost’s deliverability is 8% better than the runner-up, and 15% higher than the average inbox placement in the industry. Senders leveraging SparkPost see more of their email reaching their intended recipients — this kind of successes manifests as improved deliverability and a higher return on investment.

Email Delivery Platforms

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% SendGrid Dyn Mandrill Amazon SES Mailgun Google App Engine

Cloud Provider Deliverabilityvi

68.6% 69.8% 83.6% 86.9% 87.2% 89.5%

97.8

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Adaptive

Delivery

TM

Maintaining world-class deliverability at scale requires a level of competence in understanding the characteristics of email in transit, the signals ISPs read to identify spam, and architecting systems compliant with industry established best practices. SparkPost built the Adaptive Email Network (AEN) to help auto-mate delivery to more than 12,000 global ISPs and mailbox providers. The AEN intelligently categorizes bounces, throttles email traffic in real time in response to sending conditions as they arise, and maintains over 2000 rules that optimize the delivery and sending of email.

The potential value and ROI of email messaging is too important to leave to chance. Applying the best practices discussed in this e-book will help you achieve the highest

possible inbox rates and help every message you send translate into a real bottom-line impact.

Contact Us Today

Visit us online at sparkpost.com and follow us on Twitter @SparkPost.

Improve your Email Deliverability

for Maximum Business Results