Enter the new Google Postmaster compliance page — a helpful addition to Google Postmaster Tools that simplifies how you obtain your compliance data in all the important areas. 

What is Google Postmaster?

Before we delve into the latest update, let’s quickly recap what Google Postmaster is all about. Google Postmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that offers insights into a sender’s email performance within Gmail. It provides data on delivery errors, spam reports, sender reputation, and more, allowing senders to identify and address issues that may be affecting their email deliverability.

The importance of compliance

Compliance with email industry standards and best practices is crucial for maintaining a good sender reputation and ensuring inbox placement. Failure to comply with these standards can result in emails being filtered as spam or even blocked outright by email providers like Gmail.

The new compliance page

The new Google Postmaster compliance page is designed to help senders better understand and adhere to Gmail’s sending guidelines and policies. It provides a comprehensive overview of a sender’s compliance status, highlighting key issues that could impact deliverability.

Features and benefits

1. SPF and DKIM authentication
Ensure that your emails are properly authenticated using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), reducing the likelihood of them being flagged as spam or phishing attempts.

2. From header alignment
Verify that the “From” header in your emails aligns with the DKIM signature, enhancing trust and improving inbox placement.

3. DMARC authentication
Verifies that your DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) record is present and correct.

4. Encryption
Pass/fail result letting you know whether your emails are encrypted in transit, safeguarding sensitive information and enhancing security.

5. User reported spam rate
Lets you know if your user reported spam rate is below the acceptable threshold.

6. DNS Records
Verifies your domain’s DNS A and PTR records.

7. One-click unsubscribe
Coming soon – there are no published details on this but we assume this will be a pass/fail if your email header has a RFC 8058 compliant one-click unsubscribe or not.

8. Honor unsubscribe
Coming soon – again there are no published details but we would hazard a guess that this will monitor whether or not senders continue to email recipients after they have requested unsubscription.

How to access the compliance page

Accessing the compliance page is simple for senders who are already using Google Postmaster Tools. Look for the text link at the top of your Postmaster tools homepage:

The post The email marketer’s guide to Google Postmaster’s new compliance page appeared first on Cordial.

These changes may seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, as they essentially document and reinforce existing best practices. The updates provide a clearer framework for reasoned and documented policy-based blocking of non-conforming mail. The key requirements are as follows:

1. Authenticate email

Authentication of email messages is no longer just a best practice; it is now a requirement for successful inbox placement. Marketers should implement DKIM to meet this authentication standard. Whilst not an explicit requirement, both Google and Yahoo recommend that bulk message senders authenticate with SPF and DMARC as well as DKIM. DMARC can be set to “p=none”.

2. Make unsubscribing easy

Bulk-sending platforms are urged to implement list-unsubscribe, emphasizing support for one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058) or the “mailto” unsubscribe method (RFC 2369). This is in conjunction with a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe link in the body of the email. 

3. Ensure wanted mail is sent

Maintaining low spam complaint rates demonstrates that the emails sent are wanted. Google specifically warns that high spam complaint rates (>0.3%) may result in blocking at Gmail. Yahoo Mail already blocks some emails based on high complaint rates, and this announcement could be Yahoo’s way of making the requirement of a low complaint rate more transparent.

Additional resources

Both Google and Yahoo have released statements directly addressing these changes:

Yahoo: More Secure, Less Spam: Enforcing Email Standards for a Better Experience

New Gmail protections for a safer, less spammy inbox

What this means for email marketers

Email marketers should follow the implementation requirements set by their email send platforms. Paying close attention to authentication best practices, ensuring proper DKIM implementation, and avoiding practices that could lead to high spam complaint rates are critical. Including an unsubscribe link and exploring list-unsubscribe or list-unsubscribe-post support, if applicable, is also recommended. Email marketers should sign up for Google Postmaster Tools to monitor spam complaint rates directly.

What action does a Cordial client have to take?

Very little! Cordial already set clients up to meet these requirements, so other than ensuring your mail is wanted and keeping the spam complaints rate below the 0.3% threshold, there is no action required. Detail of how Cordial meets these requirements below:

Easy unsubscribe: Cordial incorporates the one-click unsubscribe via the mailto method (RFC 2369)

Authentication: Sending domains that are delegated to Cordial are set up with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC as standard. Clients who choose to manage their own sending domain will be supplied with the required authentication records. For more information on domain delegation please see our knowledge base article.

The post Google and Yahoo unveil new email sender requirements: What you need to know appeared first on Cordial.

