Email marketers sharpen deliverability tactics at MailCon

A 12 months of changes requires a shift in tactics for email marketers. At the beginning of the 12 months, Yahoo and Google issued recent rules for bulk email senders. Now marketers have to make a decision what steps they should take to avoid getting emails rejected within the “post-Yahoogle” era.

This summer, marketers from across the e-mail marketing community, including Google, gathered in New York at MailCon to share best practices on this recent era.

“The state of email has been evolving greater than ever, especially in 2024 as a consequence of Google and Yahoo’s recent bulk sender requirements,” said Talar Malakian, CMO of Phonexa, the lead gen technology company that hosts MailCon. “Additionally, Google’s website domain upgrades and stringent spam threshold rates have all posed formidable obstacles for marketers.”

Approaches to maintaining high email deliverability and a healthy repute on this climate got here from Google and others. Here are some tactics for email marketers to contemplate.

Build up your sender repute

To ensure deliverability, bulk email senders must authenticate emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC).

Dig deeper: Email deliverability and authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)

Building a great repute as a sender, nonetheless, requires more actions and, at least at Google, is an ongoing effort based on rankings.

“The query I get from senders is when will Google, or Yahoo, start rejecting my messages,” said Ebenezer Anjorin, lead project manager at Google, in a chat at MailCon. “I believe that’s the fallacious query. ‘Will the domain be evicted?’ That’s the larger query. It takes time to accumulate repute.”

Reputation will depend on a series of actions email recipients take, rated from less severe to more damaging to the repute of senders:

Ignore
Unsubscribe
Report spam
Block

A frequent grievance Anjorin said he hears from email users is there are too many low-value emails and users can’t easily unsubscribe from them.

To meet these user demands, Google introduced two recent requirements for senders concerning unsubscribes. First, senders need to supply a simple one-click unsubscribe link within the body of the e-mail message. Secondly, these unsubscribe requests must be processed inside 48 hours.

Notice within the list above that “unsubscribe” is removed from probably the most damaging motion a recipient can take. Making unsubscribes easier will reduce the variety of recipients who, for example, block your emails or report them as spam. If they do, that would affect the sender’s repute rather more drastically.

“If you don’t make it easy to unsubscribe, the report spam goes up after which an outright block, and that’s just not good,” said Anjorin.

Email confirmations

Email marketers aren’t just at the mercy of recipients and the damaging actions they could take. There are steps marketers can tackle their end to ensure that they’re in good standing with Google, Yahoo and other services.

Although one-click unsubscribe is a Google requirement, Anjorin said it’s a great practice no matter which service the sender uses.

Bulk senders should ensure that that the one-click unsubscribe function works properly. That’s one solid step toward higher repute and overall deliverability.

Additionally, senders should ensure that to verify addresses prior to sending a series of messages. If it’s the fallacious address, a recipient is more more likely to flag as spam or block the emails. Anjorin really helpful a double-consent motion that features, for example, a signup to receive emails in a form, followed by a confirmation email.

Marketers must also be cautious about using the identical address on their side for transactional emails like order confirmations and more general-purpose marketing emails. There’s a risk that every one of those emails shall be robotically sent to spam due to the high volume of messages coming from a single address.

Anjorin also really helpful email marketers use Postmaster Tools and Sender Guidelines as resources for Gmail-specific actions.

Review engagement metrics every day

Email marketers are already within the habit of looking beyond easy open rates. What’s necessary are the signals from customers once they engage with emails and what actions they take because of this.

“It’s good practice to develop a healthy metrics obsession,” said Kevin Vaudry, senior director, sales and marketing for marketing automation platform Campaigner. “The data you get is telling you something.”

This is where AI and machine learning will help marketing teams visualize data and pull actionable insights. Using these insights, marketers can adjust email campaigns to make them more engaging and fewer more likely to be flagged as spam.

“I do know marketing teams are constrained,” said Vaudry. “AI will help. I look at metrics on a every day basis. I can see what’s good or bad over a three- or four-day period. I don’t have time to attend weeks or months. And all of it goes back to email at some point. Every metric matters. Watch your data since it’s telling you things, even on a every day basis.”

Break down email campaigns into six stages

When executing and measuring email campaigns, it helps to interrupt the marketing program into six stages, in line with Clinton Willmot, senior email marketing manager at hosting company Namecheap. These stages inform the e-mail messages and help personalize them.

Acquisition: When customers make a purchase order and join the list they receive a confirmation.
Onboarding: New customers receive a welcome message in regards to the company.
Engagement: Messages are sent regularly to construct brand awareness.
Super-engagement: Highly engaged customers receive personalized messages at a high frequency which can be triggered by abandoned carts or browsers, for instance.
Re-engagement: Customers who’re latent or inactive receive messages welcoming them back into the fold with special deals and offers.
Transition: Help process the client’s selection to unsubscribe. In some cases, offer options for unsubscribing or managing multiple email subscriptions.

Here’s where customer data and insights help to discover which stage a customer is in.

“Email marketers facing significant challenges look to MailCon and Phonexa to attach, learn and adapt amongst their peers to discover the most effective solutions and methods to beat challenges and grow business,” said Malakian.

She added: “Our key focus this 12 months was to supply the MailCon community rigorously curated programming to enhance their email marketing performance, specifically focused on email deliverability.”