Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 10, The transcript discusses the frustration of emails going to spam and provides
strategies to improve email deliverability. It covers factors that contribute
to emails being flagged as spam, such as spam filters, sender reputation, and
email content. The negative consequences of having emails marked as spam are
also mentioned. Best practices for improving deliverability include using
reputable service providers, removing spammy language from emails, consistent
sending, managing bounce rates and complaints, and implementing authentication
techniques. The use of shared IP addresses versus dedicated IP addresses is
explained, along with the potential problems associated with sharing IPs.
Additionally, the transcript shares a case study on how splitting email sends
into smaller batches improved deliverability for a client. The speaker
discusses a significant increase in email deliverability from 92% to 99.5%,
emphasizing the importance of promptly addressing and fixing problems. They
mention key factors that can affect deliverability, including spam filters and
sender reputation. The speaker suggests separating engaged and unengaged
recipients and testing different approaches to improve deliverability. They
conclude by offering assistance, encouraging subscription, and providing
contact information.
Summary notes from Episode 10:
Emails going to spam is a common frustration for clients Factors contributing
to emails being flagged as spam include excessive use of certain words, lack
of sender authentication, and previous spam reports Best practices to improve
email deliverability include using reputable service providers, removing
spammy language from emails, and managing bounce rates and complaints Content
inside emails, including subject lines, can trigger spam filters (e.g.,
excessive use of emojis, exclamation points, and trigger words like “free”)
Consistency in email sending and targeting specific groups of people can
improve deliverability Working with a responsible and reliable sending company
can enhance sender reputation Avoid scraping and bulk uploading email
addresses Deliverability and unsubscribe rates affect sender reputation Small
batches of emails followed by a large email can impact deliverability
negatively Splitting emails into smaller sends and sending them over a period
of time can improve deliverability
Full Transcript:
00:01
Today on the demand gen pod. We are going to be diving into a common frustration that I hear from clients all the time why are my emails going to spam? And in this episode, we’ll be exploring the factors that can contribute to emails being flagged as spam and talk about some strategies to improve email deliverability. So are you ready to boost your email deliverability and ensure that your messages land in the inbox? Sweet. Me too. You, let’s go. Welcome everybody, my name is Ryan. Emails end up in the spam folder due to various factors. Things like spam filters, which to be honest, to a degree we can’t control sender reputation, which also to a degree we can’t control actually. And also email content, which we certainly can control.
00:47
Negative consequences of being having your emails marked as spam, reduced open rates, decreased engagement, potential for damage to brand reputation, all of that stuff is bad. But spam filters, let’s start there. Analyze email content, they analyze the sender reputation and other factors to determine spam status. And factors contributing to emails being flagged as spam can include excessive use of certain words, lack of sender authentication, and previous spam reports. And businesses can improve deliverability by following simple best practices like using reputable service providers and removing spammy language from their emails. With sender reputation, it plays a really crucial role in deliverability, and positive reputation can increase the chances of reaching the inbox. Best practices for improving your sender reputation include sending emails consistently, managing things like bounce rates, and trying to remove emails that are going to bounce before they even bounce, and reducing complaints.
01:52
The reducing complaints part is theoretically pretty simple don’t send emails to people who don’t want to receive them. Implementing authentication requires techniques like SBF, DKIM, and DMARC and that can help to identify sender identity and also reduces chances of emails being marked as spam. So the very first thing that I tend to do when somebody says my emails are not going and or are not getting delivered consistently is look at those SPF files, the DKIM and the DMARC kind of technical, and if you’re working with an email consulting team, they could certainly help you in this area. But that’s the very first place to look, assuming that’s all fine because that’s the technical side. The other thing that you want to consider is the content that you have inside of your email and the subject line.
02:39
So things like emojis and exclamation points and then there are trigger words, things like free. There’s a whole list of them that I totally could have prepared for you, but I didn’t. So you’ll just have to trust me on it. Feel free to look them up. But all of these different keywords can act as triggers for spam filters and so they can see things like get yours free now. Lots of exclamation points, things in all capital letters, so subject lines that are all caps that can hurt you too. Things like that are easy ways to start to identify, just to check these things off the boxes. So do we have subject lines that look like that? What does our email content look like? Is our branding consistent? Are the people that we’re sending it to consistent?
