Wait – Google and Yahoo implemented stronger sender requirements?

I envy your blissful ignorance. Let me recap our blog post for your convenience. As of February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo required brands sending more than 5k emails per day to their users to comply with 3 requirements:

1. Implement authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
2. Make unsubscribing easy: include both a list-unsubscribe technical header supporting one-click unsubscribe and an unsubscribe link in the body of all promotional emails
3. Send wanted mail: keep spam complaint rates below 0.3%

Failure to meet these criteria can result in delays in emails being delivered, emails landing in the spam folder, or even emails not being delivered at all, i.e., bouncing.

For Dotdigital customers, we take care of the authentication and list-unsubscribe technical headers for you. Just make sure you’re including an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in the body of your marketing emails and keep an eye on your spam complaint rates using your account reporting and Google Postmaster Tools.

What has Microsoft changed?

Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has announced that it requires technical authentication for any domain sending more than 5k emails per day to Outlook recipients. Outlook covers outlook.com, hotmail.com, and live.com domains as well as their regional variations such as hotmail.co.uk. 

The authentication requirements are:

• SPF must pass for the sending domain
• DKIM must pass
• DMARC with at least a p=none policy is required

Microsoft has also clarified its recommended hygiene practices for high volume senders:

• Use a valid from address that can accept replies
• Make unsubscribe easy
• Regularly suppress invalid addresses
• Send to recipients who have provided consent
• Avoid deceptive practices such as misleading subject lines

Clearer guidance for marketers

Deliverability experts have long been evangelizing best practices for achieving inbox placement, and it’s great to see Microsoft echo what we’ve also heard from Gmail and Yahoo. Advice to marketers for strong deliverability has never been more clear, and it’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth:

• Consent: Opt-in is mandatory, and double or confirmed opt-in is recommended as best practice
• Unsubscribe: Make unsubscribing easy and honor unsubscribes quickly
• List hygiene: Regularly remove invalid and inactive contacts from your database
• Purchased data: Buying lists of contacts is prohibited and bad for your reputation and deliverability
• Content: Should be transparent; don’t use misleading headers or subject lines
• Frequency: Honor the expectations set at time of opt-in, and provide ways for your subscribers to change or reduce frequency of mailings

Marketers and mailbox providers unite

Now that Microsoft has aligned its sender requirements with those of Google and Yahoo, the industry is truly speaking with one voice: authentication, consent, transparency, and hygiene are required for successful inbox placement.

Dotdigital customers continue to be ahead of the curve. We handle the technical stuff for you (like domain authentication and list-unsubscribe headers) so you can focus your marketing expertise on sending relevant, wanted emails to engaged contacts.

If you have questions about your deliverability performance or want help in creating a strategy optimized for the inbox, our Dotdigital Deliverability Consultants are here to help. Reach out to your CSM to ask about our deliverability products.

That’s because we know how valuable email is to your business. The 2021 DMA report showed that for every £1 spent on email campaigns, the return on investment (ROI) was an impressive £38. Moreover, in 2022, email marketing yielded a $36 ROI for each $1 spent. But to get this kind of return, you need to make sure your emails are reaching the inbox. And that’s where we, the email experts, come in.

The deliverability team

We’re the Deliverability & Messaging Operations team – Dotdigital’s experts in email & SMS delivery and inbox placement – and we’re here to ensure your messages, you guessed it, get delivered to the inbox. If you’re new to sending email at scale, some of these terms might be new to you. But if you’re here, we’re guessing you’re something of an expert too, and are reading this to get an edge over your competition. 

No matter your familiarity with the subject, deliverability is something you should constantly be considering. So whether deliverability is a new concept to you, something that’s recently become an issue, or something you want to learn more about so that your campaigns and comms are getting the very best return they can, here are the top six things every marketer or communication manager needs to consider.

There are 6 C’s we consider for every customer

1. Consent
2. Content
3. Cadence
4. Contacts
5. Consistency 
6. Change

All of these factors contribute to your sender’s reputation. Reputation in deliverability terms means the priority that mailbox providers give to email traffic. Put more simply, reputation influences whether emails land in the inbox or the spam folder. 

Missing the mark on just one of the 6 C’s leaves marketers or communication managers using self-service platforms wondering what on earth is happening to all the messages they are sending into the ether. Perhaps you have been burnt by one of these 6 C’s in the past. Luckily for you, not only are we going to talk you through the 6 C’s of deliverability, but at Dotdigital, we have in-house experts and services at our fingertips to offer advice on every single one of them.

