Deliverability basics in email marketing

The overarching goals of a sender reputation and deliverability metrics comes from quality, and in this article, I'm going to talk about the key elements to improve quality.

Having a homogenous platform strategy is not a bad thing by any means and you will inherit some platform benefits, and this is the exact reason why my weapon of choice is Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The technology stack and architecture are based on Microsoft's ecosystem, and if you've already invested in Microsoft 365 or Azure you already have some of the important building blocks for your organization.

Build and protect your sender reputation

Using the internet as a delivery tool for direct marketing comes with the inherent capabilities of Internet Service Providers and the availability of servers to process the message you are sending. There are 3rd party organizations that monitor internet activity, message content, and spam complaints and that will impact your potential reach. Make sure to monitor and improve your score, take action and improve the overall quality. I will go over a few important topics to keep in mind. This is all impacting your sender reputation.

For infrastructure, having your domain authenticated and consistent IPs that you send from is key, whether it is a shared or dedicated IP. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and 3rd party watchdogs will monitor and evaluate traffic and your sender reputation. Ensure that you have authenticated your domain and that an SPF record and DKIM is in place.

Dynamics 365 Marketing comes with good built-in guardrails to keep you within your lines, but it's important to have a focus on your customer base and data quality at all times. It is not only about your authentication of domains and spam score, but also that of your customer base or targeted in marketing. Have you purchased a target list of emails? Have you measured the quality of your customers' email addresses and know they are in use and up to date? Having email addresses with nonexciting domains such as "name@example.com" to bypass a download form will very quickly impact your sender reputation negatively.

In the case of using Dynamics 365 Marketing, it is Microsoft who is defending your sender's reputation and will in some cases put you in "a bad reputation jail" and can limit your ability to send or in the worst case close your account.

Consistent content

Your customers want to receive content relevant for them - that includes images, text, but also content in general. Sending a "hello {{contact.firstname}}" is not personalization that caters towards my interests or improving the content to a great extent. Consistent content is also about sending emails with what is consistent with your brand. If your brand is known for travel and flights, promoting food might seem a bit off and could be expected spam and some might mark your email as spam.

In D365 Marketing you can use an AI score to indicate your likelihood of a spam action being taken on your email. The spam score is run with a 3rd party, Apache SpamAssassin in the backend. the model runs through the content of your email, the links you use, the size of images, and the size of your HTML code. The lower the score, the better - so keep an eye on the spam score and build to improve your content. This is also why a clear unsubscribe link is mandatory to be added to emails sent from D365 Marketing, as the solution is GDPR compliant by design.

Do housekeeping

Having emails resulting in hard or soft bounce might make your dashboards light up with color and look pretty in a graph. Bounced emails are not in any way a good sign and actions should be taken immediately to clean up your database and improve the quality. It is important to understand the different categories of bounce and some might be indications that your content is perceived as spam by others. Follow GDPR and comply with consent, allow your recipients to signup or unsubscribe to newsletters and content.

Sending emails as a marketing channel can be a great channel and possibly your best marketing channel. Planning your marketing activities with follow-up emails or other follow up tasks like a phone call or SMS, with branches or conditions to be met (click a link, register, wait until a given time). Planning further segments based on interests, use data such as interactions in specific links (i.e. link with a football topic vs a volleyball) and learn your customer's interest areas.

Email marketing volume

It is crucial to steadily increase your sending volumes over time and try to avoid spikes in traffic. This is an important strategy to not be seen as a spam bot. Drive your volumes up consistently over time and not send your first batch of marketing emails to everyone in your target database. In general, avoid too large segments, as this decreases the likelihood that it is content of relevance.

If your messages are being treated as spam by recipients in larger email providers, such as Gmail, it will impact how others with a Gmail-account will receive your email as well.

Email providers also recognize if your emails are opened, deleted, or manually added to spam, so if you can do multiple sending patterns (two or more swimlanes within a Customer Journey), including those you know are your frequent readers in the first batch of emails - having those super fans targeted first is never a bad thing! (How to do this in Dynamics Marketing? We can go into that another time!)

Start consistently and don't act like a spam bot!