Watch the webinar:

Maximizing deliverability

Deliverability is imperative to your email campaign’s success – it determines whether your brand’s messages reach customers. What factors influence deliverability, and how can you ensure emails end up in inboxes? These are the most critical considerations:

Building a positive sending reputation

Sending reputation is like a golden ticket to the inbox. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) evaluate various factors, such as your sending IP, domain, and content quality, to determine your reputation as a sender. It’s crucial to build and maintain a positive sending reputation.

Maintaining a low percentage of bounced emails is essential since high bounce rates indicate poor list hygiene and can negatively impact sending reputation. By regularly cleaning email lists and removing invalid or inactive email addresses, you can enhance deliverability and build a positive sending reputation.

Deliverability dos and don’ts

Do create personalized and relevant content that engages subscribers and compels them to interact with emails.

Don’t ignore authentication protocols like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). This is crucial for establishing your brand’s legitimacy as a sender. These protocols verify the authenticity of emails and help ISPs recognize that messages are from a trusted source.

Do respect unsubscribe requests. By making it easy for subscribers to opt out of email lists and promptly honoring their preferences, you demonstrate good sender practices and build trust with ISPs and subscribers.

Mastering subscriber lifecycle management

Subscriber lifecycle management is the strategic approach to nurturing and engaging with email recipients throughout their journey. From initial sign-up to re-engagement or sunsetting inactive subscribers, effective lifecycle management is crucial for maintaining healthy email lists. 

The power of re-engagement

Re-engaging inactive subscribers can significantly impact an email campaign’s success. Crafting attention-grabbing subject lines and compelling content is vital for grabbing the attention of inactive subscribers and enticing them to open emails. Personalization and tailored incentives, such as exclusive experiences or relevant content, can also play a significant role in encouraging inactive subscribers to re-engage.

Sunsetting inactive subscribers

Sometimes, parting ways with inactive subscribers is necessary to maintain healthy email lists and improve overall engagement. Defining inactivity criteria is a crucial first step in sunsetting inactive subscribers. This could be a certain period of time since their last engagement or a specific action, such as not opening or clicking any emails within a defined timeframe. Segmenting inactive subscribers separately allows you to target them specifically with a sunsetting campaign or strategy.

Creating a dedicated sunsetting campaign is essential to re-engage inactive subscribers before removing them from lists. Compelling subject lines, personalized incentives, and exclusive content can entice inactive subscribers to re-engage and take action.

Monitoring metrics and data hygiene

Tracking engagement metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions is crucial to evaluate the success of re-engagement and sunsetting strategies. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of email campaigns and help refine strategies for better engagement.

Optimizing email marketing campaigns and monitoring engagement metrics allows you to identify trends and patterns in subscriber behavior. By analyzing open rates, you can gauge the level of interest generated by subject lines. Click-through rates indicate the effectiveness of email content in driving recipients to take action. Conversion rates provide insights into the ultimate goal campaigns, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or completing a form.

Data hygiene is another critical aspect of subscriber lifecycle management. Regularly cleaning and updating email lists helps maintain a higher deliverability rate and improves overall engagement metrics. Removing inactive and unresponsive subscribers ensures that you’re targeting an interested audience and reduces the chances of emails being marked as spam.

Putting it all together

Achieving deliverability success and mastering subscriber lifecycle management are essential for maximizing the effectiveness of email marketing efforts. By implementing these insights, you’ll be equipped to create compelling content, build a positive sending reputation, engage subscribers effectively, and maintain healthy email lists.

Mastering email through deliverability and subscriber lifecycle management is an ongoing process. Continuously evaluate and refine strategies based on the metrics and data you gather. Regularly review and update content, authentication protocols, and list hygiene practices to adapt to changing trends and maintain a strong sender reputation.

The post Mastering email through deliverability and subscriber lifecycle management appeared first on Cordial.

Email marketers implement IP warming to establish their reputation with internet service providers (ISPs). This process helps to ensure that emails reach the recipient’s inbox and don’t end up in their spam folder. By warming IPs, marketers can improve deliverability rates, maximize open rates, and ultimately drive more conversions.

Why do you need to do IP warming?

IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the number of emails sent from a specific IP address over a period of time to build a positive reputation with ISPs. It’s important for marketers to warm their IPs before sending out large volumes of emails, as failure to do so will likely lead to their emails being blocked or junked.

While this may seem like a tedious task, the benefits of IP warming for marketers are numerous:

• Email acceptance rates will improve
• Emails will reach the inbox rather than the spam folder
• ISPs will learn to trust you as a legitimate, responsible sender
• Subscribers will have more opportunity to engage with your emails
• You will see a better ROI from your email marketing campaigns

How long can IP warming take for enterprise brands?

A good estimate is it takes roughly 30-45 days to warm a set of IPs. However, there are many variables at play that can affect the time it takes, such as:

• Data hygiene: The quality of your data can have a huge impact on the outcome of the ramp plan. Hitting lots of traps, disengaged or churned subscribers, and typo addresses will negatively impact your reputation with the ISPs. It is advisable to run your data through a cleaning tool prior to ramping and to only target those who have recently engaged.
• Frequency: The frequency of which you send is important. Having a regular cadence of sending will assist in keeping the process on track. Having multiple days of inactivity causes the IPs to cool down and also trigger a red flag at the ISP for abnormal sending patterns.
• Volume: The size of your audience comes into play. Of course, the larger the database the larger the pool of IPs that are required — and the longer it will take to get the IP fully warmed to your business as usual send volume.
• Content: During the ramp process you may need to send more campaigns than you usually would. You should plan ahead and make sure you have enough good content ready to send so that your subscribers continue to engage.

Example of promotional campaign warm-up plan:

Common terms for your teams to know during the IP warming process

There are a number of terms that you will likely come across while navigating through the IP warming process:

• Sender reputation: Your sender reputation is essentially a score created by the ISPs against your IP/domain to determine whether you are a good, responsible sender. Microsoft and Gmail have tools that allow you to see what your reputation is in their eye.
• Email validation: Email validation involves use of a tool that checks the syntax, spelling, and, in some cases, mail exchange (MX) records of the recipient domain to see if it actually exists.
• Soft bounce: A soft bounce is generally a temporary error, such as a full mailbox, where the receiving ISP cannot accept the email at this time but may accept it later.
• Hard bounce: A hard bounce is when the email is permanently rejected due to reasons such as the recipient domain does not exist or the account is no longer valid.
• Blacklists: There are a number of not-for-profit organizations that will put you on a blacklist and make that information available to the ISPs if you are deemed as spamming and/or have poor data acquisition processes.
• SNDS: Smart Data Network Services is a free reporting tool provided by Microsoft where you can monitor the reputation of your dedicated IPs and request support for deliverability issues.
• GPT: Google Postmaster Tools is a reporting platform provided by Google to see how they view your IP and domain reputation. You can request support and read about best practices.

The following three items are all authentication methods that can be used in conjunction with each other to help stop spammers from sending phishing messages:

• SPF: Sender policy framework
• DKIM: Domain Keys Identified Mail
• DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance

Best practices for IP warming

In order to give yourself the best chance to be successful in building a good long standing reputation you can start by following these steps:

• Authentication: When setting up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, you are immediately showing the ISPs that you are who you say you are and are actively taking steps to ensure your subscribers are not phished from your domain.
• Segmentation: Sending emails to only those subscribers who are engaged with your emails will ensure your reputation builds quickly and keeps the negative interactions (spam complaints and unsubscribes) to a minimum.
• Content: Make sure you are sending emails with relevant and interesting content to your subscribers.
• Subject line: While open rates are now hard to measure, it is still worth investing time into creating exciting subject lines that will draw the attention of the subscriber.
• Reporting: Keeping a close eye on performance by domain group (Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo ,and Global) will help you quickly identify if you are under performing at any of the ISPs.

IP warming is an essential part of any email marketing strategy, as it helps marketers to establish a positive reputation with ISPs and improve deliverability rates. By following the steps outlined above, marketers can ensure that their emails reach the recipient’s inbox instead of their spam folder and maximize open rates and conversions.

Ultimately, IP warming can be a powerful tool for email marketers if done correctly. By taking the time to prepare and execute the process properly, marketers can reap the rewards of improved deliverability rates and overall better email performance.

Imagine a faster migration to activate your customer data

Your marketing team relies on data, but your marketing tech was not built with flexibility in mind. If legacy clouds, like Salesforce, Adobe, or Oracle, are holding you back, you owe it to yourself to upgrade to a modern marketing platform with Cordial’s Architect for Migration.

• Reduce your migration time by 40% to accelerate value.
• Save $50K in migration costs with a team to support you.
• Earn 7x revenue with trigger messaging vs. promotional.

Learn how in our Migration Acceleration Guide.

The post IP warming best practices for enterprise brands appeared first on Cordial.

If you have worked in email marketing long enough, you are likely to have heard a tale of woe about someone, at some time, having all of their emails blocked due to careless behavior, such as buying a list of data from a classified site.

