When switching email providers you cannot take your previous sender reputation with you. You need to show email filters that the new emails for your brand are genuine and should be trusted.
This document outlines the initial configuration steps and how to quickly and effectively build your new sender reputation.
Contents
Background information
Understanding email filters
Most email platforms generate revenue from the advertising displayed to users while they read emails.
Inbox filtering exists not just to filter out spam, but also to identify emails which will be opened and read.
“Deliverability” is the measure of how successful your emails are at navigating these filters and reaching your subscribers’ inboxes.
What influences deliverability?
Three things influence your inbox placement:
-
Sending emails from a trusted and secure infrastructure
This includes your sender domain, DNS and from address, sending IPs, and the links and image paths in your emails. -
Your existing sender reputation
Your past email campaigns are used as an indicator of future results. -
Your active campaigns
Not only the email content and contact data, but also live recipient responses to your email campaigns are used in real-time to filter incoming campaigns and to update your sender reputation.
Email onboarding
1. Configuration
This is a largely administrative step where you have to configure your DNS settings or delegate this process to us. We also need to collect some information from you to ensure that we make the right settings on our side.
See:
2. Reputation building
Your new reputation will be generated from the data you use and the responses of your recipients.
This step can take 1-4 weeks, depending on the quality of your data used and how your recipients respond to your email campaigns.
To generate the best possible sender reputation in your early mailings you should ensure your contact data is recent, valid and active.
You should ideally select or create content specifically to generate high open and click-through rates. During this early reputation-building process you should avoid sending emails to older and less active recipients.
Your very first mailings may have slightly lower engagement (open and click) rates than your established program. Note that open and click rates can be tracked or displayed differently from one platform to another.
You’re ready for the next step once your engagement rates are consistent.
Creating a segment of your most active recipients
Since you are new to Emarsys you cannot use our email behavior segments to filter for your most active contacts, therefore when you import your contact list you should ensure that it contains a column showing last activity on your website or some other engagement identifier that you can use for selection.
Then create a segment based on this field, and use that as the basis for your first campaigns.
After you have sent your campaigns, check the results in the Deliverability Advisor for any obvious issues.
3. Ramping-up and migrating your previous email campaigns
With an established sender reputation, you can now start phasing in the rest of your marketing and communication streams. You want to avoid big spikes in volume, big changes in inactive data use or anything else that looks unusual and will cause the ISPs to pay more attention to your emails instead of less.
It is sensible to have a plan where you can see your proposed volume increases and also when you will turn off automation emails from your previous provider. When planning this stage it’s worth verifying that suppressions and inactive data from your previous provider are not inadvertently included in your marketing lists.
A performance review at the end of each week can provide early insight into successes and issues, allowing you to slow down or accelerate the onboarding.
Creating segments to ramp up your volume
Your reputation-building segment should gradually grow in size until it matches your maximum volume for any given campaign.
You can do this by creating a series of segments where the main criteria will change to allow more contacts. For example, you can extend the period of engagement back in 3- to 6-month blocks. If this is not possible, then you should use another criterion that will allow you to increase the volume by a controlled percentage on a daily basis.
Use these segments for your ongoing campaigns to grow the volume in a controlled manner.
After you have sent your campaigns, check the results in the Deliverability Advisor for any obvious issues.
Troubleshooting
Data quality
If the reputation-building process is unsuccessful, typically this will be down to the quality of your data.
To generate the best possible sender reputation in your early sends you should ensure your data is recent, valid and active; avoiding data which is older or less active.
If you are segmenting your lists correctly and sending content specifically to generate high open and click-through rates, you should see very low hard bounce rates, high open and click rates, and low unsubscribe rates.
Poor initial response rates
When we start a ramp-up plan we can expect all ISPs to view us with suspicion. They are on the lookout for spammers and are always cautious when a new domain is used.
Therefore we can expect:
- Some blocking or filtering by individual ISPs in the first campaigns. This will usually resolve itself as long as engagement rates remain high.
- Different (lower) delivery and open rates than on your previous sending platform. This is exactly why we have the ramp-up plan and these rates will resolve themselves when your reputation is established.
Ideal onboarding email campaign metrics:
- Hard bounce rates should be lower than 1%.
- Open rates should be over 25%.
- Click rates should be over 5%.
- Complaint and unsubscribe rates should be lower than 0.2%.
You can view all these statistics on the Email Response Summary page for your campaigns (Analysis menu > Emails).
Previous deliverability problems are repeated
The ramp-up will not resolve any pre-existing deliverability problems you may have experienced with previous providers. Unless you have taken specific steps to address these beforehand, the problems will reoccur.
That is why it is critical that you provide full and frank answers to all the questions on our Email channel setup form.
In particular it is critical that you import all your suppression data (bounces, unsubscribes, complaints) before sending emails from the Emarsys Platform.