Cracking the Inbox Code: Gmail and Google Apps
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This document summarizes a presentation on improving email delivery to Google services like Gmail. The presentation covers understanding Gmail reputation, the promotional and primary tabs in Gmail, spam folder delivery, tips and tricks for better delivery, and resources for additional information. The presentation discusses how engagement, user feedback, content scanning, and machine learning impact inbox placement in Gmail. It provides tips like using Google Postmaster Tools, sending to engaged subscribers, re-engaging dormant subscribers, monitoring delivery, keeping email content clean, and being aware of new features from Gmail.
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Cracking the Inbox Code: Gmail and Google Apps
- 1. T i f a i n e H i g h l y Cracking the InboxCode:Gmail and GoogleApps August 2019
- 2. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. 2 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
- 3. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. MeetYour Presenter Tifaine Highly Sr. Deliverability Consultant Marketo Professional Services
- 4. Improving Delivery to Google 01 02 03 04 05 Understanding Gmail Reputation Tabs: Promotional vs. Primary Spam Folder Delivery Tips and Tricks Resources
- 5. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc.
- 6. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Deliverabilityis Hard Source: 250ok’sGlobalBenchmarkReport,Q12018 Inbox placement Missing emails 5% 4%
- 7. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. WhatDrives InboxDeliveryatGoogle? • Engagement • User feedback • Content scanning • Machine learning ?
- 8. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. Engagement Positive signalsinclude: • Opening • Clicking • Forwarding to a friend • Replying • Adding your address to their address book
- 9. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. UserFeedback • Removing mail from the Spam folder or clicking “Not Spam” • Clicking “Spam” or moving mail to the spam folder.
- 10. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. ContentScanning and MachineLearning • Scans content to determine whether it is one-to-one ormass communication • Can recognizewhen an email is attempting to collect sensitive information • Machine learning continuously updates filtering protocols
- 11. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. DomainReputationvs. IP Reputation
- 12. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. DomainReputation– Not JustFor SendingDomains
- 13. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. Gmail Tabs: What Do They Mean To Me?
- 14. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. Help!My Mails Are Going to theSpam Folder! • Google Postmaster Tools • Sendto the most engaged segment of your audience • Monitor inbox placement using the Email Deliverability Power Pack • Attempt to re-engage dormant subscribers • Keepit clean
- 15. 15Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. Google PostmasterTools
- 16. Proprietary and Confidential | © Adobe, Inc. Send to the Most Engaged Segmentof Your Audience
- 17. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Monitor Delivery With EmailDeliverability Power Pack
- 18. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Re-EngageDormant Subscribers
- 19. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. KeepIt Clean • Coding - HTML - Use Responsive Design - No URL Shortners and monitor for URI blacklists - UseList Unsubscribe • List Quality • Authentication
- 20. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Tips and Tricks Recapped • Monitor your Google Reputation with Google Postmaster Tools • Sendonly to engagedsubscribers • Re-engage dormant subscribers • Monitor inbox deliverability with Email Deliverability Power Pack • Keepit Clean
- 21. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. NEWfrom Gmail • AMP for Email • Annotations for Promotions Tab
- 22. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Gmail/Google Apps Resources • Cracking the Inbox Code: Google • 250ok: Seriously, You Don’t Need To KeepTabs On Gmail Tab Placement • Marketo: Howto survive the Gmail Tabs Apocalypse • Email Delivery Jedi: Top 10 Gmail Promotions Tab Myths Debunked • DigitalDonut: Anxious how to avoid the Gmail Promotions Tab? WorryNot. • The250OK Email Experts Series Explains Google Postmaster Tools • What Marketers Should KnowAbout the NewRedesigned Gmail • Google Introduces Email Annotations for Gmail Promo Tab
- 23. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc. Q&A
- 24. Proprietary and Confidential | © Marketo, Inc.
Editor's Notes
- Tifaine Highly is a Sr. Deliverability Consultant with Marketo’s Professional Services team. Tifaine is an email veteran with more than 13 years solving deliverability puzzles for senders, email service and marketing automation providers. Tifaine's superpowers include asking deep questions, sifting through delivery logs, and making complex problems easy to understand (with flair!)
- Understanding what drives Inbox placement decisions at Google – and how your can affect them – is a powerful tool in your arsenal. In today’s webinar we’ll discuss what factors influence your reputation at Google, the real impact of tab placement, things to try if you find yourself delivered to the spam folder, and things to consider with your content.
- It is important to remember that ‘delivered’ does not necessarily mean “to the inbox”. In specific, delivered means that the mail was accepted for delivery by the server that you’re attempting to send to but it does not indicate what happens with the mail once it has been accepted. Let's talk through an example...imagine that you’re sending a package via UPS to a hotel guest. The UPS driver goes to hotel with the package. The front desk staff accepts the package and the UPS driver marks the package as delivered. Then, the package is then handed to the hotel’s security team to be examined before it’s given to the guest. That security team is similar to a receiving server’s spam filtering system checking the mail before delivering it your subscriber. If the security team determines that the package is suspicious, they might dispose of the package, they might put it into a secure area until the hotel guest can give the ok to deliver it, or they may attach a sticker to the package indicating that it may be dangerous and deliver it to the hotel guest. This can happen with email as well and can result in an email being delivered but not to the subscriber because the server’s spam filter caught it before it reached its destination.
- Hitting the inbox is difficult. Marketo partner 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 EOY 2017. While 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, especially at Google. One of the issues that we hear from clients most often is difficulty delivering to the Inbox at Gmail and Google Apps hosted business domains.
- When Gmail was launched by Google just over 15 years ago, it was an invite-only beta email system. Today, Gmail is Google’s flagship B2C email product. It accounts for more than 35 percent of most B2C list distribution this year, up from 33 percent in 2018. For B2B senders, Google Apps comprised nearly 30 percent of the B2B list, up more than 6 percentage points year-over-year. This past year, we witnessed Gmail evolve with a flurry of new features and functionality, a fresh redesign, increased security, email annotations, and surpassing 1.5 billion users worldwide. * Google’s reputation system is often referred to as a “black box” because Google does not release specifics around how their filters work or provide feedback as to how to improve Inbox placement. They have discussed general information such as the importance of user engagement at various industry events and in their blog. We have also observed other behaviors that have helped us to understand how they filter mail. The most important factor in your Google reputation is engagement – how your recipients are interacting with the email that you are sending, however Google uses a number of other measures as well, such as scanning content to determine if the message is a mass mailing, user feedback (such as using the “this is spam” button), and machine learning which continuously updates Googles filtering protocols. Let's dig deeper on each of these. *findings reported by our partner, 250ok, in their blog post: https://250ok.com/email-deliverability/happy-15th-birthday-gmail/
- How do your recipients interact with the mail that you’re sending? Are they actively engaged and excited to receive that message: opening, clicking, replying? Or has their interest waned -- ignoring the email, deleting it without reading or worse – reporting it as spam? The more positive interactions your mail receives, the more likely it is to get delivered to the Inbox, so making sure that your audience is active and engaged is one of the best gifts you can give to your mail program. There are a number of ways that receivers like Google measure engagement. They look at the things we can track in Marketo, such as opens and clicks, but they also look at other things as well – did the recipient reply to the email? How long did they spend reading it? Did they read it multiple times? Have they added the sender to their address book? Are they looking for your mail in the spam folder and marking it "not spam?" That is a sign of positive engagement. It's not easy to dig through the spam folder. Most of us don’t even notice it! All of the ways that people interact with email are measured and used to determine if the mail was wanted and that information used to determine Inbox delivery.
- Google measures engagement both at a global level and at a user-specific level. If your subscriber has marked an email as spam, then it is likely that future emails from you will be delivered to that subscriber's spam folder even if your overall reputation is positive. However if a large enough segment of your audience marks your mail as spam, then your mail overall is more likely to end up in the spam folder. By the same token, if your mail starts getting delivered to the spam folder and your audience goes into their spam folder to remove it, that can result in your reputation improving and your mail moving back to the Inbox. That "this is not spam" vote is powerful stuff by Gmail standards.
- It's also true that Google uses automated processes to scan messages to determine whether they are one-to-one communication or mass mail. They also can recognize when an email is attempting to collect sensitive information (such as social security number or credit card numbers). In addition they use machine learning to continuously update their filtering protocols based on both sender and recipient behaviors.
- When identifying a sender and assessing that sender’s reputation, both domain and IP reputation play a part. Many ISPs look primarily at the reputation of the IP and secondarily at the reputation of the domain when determining a sender’s reputation, however Google looks primarily at the sender’s domain reputation with the IP reputation being a secondary factor. The benefit to this is that it means that your reputation is portable – when changing sending platforms you take your reputation with you. You still need to warm up a new IP at Gmail because the domain/IP pairing has changed, but you aren’t starting completely from scratch. On the other hand, it means that if your domain has suffered a reputation hit you will need to work to repair your reputation in order to get delivered to the Inbox. That also means that you can benefit from a subdomain strategy to manage the reputation of your mailstreams separately, even if you're mailing on a single dedicated IP. This is GREAT because Gmail recommends segmenting classes or types of mail using a subdomain strategy. For example, you may mail from news.brand.com and purchase.brand.com and offers.brand.com to keep your newsletters separate from your transactional mail and your promotions.
- Inbox delivery can also be impacted by the reputation of the domains in your links. For example, link shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl tend to have poor reputations due to being misused and abused to hide links with malicious software downloads or forms designed to collect personal information. As a result domains used in shortened links are often blacklisted which can result in your mail being sent to the spam folder, marked with a red “This mail is unsafe” banner, or blocked. There are domain based blacklists as well that can list domains used in your From email address or in links to web pages. Including domains that are blacklisted on the SpamHaus DBL, URIBL, or other widely used domain-based blacklists can impact your ability to reach the Inbox.
- Ok, let's talk about Gmail tabs. Ever since Gmail introduced the “tabbed Inbox” in 2013 marketers have been asking “How can I get delivered to the Primary tab?” The bad news is that there isn’t a good answer. Google has a proprietary algorithm that analyzes all emails sent to their users and determines which tab it should appear in. There is good news as well. First, Google considers all of the tabs to be “The Inbox” when it comes to delivery, so if you’re showing up in the Promotions tab, that means you still have a positive reputation! In addition. there have been several studies performed since the release of the tabs that show that marketing messages delivered to the Promotions tab rather than the Primary tab have improved open rates because they’re where the recipient expects them to be. That bears repeating. Don't panic if your mail is in the promotions tab. Consumers are savvy and the studies show that promotions placement is having a net positive impact on engagement! And by the way, Google recently announced annotations for mail in the Promotional tab. Annotations use recipients’ interest to highlight and group the most relevant email promotions at the top of the tab. There are a number of customizable elements with annotations such as sender logo URL, single image preview URL, and expiration date. Our partner 250ok has a great blog post (included in the resources slide at the end of this webinar) with all the details.
- So what do you do if you find that your mails are getting delivered to the spam folder at Google? There are a few steps to take to help repair your reputation. First, monitor your domain and IP reputation through Google Postmaster Tools. We'll take a look at them in just a minute. Then send to the most engaged segment of your audience. Monitor the results using the Email Deliverability power pack. Once you see your mail delivering to the Inbox, re-engage the dormant subscribers. All the while, you'll want to keep your mail clean – make sure it’s properly authenticated and that there are no issues with your HTML that may cause the mail to render in unexpected ways,
- Google offers Postmaster Tools to help monitor your sender reputation with Google. You can view a number of different metrics – IP or domain reputation, spam reports (by percentage), and other metrics that can help you diagnose why your mail might be getting delivered to the spam folder. It’s also a great resource for tracking progress as you work to repair your reputation and get moved back to the Inbox. I'm going to tell you, the tools are an indicator that you're having problems, but don't count on them telling you what the problems are specifically. Sure they'll highlight a spike in complaints (presuming your mail is delivering to the inbox so complaints are tracked) but other than "bad/low/medium/high" reputation indicators you're not going to find the silver bullet here.
- Because user engagement plays such a significant role in determining Inbox placement, the best way to course correct if you see your mail being delivered to the spam folder is to temporarily restrict your sending to the most engaged portion of your audience. We recommend focusing on the people who have opened or clicked an email in the last 30 days. By targeting this group and temporarily suspending sending to people who are less engaged, you are sending a message: that you are listening to your audience and that their response is important to you. As an example, I worked with a client whose audience was largely Gmail. They had been seeing decreasing open rates for some time and upon digging further discovered that they were being delivered to Gmail’s spam folder. While working with them I determined that a significant number of their subscribers had not interacted with any mail in more than 9 months. Working together we restricted their sending to Gmail recipients to only people who had opened or clicked an email in the last 30 days. Within a week, their seed tests showed delivery to the Inbox and their open rates started increasing. We slowly reintroduced the less active segments of their list until they started to see a dip in open rates. At that point they determined their risk tolerance and decided to implement a reengagement campaign for the people who were still unresponsive. Now, not all changes happen that quickly but if the earlier you identify the warning signs and make changes, the better.
- In order to have visibility into not only your delivery but your inbox placement, use an inbox monitoring tool like the Email Deliverability Power Pack. This, combined with the Google Postmaster Tools will help you see the changes to your reputation at Gmail and know when your Inbox delivery improves. Monitoring your opens and clicks within Marketo using either the Email Analytics reports or Email Insights will give you another measurement of improvement. As a general rule, as your Inbox delivery rates increase so should your open rates.
- Once your mail is being delivered to the Inbox, it’s time to reach out to the subscribers who weren’t engaging previously to recapture their interest. It is likely that the reason they weren’t opening your mail was because they weren’t seeing it due to it getting delivered to the spam folder. Once that issue is addressed, it’s time to give them the opportunity to interact with you again. It’s best to start slowly to ensure that you maintain your successful Inbox delivery and determine the point at which the risk to sending to the unengaged portion of your audience is greater than the rewards. Our Deliverability Consulting team can help you build a plan to welcome these users back into the program while minimizing the risk to your reputation. The lesson here: When working through a tricky spam delivery issue at Gmail, focus on your engaged audience and stay the course. You may not see an immediate shift from spam delivery to inbox, but with time and consistency, you will see movement. Once you see your mail delivering to the Inbox, re-engage the dormant subscribers, gingerly. This is NOT the time to try to win back EVERY Gmail subscriber ever. It's time to take a measured approach to win back focused on the least risky and stop re-engagement once you see indicators of spam delivery or declining engagement. We will have an entire episode dedicated to re-engagement in a future session, so stay tuned!
- Last on our list of Tips/Tricks: Keeping it clean. This has a multi-faceted meaning. Rendering tools like the Design portion of the Email Deliverability Power Pack will help you ensure your HTML is rendering as expected. Different email clients read and render HTML differently so ensuring that your carefully coded emails appear to your recipients as expected will encourage them to engage with your content. Use responsive design to ensure that your emails will render better on mobile devices. Be aware that messages over 102KB will be clipped by Gmail and may impact your subscriber interaction with the message. Avoid URL shorteners as they've been abused by spammers and may carry negative reputation. The List Unsubscribe feature is configured by default within Marketo and is included with all outgoing campaign sends. When present, this feature allows a recipient to unsubscribe when using the “this is spam” button in Gmail. When the user marks a message as spam, they will see an additional dialogue asking if they want to unsubscribe. If they click “yes” then Gmail uses the List Unsubscribe to send Marketo a notification of the request. This notification is received and processed by our system and the recipient is unsubscribed so that you don’t continue to send mail to someone who has marked you as Spam and helps ensure that you are sending mail to people who want it. As noted earlier, an engaged and well permissioned list is critical for success at Gmail. Opt-in is required by Gmail, while Double Opt-In is preferred. While Google cannot necessarily see that someone has opted in, they can see if your content includes opt-in confirmations. They also use user behavior to determine if a mail is wanted – the more people interact the clearer it is that they wanted your message. Having an unengaged list sends the message that your mail is either not well permissioned or doesn’t provide enough value to your subscribers that they want to spend the time reading it. Other indicators of poor permission include high spam complaint rates and high invalid address rates. Ensuring that your mail is properly authenticated is another way to keep it clean. There are three main standards of authentication. The first is SPF which, at its heart, states that it’s ok for the IPs named in the SPF record to send on behalf of the domain the record is published for. You can also specify whether a failure should be considered a “hard” fail – as in “if it doesn’t pass, I definitely didn’t send it!” or a “soft” fail, or “if it doesn’t pass, I probably didn’t send it but there are legitimate reasons why it might fail.” DKIM is a cryptographic protocol which signs the body your email and selected parts of the header. The signature is included in the “DKIM signature” part of your headers and the public key to decrypt the signature is published in a DNS record. Ultimately this allows you to assert responsibility for the message and validates the domain identity. It ensures the message has not been altered during transmission. By default, Marketo signs DKIM for all of our clients with a Marketo domain, however if you have added your sending domain to Marketo under the Admin – Email – SPF/DKIM section of the UI and published a DKIM record that shows as “verified” In the application, then Marketo will also sign using your domain and published key as the primary DKIM signature. Both of these are great and have gained wide acceptance since they were introduced a number of years ago. The downside from the receiver perspective is that they don’t dictate what should be done with a message that fails authentication. This is where DMARC comes in. DMARC allows you to publish a record in DNS stating what you would like to happen with mail that doesn’t pass SPF or DKIM. You can choose to specify that you want the mail handled as normal. This allows you to collect reporting so you can see where your authentication might need to be buttoned up. The next option is a quarantine policy – basically asking the receiving server to place the mail in the spam folder if it is not properly authenticated. Lastly you can specify that you want all mail that isn’t properly authenticated to be rejected. This allows you to protect your domain by making it harder for bad actors to spoof it and also helps increase trust on the part of the receivers as they know that you’ve taken steps to ensure that your mail is properly authenticated. While DMARC is not as widely adopted as SPF and DKIM at this time, Google and other ISPs are pushing senders to move to having a DMARC policy as it provides more protection for both you and the receivers.
- To recap, in order to maintain or repair your reputation at Google, you’ll want to: Make sure you are monitoring your reputation using the Google Postmaster Tools. This can give you an early warning that there are issues so that you can take immediate action to correct them. Ensure that you are sending to engaged subscribers. We understand (and so does Google!) that subscriber interest has an ebb and flow and that people may not open or engage with every piece of email from a sender. That’s to be expected. But the more engaged your audience, the clearer it is to Google that you’re delivering value and the better your Inbox delivery will be. When you see subscribers who have gone quiet, stopped responding, or who have never responded at all, target them for re-engagement. We can work with you to develop a plan to reach out to those subscribers in a way that won’t negatively impact your hard-earned Inbox delivery. Lastly, keep it clean – make sure your HTML is clean and renders as expected in Google (and other email clients!), make sure your mail is authenticated and you have a published DMARC record to enforce that authentication, and send only to people who have directly expressed interest by opting in to your program.
- So, we know that engagement is key for Gmail. What could be better than driving engagement directly within your email with the newest feature, AMP? AMP for Gmail is in early release. It allows senders to build dynamic and interactive email, and allows users to engage with content to take quick actions like take a survey, RSVP to events, and personalize their content. In this example we can see how useful AMP is in helping me search listings for apartment rentals. I can browse the catalog of listings within the email, search through the photos, and likely find my new place fast, all without leaving my inbox. But in order to take advantage of AMP, your mail must be delivered to the Inbox. We hope our session today has you empowered to tackle Gmail and Google Apps Deliverability. We’ll leave you with resources and answer any questions you may have. Thanks for joining us today!
- If you want to learn more about deliverability to Google, please see these resources as a great starting point.
- Does Gmail look at IP or domain reputation? Good question, and the answer is both, and more! Not only does Google look at the reputation of your sending domain and IP, they also look at the reputation of the domain you use to sign DKIM and domains in your links. All of these can influence your Inbox placement at Google so it is important to ensure that you avoid using things like link shorteners which can negatively impact your deliverability. Do Gmail and GoogleApps use the same filtering? Great question! Their algorithms are similar but GoogleApps allows for administrators to customize their filtering based on their organizations leads which introduces some variability in Inbox placement between Gmail and GoogleApps. Both systems rely heavily on user engagement and recipient behavior so things that work to improve delivery for one will help with the other as well. Does Marketo support AMP? Presently AMP is in early release with only a handful of ISP partners supporting it, including Gmail and Outlook. Verizon Media is working on it and Mail.ru will support it longer term. There are only a few ESPs and Marketing Automation companies presently supporting AMP. Marketo is considering it for our roadmap. In addition, we are reviewing the roadmap for inclusion of Annotations support for the promotions tab. More to come! Are their resources to help me solve my Gmail deliverability problem? Absolutely! We have a wealth of deliverability content in the Community as well as a team of Deliverability experts whose charter is to help customers tackle the trickiest of deliverability issues.