@Cassie Moralez
Question: Does asking users to add us to their address book really work? If so, is there a one click url we can use to do this?
Answer: Yes, if a user adds you to their address book, it is a positive signal to the mailbox providers and it can definitely improve your standing with them. As far as a one-click function for this, I know there used to be, but that has been removed for quite some time.
@Brian Curry This one was pre-submitted from
@Julia Benson
Question: What is the most common cause of deliverability issues during a high volume time like the holiday season?
Our Safe Engaged Sender List can be broken down in the following way:
Emailable Opened in the last 1 Month - 25% of audience
Emailable Opened between 1-3 Months- 75% of audience
When we try to hit everyone in this group our 1 Month folks open at a good rate but our 1-3 month group dive bombs in opens.
Should we even out the ratio of 1 month to 1-3 months?
Isn't 3 Month Engagement Best Practices to be able to send to? We can't figure out why we are having problems with that cohort.
p.s. we just improved our domain reputation in google postmaster from medium to high in 6 weeks from strategic engagement segmentation. now we want to be able to hit more people.
@Julia Benson
Question: What is the most common cause of deliverability issues during a high volume time like the holiday season?
Answer: The most common thing we tend to see are issues tied directly to drastically changing your sending behavior in a short period of time. This can include dipping way back into the database to less engaged users and increasing send volume significantly, increasing the amount of emails recipients are getting causing them to complain and not carefully planning out how to stagger sends out to avoid looking “suspicious” to the mailbox providers because the send volume, pattern and quality of data is different.
@Brian Curry This one was pre-submitted from
@Eoin Lyons
Question: Does staggering sends throughout the day help with delivery?
@Eoin Lyons
Question: Does staggering sends throughout the day help with delivery?
Answer: Absolutely yes. There is a lot of volume sending in the ecosystem during the holiday season and that causes a lot of rate limiting and throttling from the mailbox provider side.
The spam filtering logic at the various mail systems has to decipher very quickly what is “good”, what is “bad”traffic and each system has limitations on how much they can accept at any given time.
Breaking up sends over a few hours and not sending at the top of the hour or 5 minutes past is also a really good idea to stay away from where the bulk of the volume is coming in.
@Kaylyn Kuehn
Question: Our Safe Engaged Sender List can be broken down in the following way:
Emailable Opened in the last 1 Month - 25% of audience
Emailable Opened between 1-3 Months- 75% of audience
When we try to hit everyone in this group our 1 Month folks open at a good rate but our 1-3 month group dive bombs in opens.
Should we even out the ratio of 1 month to 1-3 months?
Isn't 3 Month Engagement Best Practices to be able to send to? We can't figure out why we are having problems with that cohort.
Answer: This could be related to the industry you are in and the customer lifecycle/purchase cycle. For example, in the OTI (online travel industry), purchasing flights for personal means, within the first month of searching, can result in high engagement, then fall off the engagement cliff after the purchase is made. So the Opens, Clicks and Conversions severely drop off. Knowing what that lifecycle looks like, per your brand, and analyzing where that engagement cliff lies can be helpful to determine this.
Overall 3 months, recent opens, is considered highly engaged from the eyes of the mailbox providers. I would encourage you to review your metrics to determine if that threshold should be adjusted, recency engagement, frequency or segmentation for the lesser engaged.
# THE DELIVERABILITY DURING THE HOLIDAYS AMA HAS ENDED!
We will no longer be taking live questions, but if you submitted one in advance of this session, don't worry! I'll be posting those responses shortly.
If you would like to learn more about deliverability, check out the courses that we have in the Iterable Academy. Request access to the academy at
iterable.com/academy
Thank you for all of your participation, we loved taking your questions and helping you prepare for the upcoming holiday season.
Cheers!
Sarah, Quincy, Brian and Seth.
@Nikki Orlowski Thank you for the questions that you submitted in advance of the AMA, here's how the team responded to them:
Question: What is best practice in terms of universal recency rules? And should this answer differ during the holiday period?
Answer: Throughout the year majority of mailbox providers have a threshold of tolerance, and what they consider to be "engaged" or "active" in the 6 month range or less. That threshold can vary, depending on the engagement of your subscribers, the subscriber lifecycle. Digging into your data to do an analysis of where that engagement cliff lies, to best determine when you should be adjusting your inactive suppresion strategy can help. During the holidays mailbox providers are known for tightening their threshold for engaged, as volume increases across the ecosystem. It would be beneficial to make sure you are targeting your most engaged subscribers.
Question: Do you recommend having stricter recency rules in place for different ISPs? (e.g. gmail)
Answer: It shouldn't be a cookie cutter approach, each mailbox provider and subscriber group will behave differently and therefore should be treated with different recency rules. Review your last Opens and/or Clicks for the recipient mailbox providers, to determine the threshold. Also, be sure to check in with the health and reputation at the different mailbox providers, where available, and confirm that reputation is High or Green. If your sending IPs and/or Domains have poor reputation, it would be smart to review tightening your engagement threshold.
Question: Rule of thumb for Black Friday/ Cyber Monday Weekend (Thanksgiving - CM): How many emails is "too many" for your most engaged email list?