1. Consent is the cornerstone of deliverability

Obtaining consent has always been important for successful email delivery, even before GDPR was introduced. Which is why we’ve always preached best practices in this area. If customers receive messages that they don’t expect or haven’t consented to, it’s only a matter of time before they hit the spam button or unsubscribe. Consent is also a crucial aspect of data privacy and regulations. Without it, building a successful relationship between your brand and your customers is unlikely. As we’ll go on to discuss, this is crucial, not just for the customer experience but also for deliverability’s sake.

At Dotdigital, we log something called ConsentInsight, which is all that you need to gain and demonstrate evidence of consent. This way, you can be sure to maintain excellent customer relationships, now and in the future.

But consent isn’t just about that initial sign-up – consent doesn’t last forever, and you need to keep an eye on your engagement to ensure that your contacts still want to hear from you. Your provider should have tools and services to help you continuously measure that continued consent, re-activate and re-engage lapsing subscribers, and know when it’s time to say goodbye to a contact who no longer wants your emails.

2. How deliverability is affected by content

Your customers and prospects shouldn’t just be content with your content – you want them to be delighted. And when we say content, we mean everything from the subject line, the friendly from address, the pre-header preview text, the body text, and even the imagery within your emails. 

Filters affect how much folks engage with your brand, but maybe not in the way you’d think. Most filters are a lot smarter than they used to be, and it’s less about whether specific words or content look “spammy” to the receivers and more about how recipients interact with your emails. 

Sometimes recipients don’t expect your emails, don’t recognize your brand, and think your emails look like spam. Your emails are unlikely to be opened, read, or clicked, or worse, they may be marked as spam or junk. 

This is a strong indicator to mailbox providers that your emails are unwanted, so they’re more likely to place them in the spam folder. The more relevant your content is to your targeted audience, the more engagement you’ll get from your emails, and the better reputation you build up.

In a nutshell, content is the key to engagement, and engagement is key to deliverability. Pay attention to every aspect of your campaign content to make sure you’re delighting your contacts.

3. The effect cadence has on your reputation (especially during ramp-up)

Sending frequency can impact your email inbox placement and delivery. It’s not just about the content of your email. For those who are unsure about the difference between delivery and deliverability, delivery refers to whether your email reaches the recipient’s inbox, while deliverability is concerned with its placement in the inbox. In other words, it determines whether your email makes it to the primary inbox or if it’s marked as spam.

How often you send can be a delicate balance. Too much, and your customers may unsubscribe. Too little, and they may forget you and become disengaged. 

Additionally, when new traffic is seen over a domain or IP that is inconsistent, it has the potential to look risky to the receiving mailbox provider. A common mistake is getting the send cadence wrong during the “ramp up” or “warm up” strategy phase when brands are still building the reputation of a new sending address. The problem is that going too fast during ramp-up can damage reputation. Going too slow can cause you to lose it. Your provider should pay special attention during this crucial time to ensure everything goes to plan and continue to advise long after the first big campaign drops. 

4. Your deliverability is only as good as your contact data

The quality of the data you use for your contacts is crucial for both delivery and deliverability. Consider the following questions: 

• Where was the data sourced? 
• Is the information accurate enough to segment and personalize your emails, resulting in better engagement?
• How recent is the data? 
• Are your emails relevant to their situation, role, or interests?

The initial opt-in is a crucial aspect of consent: it’s an opportunity for you to set expectations around frequency and content, ensuring that recipients know what they’re signing up for, meaning they’re less likely to complain later. It’s also a key factor in keeping your contact data clean; using confirmed or double opt-in at the point of sign-up (where recipients need to click a link in an email to confirm they want to hear from you) means non-existent email addresses will be removed from your lists, and the email address signing up belongs to the person who entered it. 

We frequently see issues with bounces, complaints, or spam trap hits negatively affecting sender reputation and inbox placement because the email address that’s been added to the list (either accidentally or intentionally) either doesn’t exist or does not belong to the person or entity who filled out your subscription form. Using confirmed opt-in results in a more engaged source of contacts.

No matter the situation with your data, you or your provider should be asking the right questions and finding a way to move forward to make sure you get the absolute optimum ROI per email.

5. Nothing bolsters deliverability like consistency

Put yourself into the customer’s shoes. When you sign up for an email subscription, you already expect the messages you are going to receive – especially when the sender has followed best practices for consent and laid out the kinds of messages you will be receiving. 

When the consistency of this message varies, be this the content style or subject matter, customer engagement drops off because an expectation has suddenly not been met. Leave bait and switch to the fraudsters, focus on valuable content, and be as consistent and dependable for your customers as you would like to see from your favorite brands. 

6. Monitor and refine your change management practices

Change is inevitable. You need to move with the times and keep up with your customer base and leverage the latest marketing program techniques. The last thing we want to do is dissuade you from changing when all successful businesses change to survive. But as we’ve outlined above, with consistency so integral to deliverability, if you made a change to your marketing program on any of the five other C’s, you could be putting your inbox placement and deliverability at risk. 