03:23
Are we sending on a consistent basis, let alone who we’re sending to? So are you sending to the same people and adding new people every time? Or are you consistent and sending different emails to different groups of people within certain time frames? Those time frames don’t necessarily have a number on them, but if you were to send an email, say only once every three months, and you have all capital letters in the subject line with a whole bunch of exclamation points and a big heart emoji at the end of it, ODS aren’t super great. That deliverability is going to be very high. The problem is that when you start to have poor deliverability, it only gets worse the longer that you wait to try to fix it.
04:01
Another thing that I mentioned was the sender reputation side of things and working with a responsible and reliable sending company. So depending on who you use, I guarantee pretty much everybody listening to this, even if you’re at a relatively larger company, I guess that I should say medium sized company are using shared IPS to send their emails. And what that means is that every email domain has an IP address, and that IP address, generally speaking, is going to be shared amongst lots of other people, lots of other companies sending email. So if you use something like HubSpot Marketo, even still Pardot, ActiveCampaign certainly MailChimp any of these companies, they are all using by default. By default they are all using a shared IP. On the whole, this is not necessarily a bad thing, right?
05:03
So, theoretically, the shared IP practice is there to help you to have a better sender reputation because there are agreements that you’re signing with all of these companies that are saying we are going to be good people. When we email our contacts, we’re going to upload contacts who want to be heard or, I’m sorry, who want to hear from us, and we are going to go out of our way to make sure that we deliver good content to those people. That’s what you tell them when you sign up. I promise you, whatever you signed, that’s what it says. One thing that you signed, almost guaranteed, is a specific agreement that you wouldn’t scrape email addresses and bulk upload them and then bulk send to those emails. You definitely agree to that. Odds aren’t necessarily great that you’re following that.
05:53
And to be perfectly honest, especially at least in the US, most of these companies, while they definitely care, it’s not that they don’t care, because they do want to make sure their sender reputation is good. Really difficult to prove that you haven’t gotten consent from everybody and you haven’t scraped an email or bought a list or something like that. Difficult to prove. But also the only time when they’re going to start taking notice is when your deliverability is consistently in the toilet. So if your deliverability is just terrible, you’ve got 70, 80% deliverability consistently, which is really low. I mean, you should be in the high 90%, 98% or higher pretty much always. And their threshold is definitely a lot lower than a 20% deliverability failure, I assure you.
06:42
But they don’t necessarily care if one or two email sends hits a really low deliverability. They care when the deliverability is particularly low consistently. Same thing goes for unsubscribes. When you have a bulk large number of people who are unsubscribing for every single email send, it looks really bad because traditionally unsubscribe rates are less than 1%. So when you have a larger unsubscribe rate, and here the threshold is much lower. So just a few percent consistently, that looks pretty terrible and they are going to be monitoring that and they might flag it. Generally speaking, I don’t think that any platform is going to throw you off. They’ll probably give you warnings or a couple of warnings before they do. But what this can translate to across all of these platforms is that you will inevitably and eventually start hurting that shared IP.
07:33
And the platform does not want that to happen. Nobody does, to be honest. So you can avoid having a poor sender reputation yourself by using those suggestions that I’ve given you. What happens though, when you think that you are being effectively victimized by using a shared IP that somebody else may be using? Kind of nefariously, I guess, poor choice of word, but that somebody else is maybe abusing? Okay, what happens? Well, the first thing you can do if you have kind of checked all these other boxes, like to say, listen, our deliverability looks really low, but our unsubscribes are also really low. And we are consistent on emailing people. We’ve checked all of these various technical checkboxes to make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row on a technical level.
08:22
And we are confident that the people who we are emailing want to hear from us, but we are still seeing low deliverability. You can definitely take that as an argument to your you can definitely take that as an argument to your platform provider, your email provider, to say, listen, we think that there’s a problem with the shared IP and we would like to be moved to a new one and they will do that for you. And we have seen several times, I’ve personally seen several times this happen. You have a company who’s doing everything that they’re supposed to be doing. They have horrible deliverability. We go through all of these checkboxes to make sure that they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing on a technical framework level. We’ve implemented everything that we need to implement correctly.
09:08
They’re using their own domain, they have their DKIM signed, they have their SPF signed. All of these things are behaving. They have the certificates that they need and they still have poor deliverability. We have turned around and gone to Pardot for example, and we have said this is a problem and we would like to find a solution. And they typically will move you over to a new shared IP and that will help you to fix it. Okay? With that said, why shared IP versus a dedicated IP? And what does that mean? How do I get there? I’m going to tell you right now, ODS are pretty good that you’re never going to get there.
09:46
You’re looking at, I think it’s something along the lines of a little over a million sends a year that you want to be looking at doing before you’re looking at a dedicated IP. And when you are looking at dedicated IP, you need to do some IP warming, which is I think a whole other episode that we have planned actually on how to do IP warming and best practices for there. And you need to kind of build up to a point where you can send a lot of email. One other thing to note is that if you tend to send small batches of emails and then you go and send a really large email. So let’s say you usually send to 1000 people and we’ve seen this happen too.
10:28
So we have a client who they generally send in somewhere between maybe, I don’t know, 500 size segments to maybe 10,000 somewhere in between. There usually maybe float around like 6000 people for every sender or something like that. Okay? They have like one and a half million people on their database but they have a newsletter and that newsletter has 150,000 people that are subscribed to the newsletter. Okay? So on the newsletter they started to experiment with things like emojis and they would have sales on their store. So then they would add things like free or discount or save or whatever and then they would go and they would send to all these people in one batch and they saw a horrid deliverability. Like even though they were really consistent, they randomly would start getting these big drops in deliverability.
11:26
So they said, well how can we fix this? What do we do? Well, we kind of checked all things that I’ve talked about, made some recommendations based on spam kind of keywords and things to avoid on the subject line and even inside the body copy. And then were still having problems and the next thing that I suggested that we do was we split out, not just break the email out into a smaller send. So I said, okay, why don’t we do three sends of 50,000 each? But then not only that, let’s break those three sends into say every hour for 5 hours. So now you’re doing over the course of each day, you’re sending 50,000, but you’re sending 10,000 an hour for 5 hours. There’s 50K over the course of three days. You get to your 150 in dollars sent.
12:11
Okay, so we tried that and that made the difference. We then looked to improve it a little bit further and I said, okay, why don’t we pull out of that 150K, why don’t we pull out the people who have not opened one of the newsletters in the last six months? And I think that we might have actually ended up on three months or so. Six months is a little bit long, but we do send this newsletter every month, right? So let’s say that we look at the people who have sent an email, who have not opened an email, but have been sent an email every month for the last six or three months, we’ll say, and haven’t opened it. Okay? Once we’ve looked at them, we’re going to pull them out and put them into a different campaign altogether.
12:53
So they get sent the same email, but they get sent it through a separate campaign and a separate segment. Same thing. We break all of those out into, I don’t know, let’s say that was probably 100,000 out of the 50,030% open rate on newsletter. Just kind of ballparking it here. So of that 100K, we split those out and they still get sent, say 10,000 an hour over the course of 5 hours for two days. And then we send them primary newsletter to the people who have been engaging with the email previously over the last few months. We send them all 50,000 over the course of 5 hours in one day. Okay? That brought our deliverability all the way back up to like 99.5% from, I think that were experienced at like 92%. I mean, it was really bad. 8% of 150,000 is pretty terrible.
13:39
So we saw a massive increase and that’s what fixed it. And I thought that was pretty wild. So email deliverability is really crucial. It’s really important when you are starting to see problems to figure out and fix them promptly. Those key factors are going to include the spam filters, which again, we don’t have no control over it. We have some control over it, but just maybe not a lot. But there are some ways to get around it. Like I mentioned, that sender reputation, if you think that you might have a problem with the sender reputation, could be related to the shared IP, not just you specifically email content, your list quality, and then the engagement of the people who you’re sending to.
14:17
So if you do find that you’re having a poor deliverability, you can also start pulling out the people who have engaged versus the people who have not been engaging. Separate them, send them the same email through two different programs and see if that improves your deliverability on the engaged side at a minimum versus your unengaged side, and see if you can see any differences there. I hope this has been helpful. Good luck implementing all those authentication techniques and working on your list hygiene. If I can answer any questions, definitely let me know. I also, please don’t forget to subscribe if you could. It’s always great to hear from you. You can reach out to me at hello@demandgenpod.com, my name is Ryan and I will see you next time.