Answer: Great question, and the will vary sender to sender. It is obviously common for an "engaged" (and maybe even a few not so engaged) recipients to get an email every day during that weekend. Now, assuming maybe that you're referring to *several emails each day, that could get tricky. I personally feel that anything more than two messages per day could feel a little pushy, so I would typically advise senders to send around that to their most engaged users. Keep in mind that mailbox providers are on high alert for abuse and just the fact that the inbox is incredibly crowded during this time, so put the focus on sticking out with relevance instead of frequency.
Question: Is it best to avoid image sites with shared domains (such as imgur)
Answer: Shared image host sites aren't inherently dangerous, but you're right. The fact that they're shared does make them a potential link that can be used to fingerprint spammy content. Because sites like that have such a broad spectrum of content, it is definitely safer to host the images yourself.
Question: On average, how often do you see senders' reputation scores fluctuating?
Answer: Interesting detail here: "see." We have observed sender reputation scoring/scaling/changing color/etc. changing day over day through Google Postmaster Tools, MSN SNDS, etc. The effects of that change in actual mail performance, however, can certainly take at least a day or two. On average I would say that when significant "events" happen that are going to swing reputation either way, 2-4 days is probably around the time frame to see that.
@Alexandra Cambier Thank you for the questions that you submitted in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded:
Question: How can we track deliverability per email provider?
Answer: For Gmail, make sure to set up Google Postmaster Tools
For Microsoft, set up the SNDS monitoring in your IPs (only if they are dedicated IPs)
For all other providers that do not offer any direct reputation insights you can go inside of Iterable and click into the campaign itself and scroll down to the Segment Analysis section and type in “domain”. This will allow you to look at the receiving domains level (gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc.) to see if there is a spike or drop at a specific mailbox provider. For example, if you look at gmail.com and you see your open rate has gone from 25% down to 10% or lower and all other providers are staying up in the ~25% range (give or take) there likely is a reputation issue starting to surface. Same would be the case if bounce or complaints rates started to shift.
The Iterable Deliverability Team also leverages the 250ok (soon to be Everest) system to provide inbox seed testing results, reputation monitoring and blocking monitoring. This is an additional cost for customers, but customers can purchase 250ok and/or our consulting services to help monitor this in more detail.
Question: What are the few quick wins to ensure emails are optimised for deliverability?
Answer:
1.) Send to your most engaged users and carefully plan how you might expand your audience safely for the holidays.
2.) Make the email content relevant and engaging to your recipients
3.) Run experiments and tests to see what resonates the most with your recipients
4.) Use STO inside of Iterable to help optimize when recipients are sent emails to maximize engagement
5.) Watch your engagement metrics closely and be ready to pivot if anything looks off
Question: What are the steps to take if we notice deliverability issues?
Answer:
1. Understand if the issues are specific to one or a couple mailbox providers so you know where the primary problems are - one domain could mean specific reputation issue there, multiple could mean a third party filtering or blocklisting network has flagged your infrastructure
2. Attempt to understand WHY. This is commonly overlooked by senders. Typically it is due to complaints or aggressive segmentation. If your complaint rate is consistently above .08%-.1%, you're headed for trouble. Review your segmentation parameters for those platforms. Are you sending to recipeients that have recently (within 30-60 days) engaged with your email content? Any address that has opened within a year? Any address you've ever collected? Focus sends for a week or two to those that have engaged to see if that can start to ease the issues seen.
3. Regular delisting processes whether it's an online form etc. (if applicable)
4. Watch for improvements in the various reputation monitoring tools, available but most importantly in your organic mail performance to confirm if you're on the right track."
@Kellie Collins Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: What's the best approach to incorporate subscribers into my holiday sends if they haven't engaged since the previous holiday season without impacting deliverability?
Answer:
1. Review last engagement, sending past 365 days of no engagement, can be risky and impact filtering.
2. Define the threshold for inactivity and send a campaign that will allow subscribers to opt-back into the marketing messages, if the subscriber does not engage, do not target them during the holidays.
3. Of the volume that has not engaged in 6 months, 8months, or longer, slowly increase volume. Spiking volume can trigger filtering, throttling or blocks to occur.
During the holidays or throughout the year, sending to an inactive or unengaged audience can damage your sender reputation and impact Inbox placment. Mailbox providers are monitoring subscribers behavior with brands to determine is this mail they are expecting or wanting, based on activity. Opens/Clicks vs. Complaints or no action. Determining where to send the campaigns to, the Inbox, Junk folder or Block at the gateway.
@Alexander Wolherr Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: Does a bad reputation caused by a shared domain pool in general affects a foldering issue even though your domain reputation is constantly high?
Answer: Shared IPs do potentially have the chance of impacting other senders, depending on how ergrious the sending practices are and if the mailbox providers determine to throttle or block all messages from the same IPs. Gmail places a reputation for both IP and Domain to assist with this exact predicament.
@Aziz Saitniyazov Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: Can you talk about B2B "cold outreach" best practices? How to email hundreds of prospects at a time using a list of emails obtained from publicly available sources (not buying or renting a list), while ensuring high inboxing rate and domain/IP reputation? What would be an optimal set up for getting started?
