Deliverability During the Holidays Ask Me Anything - Check out the conversation!

Hi! Are there any best practices in terms of email frequency when it comes to email campaigns around the holidays? New Years is our biggest time and we sent out alot of emails in Dec/Jan so I want to take advantage without spamming and or causing any deliverability issues

Here's a question that came in advance:

Question: What is the optimal time to send, should we wish to send out communications during the festive period?

Answer: There isn't a set time that works for everyone. If you already have a set time you're using, then it's probably best to stick with that time as your subscribers will be aware of that pattern. Most senders try to send during the daylight hours of their audience's timezone so they have the option to see it multiple times during the day.

However, since many senders are sending at the same time this time of year, some providers have mentioned to avoid the top and halves of each hour. Like the o'clocks and :30's. Instead go for 5 or 10 minutes past the hour or past the half hour.

Otherwise, if these providers get too much mail, they'll end up deferring some of it, creating a queue or backlog and it'll have to wait for the system to retry it.

what is the most our email sending volume could increase on a monthly basis without it being a deliverability concern? if I send 30% more emails in November than October, could we get in some trouble?

What are some strategies to stay out of the promotions tab and in the primary tab of an inbox during the increased volume of the holidays?

Ryan Glanzer

Question: What is the most our email sending volume could increase on a monthly basis without it being a deliverability concern? If I send 30% more emails in November than in October, could we get in some trouble?



Answer: This is based on each individual customer's reputation. If you have a strong reputation, you're able to scale more. If your reputation is lower, you would want to start warming up to the volume you want to send in Nov/Dec.

Halie Lewis This is a tricky question but it will always be Gmail's goal to place the correct message in the correct tab.

Meaning, if they know the email is a marketing campaign they will push it into the Promotions tab, unless the Gmail user moves the email to their Primary tab. This is the case with 1:1 communications that route mostly to the Primary tab. There are a few things you can play with in relation to the email content but sometimes that can look suspicious to Gmail and they may end up flagging it and pushing it into the spam folder.

We always like to tell our customers to focus on making the messages relevant to the recipients to drive positive engagement and build a deeper relationship. The more subscriber engagement, the higher the chance your message will land in the Primary folder.

Also important to note, Gmail users can remove the tabs and change their preferences at any time.

Pro Tip - make sure you are signed up with the Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your sending reputation - https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/

We currently use the send rate limit option when scheduling our blast emails, setting it at 10K/minute. With the higher overall volume that we'll be sending during Q4, should we look at decreasing that rate limit to something slower rolling? 5K/minute? Would that have any postive/negative effects?

Here is another one that came in ahead of time:



Question:

What is the best approach for Black Friday/Cyber Monday deployment strategies (i.e. resends, SL tactics, etc), as we'll be competing with many in the inbox?



Answer:

A few things here.

To start, we just today got another tip from a friendly on the receiving side of the email industry that the majority of their email traffic comes in 30 seconds after the top of the hour. A great tactic would be to shift your campaign start times to avoid the top of the hour. This can be 5, 10, 15 etc. minutes after the start of the hour and I have seen this help a lot of customers avoid blocking and "rate limiting" delays.

Additionally, knowing your customer base is important. What times of the day have proved to drive a lot of engagement? What campaigns have shown the most success? What learnings were gained from those that we can use for the holiday season? Resends to non-openers can be effective sometimes but remember that those typically are going to be lower engaged recipients and might start to shift your deliverability down. Consider past purchase behavior and perhaps “clicked but not not convert” as an option. If a user is clicking you can assume the content was relevant for them and maybe a slight tweak to the content can get them to convert.

Lastly, from the deliverability reputation standpoint. You want to make sure that the segmentation is to an engaged customer base to protect your reputation. If old users, never engaged users or users hitting the “this is spam” button are being hit in large numbers, you will see your priority in delivering successful go down exponentially. The mailbox providers have to decide who is a “good” and “bad” send quickly, so making sure you replicate the behavior “good” senders do can maximize your inbox during the holidays.

Laura Thornburg

Question: We currently use the send rate limit option when scheduling our blast emails, setting it at 10K/minute. With the higher overall volume that we'll be sending during Q4, should we look at decreasing that rate limit to something slower rolling? 5K/minute? Would that have any positive/negative effects?



Answer: I would not change that throttle rate cause there isn't going to be a positive or negative effect because that is your typical throttle rate.

If you're not doing black friday messaging, are there certain days of that week that are best to avoid sending on so you're competing less with the messages about deals?

Here's a question that came in advance:

Ryan Glanzer

Question: Does changing the From Name to be from a person, like "Ryan at ConsumerAffairs", have an impact on deliverability? We have experimented with many different names and see very mixed engagement rates. Not sure if particular names jump out to subscribers or if some get better inbox placement than others.