The service Spamhaus provides is incredibly valuable in keeping us all safe on the internet. Spamhaus has been protecting businesses from phishing, botnets, malware, and spam for over 20 years. However, as far as mainstream email marketing goes, they have been relatively off the email marketers’ radar for the last couple of years.

That is until late July, when Spamhaus recalibrated and sprung back into view, where their new detection techniques and data sets have triggered a tidal wave of “informational listings.”

What caused the trigger?

In their words: Poor. Sending. Practices.

Spamhaus has written a great article on this, with insight into the poor sending practices that will cause marketers to receive an informational listing. It also gives advice on the actions to take to stop listings from happening in the first place.

So what is an informational listing?

Simply, it’s a warning to email marketers who have let their standards slip. It gives marketers advance notice that they are at risk of being fully listed on the SBL, which is the Spamhaus Block List.

What are the consequences of an informational listing?

There are no immediate consequences to receiving an informational listing. Marketers should take this as an opportunity to clean up their programs, review their data, and adjust their practices.

While there is no given timeframe on when an informational listing will become a full SBL listing, it would be wise to take swift action. We can assume the notice period won’t last forever. Should you be fully listed, you can expect to see around a 70% bounce rate on your emails. Ouch.

What to do if you are listed?

• Review your engagement window — a year of inactivity is too long. An email address that never engages should be removed long before the end of your sunset period.
• Consider how you process your bounces. A “domain does not exist” bounce or “over quota/mailbox full” bounce are clear indicators that this is not a correctly formatted or primary email address and should be removed.
• Look at validating your new subscribers via double opt-in, or use an onsite validation service that will check the format and domain spelling at the point of signup.

Finally, if you have been listed, how do you request delisting?

Once you have taken the necessary actions to bring your sending practices up to a high standard, you can request to be delisted at: check.spamhaus.org.

The post Who is Spamhaus — and what’s an informational listing? appeared first on Cordial.

Executive Summary

• Apple announced a list of changes to Apple Mail – this means any mail that is read on an Apple device using their native mail app (I use this for Gmail and Yahoo, as an example).
• The changes are meant to improve consumer privacy.
• We expect these changes to go into effect when iOS 15 is shipped in September. Currently a few companies are acting as beta testers, and one is our close partner, Sparkpost.
• While these changes are not particularly friendly to the marketer, the most important metrics that we track will remain unchanged.
• There are still unknowns related to these changes – know that we are your partner and will help you through whatever is to come.

Summary of the Proposed Changes

Apple’s announcement detailed the following information related to marketers:

Mail Privacy Protection
(Note: Mail Privacy Protection is not turned on by default. Users will be presented with an option to enable the feature when upgrading to iOS 15.)

“Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. [It prevents] senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

They will do this by only showing regionalized IP addresses rather than recipients’ specific IP addresses, loading and caching images before the recipient actually opens the email. So, why does this matter to marketers? Let’s dig in.

How important is Apple Mail anyway?

According to Sparkpost, who delivers ~40% of the world’s commercial emails, “38.1% of all opens and clicks coming from one of the Apple Mail app clients, with 25.7% on iPhone, 9.6% on desktop and 2.8% on iPad. This is second only to Gmail (on mobile and desktop) as the largest market share of any device/client family.” Note that if a user is on an Apple device, but using the Gmail or other mail app, the privacy controls we are talking about here will not impact your tracking.

Wait, will my opens go down or up?

At first, you may think that your unique opens will go down, but in fact they could go up, or be artificially inflated due to images loading before a recipient opens the email (open tracking relies on a pixel in your email being fired at the time of open). This is going to make using this metric going forward as a measure of your program’s success difficult.

Should I care if I can’t track a user’s IP address properly?

If we can’t track IP addresses we can’t use this data to help us personalize content specific to a user’s location (think weather-related content, closest store, etc.). We can still use zip code and other first-party data, but some companies rely on IP to determine an email recipients’ location at the time of open (in case they are traveling, etc.).

What if I use open-time personalization services?

There has been a lot of speculation about personalization that relies on content being rendered upon open. Clearly, if content is rendered hours, or even days before an actual open it could be inaccurate (countdown timers, as an example, may be a thing of the past). We, and the vendors that provide these services to a number of our clients, are going to watch this very closely on your behalf, so stay tuned for more information as it comes available.

How will this impact my email deliverability?

Today, we often use opens as a proxy for user engagement, which can govern when we choose to remove a subscriber from a database for inactivity (since this can lead to poor deliverability over time). If we can’t rely on this metric going forward, clicks and transactions will become more important, and we’ll need to find new and different ways to track email engagement. As well, if you ever need to move or add to the IPs that you mail from, this could change the way we build IP “ramp” plans which today rely at least partly on a list’s email engagement, a.k.a. opens.