Answer: Cold outreach is hard to do in general (for good reasons), and B2B can be tough too. So combining those is definitely a challenge. First and foremost, review to make sure that what you're doing is legal with your organization. There are a lot of consent laws that are always worth being familiar with. But after that I think the main three things to keep in mind for doing something like this are content, frequency, and message count. For content, be transparent about how you obtained their information. When I get random emails simply because someone guessed our Iterable naming convention I'm much less likely to pay attention to it. Also, don't have generic copy: _"I want to learn more about your initiatives!"_ etc. Be specific and personalized about why you think this person should respond to this message.
As far as frequency and message count goes, don't hammer away at someone repeatedly, multiple times per day if they don't respond. Mailing someone without proper explicit consent is dangerous enough - but trying to beat the door down to their inbox would just make things worse.
@"Clara García Morales" Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: Is there a way to know in which Gmail tab is delivered an email?
Answer: Yes and no - Gmail will not openly give this information 100% on their users and this can be Gmail user specific to where they want to email to land in the future (if they have tabs enabled). But there are things you can do to test this. If you have a test list of internal and/or personal addresses, you can send various tests to that list and see where all of the emails are landing and start to make a fair assumption that the bulk of the emails are landing there for your recipients.
On the Iterable Deliverability Team we also leverage the 250ok (soon to be Everest) system and when you conduct inbox seedlist tests, you can see which tab the seed addresses received the email and extrapolate that to your recipient base. (This system does come at an additional cost for Iterable customers).
@Whitney Blau Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: If a campaign is resent to folks who didn’t open it (different subject line, same content inside), how does this affect deliverability?
Answer:
This can influence a few things:
1.)The only data sending is potentially unengaged (or less engaged) users. This can look troublesome to the mailbox providers because they are not seeing the positive signals they want to see (opens, clicks, not hitting the spam button). This can cause reputation drops and especially when thinking about Gmail and how heavily they factor in end-user engagement, it can throw off your sending statistics to Gmail quickly.
2.) When resending content to users that didn’t open the first time, it can increase the odds of a “spammy fingerprint” getting associated with the email. Since the systems don’t see enough positive engagement with the content they might make a false assumption it is spam and that can cause blocking and spam folder placement.
3.) Depending on the content, it could frustrate recipients to get another email they didn’t open and could lead to them hitting the spam button. This is a direct signal to mail systems that can start to shift reputation negatively.
The recommended approach to maximize reach on resends and balance deliverability would be to send to openers + non-clickers or openers + non-purchasers (depending on industry of course). Not to say resends to non-openers are never valuable, but limiting how often that happens is key and being ready to balance the engagement metrics quickly with your more engaged recipients.
@Anastasia Andriyanova Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: What are some ways to balance daily send volume throughout the week?
Answer: There are lots of ways to do this. Have your popular content sending a few times - maybe not every day. Have some highly cultivated content go out to a hybrid segment of some lesser engaged cohorts maybe once every one or two weeks. And of course, use highly personalized Iterable worklfow functions to create different paths of messaging based on their specific actions!
@Christina M Farley Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: Since users are up against more promotional volume, I see the case for tightening up suppression list engagement criteria. However - holiday promotions could revive customers who were lying low, waiting for a promotion. What to do!
Answer: Very valid. There are definitely users that engage with brands more frequently during the holiday sending season. I would advise that those users are sent to in longtail fashion over time leading up to those holiday sends. So, basically around now - begin to hint at promotions and start to include those recipients in small relative proportions to the rest of your list to try and tease out some of that engagement data. Other than that, during the holidays themselves, I would say to always keep that unengaged cohort size in mind so you don't find yourself mailing to twice as many unengaged as engaged. Also if you plan to send to your engaged group two emails per day during this, maybe only include that unengaged group once.
@ Jordon Schwob - Thank you for submitting your question in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded.
Question: What are the best tools to monitor your deliverability?
Answer:
There are several tools within the ecosphere that can be leveraged to help provide insight.
1. Iterable Insights- dashboards and reporting (Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribes, etc)
2. Campaign level data
3. Gmail Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS Postmaster tools to monitor for reputation health
4. Deliverability tools: Validity, Inbox and Reputation
@Jeannie Stezano Thank you for submitting your questions live and in advance of the AMA! Here's how the team responded to the question that you pre-submitted.
Question: If we see a low deliverability rate in 250ok but not much difference in engagement numbers what does that mean?
Answer: Typically this is a result of subscribers, who have been historically engaged with your brand. Due to their previous Opens and Clicks, mailbox providers are more likely to send these campaigns to their Inbox, resulting in continuos engagement. It is also an indication of reputation shifts and the global level filtering that is dynamically changing based on the subscriber behavior and engagement with the sender.
"As far as a one-click function for this, I know there used to be, but that has been removed for quite some time."
Thanks for this reply, Seth. But is there is a good link to use or no link at all?
What are some best practices to maintain customer retention as well as managing the holiday season to improve customer lists?
