Emarsys has one of the best sender reputations in the industry. You can help us keep it that way by understanding and following our guidelines and policies for data compliance and responsible marketing.
Our guidelines will help you onboard more quickly and make sure your emails hit the inbox right from the start, and stay there.
The basics of good deliverability
Email deliverability isn’t a black box or some mystical dark art! The basics are something that everyone in email marketing should understand. Here’s our introduction to it.
Most ISPs and email providers make money from advertising, not email. As such, their goal is to keep users on the page as long as possible by providing a great experience, and this means two things:
- Protecting their users from unwanted email.
- Ensuring the most engaging emails reach the inbox.
To get your email delivered to the inbox, you have to create, and keep, a good impression.
This depends on three factors above all.
1. List hygiene
There are several factors contributing to good deliverability, and it all starts at the quality of the contact data file you import during your onboarding to Emarsys.
You need to understand the data that you are using: the more you know about your contacts, the better.
This is a great opportunity to clean up all your "bad" email addresses: hard bounces, unknown contacts and other inactive contacts. Anyone who has not opened any of your mails within the last year should be considered inactive.
You have to make sure that you are adhering to all relevant legal requirements, only sending to opted-in customers, and only sending what they have signed up for.
As a baseline, you must be able to show why each email address is in your list.
2. Engagement
This brings us to engagement, one of the key aspects of deliverability, especially during email onboarding.
Your industry, your company and your customer lifecycle will define what an "active customer" means to you. ISPs and email providers of course have to protect their users, so they may have a very different definition of "active". In email terms, "active" is typically defined as a recipient who has opened or clicked your emails in the last 1-3 months.
It’s important to segment and target your active and inactive customers and subscribers differently. Sending to these two groups at different frequencies, and with different content, can help maintain a good reputation, as can using transactional emails, welcome programs and re-engagement campaigns.
During email onboarding you should focus on your most active recipients and your most responsive transactional and marketing campaigns to quickly migrate your sender reputation. Emarsys provides easy-to-use segmentation and automation functionality to target these subscribers accurately and effectively.
Do this right and you can be sure that opens and clicks will follow.
3. Relevant content
Email engagement comes from relevant, timely and engaging content.
Emarsys provides the most advanced personalization options in the industry, including conditional text and block targeting, as well as some great AI-driven features like Predict product recommendations and Send Time Optimization.
But don’t forget the basics! Take the time to include subject line testing and content testing as part of your most important marketing campaigns.
Sending the right email, to the right person, at the right time - this should be your ultimate goal.
Email onboarding
This guide applies to everyone using the Emarsys Platform but is especially important during the first weeks and months after you have joined us.
When you switch email provider, your emails are monitored and scrutinized more than ever to ensure your brand hasn’t been the victim of a phishing attack or some other sort of abuse.
In other words, you aren’t only migrating your data and templates - you are also migrating your sender reputation.
Email onboarding has two distinct phases.
1. Enabling your account for sending
The first part of this process is purely technical and requires the following onboarding task to be completed:
The second part is for us to learn about your previous email sending history, so that we can prepare the most efficient and effective email ramp-up plan for you. For this you fill in this form:
2. Building up your reputation as a safe sender
Whether you are coming to Emarsys from a previous provider, or are entirely new to this business, we need to persuade ISPs that we are legitimately sending emails on your behalf and that you are not a spammer.
To do this we run a controlled ramp-up plan, whereby we start sending small volumes of emails to known engaged contacts, and gradually increase the volume until we are at your required levels.
The ramp-up can take anything from a week to three months, depending on your email content, frequency, volume and sender reputation. This is usually the longest phase of onboarding and it is therefore important that you complete your email compliance self-assessment and read our ramp-up guide so that you can plan and begin your migration as early as possible.
Please also make sure you have read and understood the section on The basics of good deliverability above, and have read and understood the email ramp-up plan.
Reference articles
ISP policies & best practices
Understanding the guidelines and requirements set by ISPs will enable you to send mail with the confidence that it will arrive safely in your recipients’ inboxes.
Here are links to the policies for some of the most common providers:
Legal and compliance requirements
There are additional legal requirements that need to be met, mostly relating to opt-in and opt-out, so that you can be safe in the knowledge that when you do send content, you are doing all you can to reduce the risk of litigation.
At the same time, you will need to ensure that your web shop and email content is compliant with our standards. These documents will help you with that:
Content requirements
There are also a number of ISP and Legal requirements on a content level (i.e. what you must always include in your mail), which encourage the recipients to actually engage with the content they are sent. To help meet our content requirements, we also provide best-practice tips and tricks to ensure your content makes it past spam filters and arrives with the intended recipients.
At the end of the day, you have a message that you believe your recipients would want to see, so we make sure that you can avoid any pitfalls that you may encounter.
General deliverability
Finally, we have also provided some reference articles to help you better understand how global deliverability works: