Email Deliverability 101: 4 Tips to Inbox Success
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Deliverability is an interesting beast. Spam filters and email UIs change frequently, malware and phishing campaigns are growing in number, and new laws and compliance regulations are altering the data privacy landscape. With the right approach, you can overcome an ever-evolving email ecosystem. Watch Kiersti Esparza, Head of Product Management, Email Delivery and Compliance, and Carmi López-Jones, Manager, Professional Services, Email Deliverability, explain how to ensure your emails make it to the inbox.
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Email Deliverability 101: 4 Tips to Inbox Success
- 1. K I E R S T I E S P A R Z A C A R M I L Ó P E Z - J O N E S Email Deliverability101: 4 Tips for InboxSuccess JANUARY 2019
- 2. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 2 Meet Your Presenters Kiersti Esparza Director, Email Delivery & Compliance Carmi López-Jones Manager, Email Deliverability
- 3. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 3 Housekeeping • This webinar is being recorded!Slides and recordingwill be sent to you after the webinar. • Have a question? Usethe chat box and we’ll answer yourquestions after the webinar. • Posting to social media? Use ourhashtag #mktgnation • Thereis a brief surveyafter the webinar
- 4. Syllabus To optimize deliverability, you must: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 NavigatetheLandscape KnowYourAudience Get Permission ManageYourData HonorYourSubscriber LearnFromYourCritics ConquertheInbox
- 5. 5Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. But,First…
- 6. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 6 Gateway Deliverability vs Hittingthe Inbox
- 7. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 7 Delivery is… Emails accepted at gateway = Deliveryrate Emails sent
- 8. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 8 Deliverability is… Emails deliveredto inboxes = Deliverabilityrate Emails sent
- 9. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 9 First Ruleof Email Deliverability Inbox Delivered ≠
- 10. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 10 Deliverability is Hard Source: 250ok’sGlobalBenchmarkReport,Q12018 Inbox placement Missing emails 5% 4%
- 11. 11Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Navigate The Email Landscape
- 12. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 12 The Email Ecosystem • Spam filters and email UIs change frequently • Number of malware and phishing campaigns is increasing • New laws and compliance regulations alter the data privacy landscape
- 13. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 13 Email Landscape for B2B and B2C Marketers B2B B2C
- 14. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 14 AllIs Not Lost Q. In this world ofthe changing inbox,is it possibleto learnhow to achieve and maintaingooddeliverability? A. Absolutely.
- 15. 15Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Know YourAudience
- 16. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 16 DefiningEngagement • Brand affinity • Built through trust • Mutualcommitment • Shared interest • Mutualbenefit
- 17. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 17 Email Engagement
- 18. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 18 DefiningYour Audience • MQLs • Customers or Members • Active buyers • Prospects/leads • Zombies • Engaged vs unengaged
- 19. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 19 AudienceMVPs • Engaged audience • Chronically unengaged audience • Bounces • Unsubscribers • Complainers
- 20. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Tip #1:Get Permission 01
- 21. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 21 You’re In Control Data Acquisition: Bringing new subscribers into email programs Data Management: Maintaining data quality, integrity, and health
- 22. Electronic Communications and Anti-Spam Policy Marketo has a zerotolerance policy regarding using the Subscription Services to send Unsolicited Commercial Email ("UCE") orUnsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) (collectively referred to as “spam” or “Unsolicited Email”). Unsolicited Email is defined as email sentto persons otherthan (i) persons with whom Customer has an existing business relationship, OR(ii) persons whohave consented to the receipt of such email, including publishing or providing their email address in a manner from which consent to receiveemail of the type transmitted may be reasonably implied. Commercial advertising and/oremails and other electronic communications may only be sent to recipients whohave opted-in to receive messages from the sender.
- 23. 23Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. USA C A N SPA M CANADA C A SL EU GDPR & ePrivacy Directive ANZ Spam A ct JAPAN R egu lation of Tran smission of Specified E lectron ic Mail UK Privacy an d E lectron ic C ommu n ication s R egu lation s; R egu lation 2 2 ElectronicCommunicationsand Anti-Spam Policy& The Law
- 24. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Tip #2:Manage Your Data 01
- 25. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 25 Why Does DataQuality Matter? • Acquisition strategy • Inactivitymanagement • Bounce management • Invalids • Spam traps
- 26. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 26 EngagedAudiences
- 27. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 27 UnengagedAudiences
- 28. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 28 ChronicallyUnengagedFlow
- 29. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 29 It’s A [Spam] Trap! • Deceptive • Planted on the Internet • Abandoned email addresses • Feeds blacklists • Requires discipline and restraint to beat
- 30. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 30 Hard Bounce Codes and Messages 550 • No Such User Here 511 • nomailbox here bythat name 505.1.1 • Recipient not found. 5505.1.1 • Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table 550-5.1.1 • The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. 554 • delivery error: Sorry your message to test@test.com cannot bedelivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued. bosimpinc13 bizsmtp Connection refused - 199.15.213.65 5545.4.7 • last transfail: 4214.7.0 • [TS01] Messages from 199.15.213.57 temporarily deferred due to user complaints 553 • Message filtered. 550 • The content of this message looked like spam.
- 31. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 31 Soft BounceCodes and Messages 452 4.3.1 • Insufficient system resources 452 • Too many recipients received this hour 451 4.7.1 • Please try again 550 • Mailbox quota exceeded 550 • Recipient Rejected: Temporarily inactive 550 • Account Inactive
- 32. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 32 Bounce Categorization in Marketo Bounce Type Bounce Category Hard Bounce Spam Block Category 1 HardBounce Invalid User Category 2 Soft Bounce Soft Bounce Category 3 Soft Bounce Technical Category 4 Soft Bounce Unknown Category 9
- 33. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 33 AutomateDataManagement
- 34. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Tip #3:HonorYour Subscriber 01
- 35. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 37 Unsubscribes
- 36. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 38 Complaints
- 37. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 39 Honor Thy Subscriber Complaint management: • Consent/disclosure • Subscriber experience • Frequency • Managingexpectations
- 38. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Tip #4:Learn From Your Critics 01
- 39. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 41 Heed Thy Critic • What are my areasof vulnerability? • What sources are not serving me well? • Is double opt-in necessary? • Am I mailing to frequently? • Am I not mailing frequently enough? • Is my messaging relevant and resonating with my subscriber?
- 40. 42Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. ConquerThe Inbox
- 41. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 43 ” 43 By mailing to active audience only (openers or clickers in the past 90 days) opens increased from 5.4% (3,475 opens) to 17.3% (5,158 opens) and Clicks increased from 0.3% (170 clicks) to 4% (1,193 clicks). …saw a TEN FOLD increase in clicks sending to HALF the original audience…
- 42. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 44 INFRASTRUCTURE Subscription Products TOOLS Subscription Products DELIVERABILITY • Shared IPs • Dedicated IPs • Dedicated MTAs • Dedicated Email Relays • Encrypted Authentication • Email Deliverability PowerPack • Email Reputation PowerPack • Email Informant • Modular Projects • Deliverability Reboot • Deliverability Subscription Service • Managed IP Warm Up Service (technical support) • Deliverability Health Check • Reputation/Deliverability Training I m p r o v i n g E m a i l O n e C u s t o m e r A t A T i m e Deliverability Products and Services
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Deliverability 101: 4 Tips for Inbox Success
- Kiersti Esparza is the Director of Email Delivery and Compliance at Marketo. Offering over 15 years of experience driving success for both B2C and B2B customers. Carmi leads Marketo’s Deliverability Consulting practice. She’s spent the past 12 years fast-tracking B2C and B2B marketers to inbox nirvana, optimizing response and driving revenue.
- I often hear that email deliverability is confusing. In today’s webinar, we’ll discuss how solving deliverability challenges involves understanding – and learning from – the audience with whom you’re engaging. We’ll frame the practices we see in the best email senders from understanding permissions, managing data, understanding your audience, and learning how to improve your deliverability to the audiences that matter most.
- Before we dive into the good stuff, let’s first establish what we mean when we talk about email deliverability.
- Let’s start with the basics. How do we know if an email has been delivered? By looking at how emails make it to the inbox, we can see the difference between gateway delivery and hitting the inbox. After an email is sent, it arrives at the gateway of the receiving network. The gateway blocks the email, or accepts it. When it is accepted, it is reported as delivered. Once delivered, the email is subject to filters that can move it to a spam, junk, or bulk folder. If the email clears the spam filters, it is delivered to the subscriber’s inbox. This is what we mean when we discuss deliverability. ESPs and marketing automation providers report on Gateway Delivery, meaning your message was accepted at the gateway of the receiving network. Most providers report if message was technically delivered or bounced but not whether it was delivered to the Inbox versus Spam folder deliverability. That kind of line of sight often requires sending to a seedlist of test addresses to monitor where they delivered when you sent your campaign. Using that seedlist of test addresses you can infer that the emails to your audience were delivered in the same mailbox as the seed messages.
- Delivery is the rate of email acceptance at the gateway of the receiving network of your subscribers. For example, say you send out 100,000 emails and 80,000 are accepted at the gateways of your subscribers. Your delivery rate is 80%. However, this does not mean that 80% of the emails sent made it to subscriber’s inboxes.
- The rate of emails sent that make it into subscriber inboxes is called the Deliverability Rate. This rate can be lower than the Delivery rate, because after an email clears the gateway and before it makes it to the inbox, it might be automatically routed to the subscribers’ spam, bulk, or junk folder. Take those 80,000 emails that were accepted at our subscribers’ gateways on the previous slide. Of those, let’s say that 10,000 were routed to spam, junk, or bulk folders. This means that of our 100,000 emails sent, 70,000 made it into inboxes. Our deliverability rate for this send would be 70%.
- Hitting the inbox is difficult – the first rule of email deliverability is that ‘delivered’ is not equal to ‘inbox placement’
- 250ok reports a positive trend of improvement, with a 4% increase in inbox placement and a 5% decrease in missing emails between EOY 2016 and 2017. While Marketo partner, 250ok, reports some positive trends in email delivery and deliverability. At the end of the day they are still reporting that only about 87% of commercial mail is delivered. And about 10% of mail delivered is delivered to the spam folder! Between missing mail and mail in the spam folder only about 77—78% of mail sent makes it to the inbox! Inbox placement is hard.
- And it’s made more challenging by an ever-evolving email landscape
- While the primary inbox challenge for a consumer marketer is how to deliver to Gmail or Yahoo, the landscape for a B2B marketer is even more complex. The filtering layers include hosting providers like GoogleApps or Office 365, plus gateway spam appliances like McAfee, Proofpoint and Ironport and then further, there are native filters in email readers like Outlook and Thunderbird. Further, each of these layers is highly customizable. For the B2C sender, the landscape has shifted recently as well, with the merger of Office365 and Outlook email infrastructure and the alignment of AOL, Yahoo and Verizon under a new brand. Regarding changing the UI email consumers are seeing, Gmail recently changed how it displays email to users.
- The constant evolution of spam filters and email UIs can be frustrating. Once you’ve learned the path and have a good rhythm with your program, something changes, email filters start responding differently or the UI suddenly presents unsubscribe links in unexpected places. As a deliverability professional, the constant evolution of spam filtering and email clients keeps me interested and learning. But it also means that the answer to a lot of the questions that are escalated to me is ”it depends” – a fuller answer is usually based on another series of context seeking questions. That’s why achieving and maintaining good email deliverability involves understanding your audience.
- As we mentioned at the very beginning of the presentation, achieving and maintaining good email deliverability involves understanding your audience.
- As Marketers, you probably think about engagement as the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time. By focusing on engaged email subscribers, you can dramatically and positively shape your deliverabilty destiny. Let’s talk about how to define your engaged audience in Marketo
- You can monitor your email engagement with Open Rates and Click Rates in Marketo. When subscribers open an email or click, these are positive signals we can measure as marketers that align with how the ISPs and mailbox providers evaluate you as a sender. If your subscribers are NOT opening or clicking, or are clicking ‘this is spam’ or deleting your messages without reading them, it sends the signal that your mail is not wanted. And as you may have heard, unwanted mail is likely to be delivered to the spam folder or blocked outright.
- What are the ways you define your audiences?
- Which audiences matter most? We’re going to talk about the key audiences that matter in your email program besides the most engaged. We’ll talk about the chronically unengaged, bounces, unsubscribers and complainers. You must think I’m confused. No I’m not, and I’ll explain why in just a bit.
- Two areas where you have control: Data acquisition Data management Understanding the power harnessed in these two areas and their impact on your marketing program will better enable you to get into the inbox and in front of your subscribers. A word about Permission: Marketo’s Email Use Policy calls for our customers to only send email to people who are their customers or who have opted in to their email program. Marketo’s policy is more strict that the US CAN SPAM law for marketing email because this is what is required for senders to build and maintain a positive sending reputation which drives inbox delivery. Opt In is also a practice that is required for sending bulk or commercial mail into the largest email networks. In Gmail’s “Bulk Sender Requirements” they offer their guidelines to help bulk email senders achieve predictable inbox placement and “recipient satisfaction”. Gmail recommends that all recipients should opt in to the marketing program by manually checking a box on a form or in software. They explicitly call out pre-checked boxes as an opt-out process not an opt-in process. The recipient needs to take an explicit action to be added to your mailing list.
- Data Quality matters. Like engagement, it sends a signal to the ISPs and mailbox providers. Are you sending to a list that you purchased or that your sales team (ahem) cultivated from Linked In? Did you ask those subscribers for permission in the first email? Are you sure they still work at that company? Your acquisition strategy is one of the primary determinants of inbox placement. Let me say that again….the way you acquire leads and welcome them into your program is a KEY factor for delivery to the Inbox. If your prospecting relies largely on other people’s data, you’re probably going to experience other people’s problems. Lists that are purchased or scraped are fraught with invalid addresses and spam traps. Let’s talk about invalids – email validation partners like BriteVerify estimate 7-15% of all emails collected are invalid. Most good senders can keep that rate below 2% with good bounce handling and sound acquisition strategy. You may still be wondering about managing your inactives. Why would you want to throw away good leads? You worked hard to scrape all those addresses. Maybe you like your bad reputation. It’s a badge of honor you wear with pride. You may embrace the dark side….but at some point, those that are unengaged will become more of a liability than an asset. They may ignore your mail, or worse, they may complain about your mail by clicking on the “spam” or “junk” button. The mailbox providers look at all of these indicators when they determine if your mail is legit or spam. Next up, I’ll walk you through how to identify your Engaged audience.
- When you’re building a Smartlist of your Engaged audience, you’ll start with “was delivered email” I generally recommend using 6 months as your date of activity constraint. The Minimum number of times constraint will be based on YOUR normal frequency. If you’re mailing weekly, your subscribers probably would have received between 20-24 messages in 6 months. Next you’ll look for any who have opened OR clicked in the same timeframe. I recommend focusing on a smaller number of times than the constraint used for “was delivered email” in filter 1 above. This will help you hone in on your most engaged….not just “any” measure of engagement. In this example, I’m looking for most engaged as anyone who’s opened OR clicked at least 2 out of 3 emails you sent in the past 6 months. This is HARD for most marketers….but the reward is improved and consistent inbox delivery, which drives response. I know what you’re thinking. There’s no way we’re going to do this. It can’t be true. “Quote…..” on next slide Caveat: You may have experienced spam filters clicking on your links. (((Product is monitoring click activity to try to ignore traffic from known filter bots. But this project is in very early stages and we are currently gathering data for deep analysis. We do not want to ignore valid activity in an overaggressive response.These filters are looking to protect end users from malware and are actively working to make sure that their activity is not easy to identify. This makes it much harder to identify clicks from filters vs. real people. We know from researching this and talking to industry contacts that these filters randomize their responses as well. Some will click all links, one link, a few links changing the pattern frequently. Some filters don’t click the links until hours after delivery some before delivery is accepted and this pattern is randomized as well. I even spoke to one filter operator who clicks links using “residential” IP space vs commercial IP space so the behavior is even harder to pinpoint. The hammer we typically approach with is reputational. In some cases the clicking of the links is in response to other triggers that caused mail to be scrutinized further. We recommend working with the customer to review domain authentication, engagement management and acquisition strategy to start with to see what can be improved to avoid this kind of filter response.)))
- Chronically Unengaged SmartList We’re looking for email delivered (not sent) in the past 6 months With a minimum number of times constraint, similar to the ‘engaged’ SmartList We’ll look for not opened or not clicked in the same timeframe And add in “not created” in that window. Let the new members live to fight another day!
- Once you’ve narrowed in on the audience you want to build the flow to change the data value to “marketing suspended = true” And to change the data value to “Marketing Suspended Reason” = new value date Chronic non-responder I’m pretty sure you’re still thinking about how to convince the C-Suite that you need to clean up the database. Mail More has been the mantra for years. The thing is…
- How are you being deceived? Spam traps are getting “delivered.” You’re thinking – “They must want my mail, they signed up and they haven’t unsubscribed!” Let’s talk about what a spam trap is. It’s an email address used to detect marketers doing the wrong things. Some spam traps are planted on the internet just to be scraped by bad actors. Others are email addresses converted into traps after they’ve been long abandoned. Spam traps feed blacklists….so when you get a notice from Compliance that you’ve hit one, it means you’ve got some work to do on data management. Winning the inbox wars requires discipline, restraint, a shift in thinking. Downsizing. Blacklist
- We can use a smart list and custom view to get to these codes, but we could also find them in the Lead Details, Here are some sample bounce codes we can read, and you’ll notice that, although sometimes they might seem like a foreign language, generally you can understand the underlying reason the email bounced. For example, the first code here says “No such user here,” indicating that the email address we are attempting to contact isn’t in fact a real email or of a person at the company we are trying to reach. When in doubt, you can also google your error codes to find out what they mean. Typically they’ll be a version of one of these listed. You’ll notice a few trends here- no such user, user not found, Account disabled, message filtered. Some of these indicate a problem on the users end, some on your end. But you don’t just get these error codes from hard bounces. Let’s take a look at soft bounces now.
- As you can see, these are a little fuzzier. Typically, a soft bounce occurs when an inbox is temporarily unavailable, like when a server is done or the inbox is too full. Just like with the hard bounce codes, if you get a code not listed here, you can usually google it to find out exactly what is happening. A soft bounce is a temporary problem with email deliverability, usually due to an unavailable server or a full inbox. This could be due to: Temporary/technical errors No status change Retried for 24 hours
- Listen, ain’t nobody got time for that. Marketo has simplified all these crazy codes into something we as marketer’s can read. And we treat each of these bounces differently. Let’s start with Hard Bounces. You’ll see category 1, Spam Blocks and Category 2, Invalid Users. We do the heavy lifting for you. All Category 2, Invalid users will be marked invalid and you won’t mail to them again. For Category 1, Spam Blocks, we place these on hold for 24 hours, but they will be mailable again after 24 hours. We do this to help protect you from yourself. We don’t want to hammer servers that are telling us to go away.
- The good news is that data management, the KEY to your successful INBOX delivery, is easily automatable within Marketo. You can set up programs to listen for the chronic non-responders, the chronic bouncers to manage their impact automatically.
- First let’s start by identifying them. In Marketo, we can run a SmartList to identify the unsubscribes Unsubscribes are an indication of subscriber fatigue, lack of relevance, or poor permission…but they don’t have a reputational impact, so…I’ll always prefer an unsubscribe to a complaint.
- So, what’s a complaint? It’s when your scriber clicks “this is spam” in their email client. Keep in mind, not all maibox providers offer this service. Notably Gmail and most business email hosting providers do not. Complaints, like unsubscribes are an indication of subscriber fatigue, lack of relevance, or poor permission.
- It’s important to track and monitor your complaints and adjust your email program to resolve the underlying root cause. Generally, subscribes complain because they are receiving mail too frequently, or maybe not frequently enough to keep your brand top of mind. Perhaps they’ve complained because they don’t realize that downloading your whitepaper opted them into your email stream. Sometimes the consent piece is buried in our terms of use or privacy policy. Ultimately, the experience you build for your subscriber will influence their judgment of ‘spam’ or ‘not spam.’
- Those who unsubscribe or complain are sending us a very CLEAR message. They are NOT engaged, nor do they wish to engage. We can take away some valuable lessons if we are listening. Review your unsubscribes and complainers with a different lens. Perhaps leads from a particular source are problematic, maybe it was that one large mailing to our entire database that caused high complaints or unsubscribes. Maybe the greatest opportunity is to review our welcome stream and make sure that we’re properly setting expectations and demonstrating the value of your program to the subscriber. Often times, marketers experience a change in their email performance, response and engagement and wonder what’s happened. They say, “I haven’t changed anything. My email program is the same as it was a year ago and the results were so much better then.” My response is, well the world is changing all around you. As Kiersti noted earlier, there are significant shifts in the email ecosphere that affect us all….changes in filtering, consolidation of the mailbox providers, spammers getting smarter. And the mailbox providers have to pivot and change their process to keep the bad guys out of our inboxes.
- Conquering the Inbox is within reach. We routinely see results like this when customers get permission, manage their database quality, honor their subscribers and learn from their critics.
- We’re here to help. We offer a wide range of tools and services to help you Optimize your Email Deliverability and response.