Answer: It can. For example, info@domain.com, info is referred to as the Local Part. Some providers will assign some reputation weight to the local part of the address, which also ties into the reputation of the sending domain and IP address. To your point, some subscribers might be more inclined to interact with a message where the local part is a person vs. an alias, like info. Ultimately, engagement is what you're looking for so if subscribers are more likely to engage with an email from Ryan, then by all means use it; however, mixing it up too frequently could confuse subscribers and cause lower engagement and potentially alert mail filters that you're trying to game the system. Some senders will use different local parts for different mail streams to help subscribers know which mail they're receiving and can therefore interact accordingly. So it's ok to try some unique local parts, but once you've identified a good working one, stick to it as the providers also value consistency, as does your audience. There's not a "universal" from name that will get anyone inboxed all the time, it's all based on how your subscribers respond.

Maddie McKay - thanks for the question. There was a couple similar questions submitted a head of time, so I will do my best to answer them all here for you all!



Questions:

Are there any best practices in terms of email frequency when it comes to email campaigns around the holidays? New Years is our biggest time and we sent out a lot of emails in Dec/Jan so I want to take advantage without spamming and or causing any deliverability issues

Is it ok to send daily?

Is there an optimum # of emails to send per week to keep deliverability high?

Is it ok to switch between 5-7 emails per week?



Answers:

The answers below can be applied to all of the questions above

There is not anything inherently right or wrong by sending daily. This comes down to what your "normal" campaign cadence and segmentation is. For example, If recipients are used to getting 1-2 emails a week and now the cadence moved up to 4-5 during the holidays that could create adverse effects. In this case, it is all about managing recipient expectations and hopefully testing the waters out a bit before we hit Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This way you know ahead of time where the line might be, in terms of how aggressive you can be without causing deliverability issues.

This all will be very specific to each customer and their program. What we want to display is consistency and not large deviations from “normal”. Meaning, if we are going to increase the send volume and cadence of campaigns, this should likely be approached like a mini “warming” in a way. One of the most basic flags many spam filters have is what “normal” volume looks like and if we start increasing 4-5x what is normal we might see blocking or “rate limiting” quickly.

What I like to advise is to have contingency plans. If you start to see that raising your cadence to 5-7 campaigns is starting to decline the metrics quickly, either pull back on the cadence or segment down to an even more engaged audience to try to rebalance some of the engagement metrics that feed into your reputation. Keep more of the recipients who have been engaging for a long period of time and in particular in the realm of clicks as that can be a stronger sign of relevancy and interest.

Keep monitoring and see what levers you might need to pull to get back into balance.

Another one that came in ahead of time:

Question:

We will send a higher frequency of emails over a shorter period of time over Black Friday. What should we be monitoring + adapting between sends to make sure each email has the best shot of reaching the inbox?



Answer:

First, I would make sure you know what "normal" currently looks like. Is your delivery rate regularly +99%? Complaint rate below 0.10%? Open rates 20-25%? Knowing how a typical campaign performs is the first part. You can track this within Iterable easily and should have a good idea of how various segmentation and campaign types perform.

Another helpful tip is within Iterable if you click to see an individual campaign performance, you can see more granularity at the recipient domain level. This is done under a Segment Analysis and you can see your metrics at places like gmail.com (Gmail), yahoo.com (Yahoo) or hotmail.com (Microsoft) as an example. Some metrics might be declining overall, but that typically is indicative of a certain mailbox provider starting to shift around.

Lastly, there are 2 free reputation systems you can sign up for to monitor your IP/Domain reputation:

Google Postmaster Tool - https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/

Microsoft SNDS (if sending on dedicated IPs) - https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/

James Jordan Unfortunately, there is no avoiding the craziness of Holiday sending 🤪 But, there are some tips that mailbox providers have given us. For example, they have suggested to not send at the top of the hour to avoid competition. For example, try sending at 11:05 instead of 11:00.

Also, the weekends tend to be significantly busier during the Holidays, so try keeping your sending schedule to the weekdays!

Here's another question that came in ahead of time:

Question: Is there a way to increase our commerce email from 96% deliverability to 99%-100% again?

Answer: Yes it may be possible, but it all depends on what your current bounces are. You'll want to review the types of bounces your current messages are getting back and then take appropriate steps to help reduce those bounces.

For example, if you're getting a lot of bounces where the response is, "The email account that you tried to reach is over quota and inactive", this means the subscriber has not used this account for a long time and it's full and no longer accepting mail. Depending on your current cadence, you could set up a Journey to suppress recipients that receive this specific response 4 times over the next 30 days and this would prevent you from sending to these inactive subscribers which will help reduce the number of those bounces.

There's not a one size fits all approach to these, so it really comes down to digging into the bounce reasons to know what your options are.

Question from beforehand:



Question:

Are there tips on image-to-text ratios within email that can impact deliverability?



Answer:

This is never an exact science but the best advice we can give is to try to have a good mix of both.

The spam filters out there are always evolving and all have different rules. The reason for wanting a good balance is that bad actors try to hide behind images a lot of the time, this can trick users on clicking the images and they don't know or see where the links go.

Conversely, all text emails might start to mimic 1:1 communications, which is another tactic some bad actors will try to pass spam filters as a "trusted" correspondent.

Trying to have a good balance of text and images will make the spam filters job a little easier and should reduce the likelihood of being flagged as “spammy”.

The Deliverability During the Holidays Ask Me Anything has ended! Thank you everyone for your questions!