Luckily, we’re well-versed in change management. Every day, we help marketers adjust their campaigns and strategy, all whilst reducing the risk changes can pose. This is a vital piece of expertise most businesses can’t live without.

When to bring in the deliverability experts

The best way to think of all the 6 C’s of deliverability is as dominoes that have a long, viral-worthy domino effect. For example: the better your consent practice, the better your contact data, the more relevant content you can deliver, the better your engagement, the better your reputation, the better your deliverability.

Keep in mind that our experts are here to guide you in achieving those impressive engagement rates. Whether you’re launching a new campaign, troubleshooting an issue, or exploring a fresh approach, reach out to us for assistance. Remember, the £38 return on £1 spent is an impressive feat, but neglecting the 6 C’s of deliverability can hinder your full ROI potential. Stay informed and proactive in utilizing these 6 C’s of deliverability to optimize your campaign success.

What is BIMI?

Brand Indicators for Message Identification, or BIMI (pronounced bih-mee), is an email specification that enables email inboxes to display a brand’s logo next to the brand’s authenticated email messages.

BIMI aims to give trusted senders control over how their brand is represented in messaging services. For participating mailbox providers like Yahoo or Gmail, BIMI adopters will have the logo they choose displayed in their recipients’ inboxes.

BIMI serves two important purposes:

• It gives brands control over their visual identity in email clients
• It helps recipients instantly verify legitimate emails from trusted senders

Major email providers including Gmail, Yahoo, and Apple Mail have adopted BIMI, representing a significant shift toward improved email security and brand recognition. Apple’s upcoming adoption is particularly noteworthy, as it signals BIMI’s growing importance in the email ecosystem.

To implement BIMI, email providers require several key elements:

• A brand logo in SVG Portable and Secure format (specific requirements apply)
• DMARC authentication policy set to enforcement level (“quarantine” or “reject”)
• A Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for certain providers like Gmail and Apple
• Consistent sending reputation and authentication practices

How does BIMI improve my emails?

BIMI is all about improving the overall security of the email ecosystem, and therefore improving the overall customer experience. The regulation around BIMI, and the nature of brands working with MBPs means that this works as another security measure around email sends.

With customers understandably wary of scams, BIMI allows you to add a layer of brand identity and authenticity to your email sends. This means customers have a clear and simple way to identify and trust your communications, giving them more control and peace of mind.

BIMI also allows you to feel more confident, knowing you’ve added another element of protection against anyone trying to impersonate your brand by spoofing.

Another benefit is that inboxes are crowded, and BIMI allows you to showcase your brand identity before subscribers even open your email.

According to research by Red Sift and Entrust, BIMI implementation can lead to:

• 39% increase in email open rates
• 32% higher purchase likelihood
• 120% improvement in brand recall

These impressive statistics demonstrate the transformative power of BIMI for your email marketing strategy.

How can you implement BIMI?

To implement BIMI, you need to follow these key steps:

Set up DMARC authentication

Ensure your domain has a proper DMARC (domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance) policy in place. For BIMI to work, your DMARC policy should be set to either “quarantine” or “reject”. If you’re using a subdomain as your custom from address, your top-level organizational domain must also have DMARC implemented with an enforcement policy.

Create and publish your BIMI logo

Design your BIMI logo according to the guidelines provided by the BIMI group. You can use their BIMI SVG conversion tool to help create a compliant logo. Once created, publish the logo at an HTTPS location, either on your own infrastructure or in your Dotdigital account.

Maintain good sender reputation

Mailbox providers will only display your BIMI logo if you maintain a good sending reputation. Stick to deliverability best practices to establish and maintain this reputation.

Test your BIMI logo

After setting up BIMI and ensuring good deliverability practices, create a Yahoo email account and send test emails to it. If your logo appears, it indicates correct authentication and trusted sender status.

Obtain a verified mark certificate (VMC)

For some mailbox providers like Gmail and Apple, a VMC is required. Dotdigital has partnered with Red Sift and Entrust to guide customers through the VMC process. Note that there is a fee involved in obtaining a VMC.

Remember, implementing BIMI not only improves your brand visibility but also supports fraud prevention and email deliverability. If you need assistance with DMARC setup or obtaining a VMC, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or read our help center.

Implement BIMI today

BIMI offers a win-win situation for both you and your email recipients. By implementing BIMI, you can enhance brand recognition, boost email security, and ultimately drive better results for your email marketing campaigns. With the growing adoption of BIMI by major email providers, it’s time to consider this valuable tool and take your email marketing to the next level. 

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.