Will this impact email testing/experiments?

It could if you use opens to determine the winner of subject line tests, etc. The good news here is that Cordial allows you to use other metrics when you set up tests, and we have always offered opens, clicks, orders and revenue as metrics to help you determine the “winner” of a test.

That was a lot. Is there anything else I need to worry about?

Apple has a couple of additional features that will be available with iCloud Plus subscriptions that could impact email marketers. In short, Apple will provide users the ability to obfuscate their true email addresses to marketers, and potentially the same for URLs within your emails. This sounds scary, but let’s take a wait-and-see approach on this and understand user adoption before we worry about this. Let’s focus on user engagement and continuing to provide your subscribers with amazing and relevant content.

Is there anything I can do today to prepare for these changes?

Actually, there is.

• If you don’t currently track transactions and revenue with Cordial, run, don’t walk to your CSM and get this up-and-running ASAP. You will want/need transactions as a proxy to opens along with clicks. We will also want to track transactions for as long as possible before the changes are made with Apple to have as much historical comparison data as possible.
• If you haven’t heard the hype about zero and first-party data, welcome to the party! This is the time to collect as much user information as you can before changes are made with Apple… and before the next changes are made. The best defense is a strong offense when it comes to data collection.
• Really think about your email program and how to best engage your subscribers. There are so many things every marketer can do to increase user engagement. Let us help you audit your program and ensure we’re not missing opportunities to gain long-term, loyal email subscribers.
• Let’s talk about clicks – click activity will also become more important. Now is the time to work on optimizing this metric and ensuring that your templates have click opportunities above the fold, and that your calls to action are strong and visible.
• Lean on your Cordial team! This is what we train for.

Closing Comments

As Cordial’s CRO I lead our Deliverability efforts as well as manage our Client Experience team. I can tell you that we are your biggest advocates and will continue to work tirelessly to ensure your email program is truly best-in-class. So, let’s focus on how to continue to improve our programs and not focus on what we can’t control. Rest assured that your Cordial team will continue to update you on these changes Apple is making, and any and all other changes that could have an impact on your programs, your brand, and your business.

The post What the upcoming changes to Apple iOS mean to you appeared first on Cordial.

In May 2019, the team at Branded Online found themselves migrating over a handful of new email programs. Eight to be exact. One of these brands was the popular retail brand, Bebe. Like many other retail clothing brands, Bebe sends a lot of messages—to the tune of 400,000 to 1.4M each day. When it came time to ramp up their promotional email volume on Cordial, the triple-threat worst case scenario became a reality. Key performance indicators of open rates, CTORs, and revenue were marginal at best. So, how did this happen?

During the ESP ramping process, there are several metrics to keep a watchful eye on. One of these crucial metrics is Google Domain Reputation, as reported by Google Postmaster Tools. Why is this important? It’s because this metric encapsulates the entirety of how reputable Google sees a brand. The concept of domain reputation is specific to a few ISPs, with Google being the primary one. Google evaluates each sending domain individually, so brands who share an IP address don’t conflate their domain reputations.

With each reputation tier, the amount of emails allowed into the recipient’s inbox increases:

• A “high” reputation means that as a sender, your mail is properly authenticating, receiving minimal spam complaints, being consistently regarded as sending wanted and relevant content, and recipients are interacting favorably with your brand.
• Conversely, with a “low” or “bad” reputation, recipients are either responding negatively to emails, or the brand hasn’t been taking into account metrics like open rates, hard bounces, and spam complaints when sending. In this case, the ISP has no choice but to route mail to the spam folder.

In the early stages of ramping Bebe’s sending domain, the contacts who were the most likely to open and click a message did not engage favorably with the brand. As a result, they received a fair number of spam complaints, their open rates were subpar, and their domain reputation dropped. I should mention: while it’s much easier to maintain a healthy reputation than to repair a poor one, a poor one can in fact be repaired. It’s just a longer road.

By reducing send frequency to Gmail contacts, hyper-focusing on the contacts who had actually engaged (vs. those predicted to have engaged), and spinning up a dashboard to track growth and performance of the troubled segment—Bebe’s domain reputation did improve. The brand’s average open rates went from less than 2% at Gmail to over 12.5%, even hitting peaks of 20%, in just four months.

As a sender, the most important thing about the sustainability of your email program is your domain reputation. If your program philosophy is centered around “batch and blast,” your domain reputation and subscribers will likely suffer as a result. This is where the power of data and the Cordial platform can make a quantifiable impact. With the flexibility to send automated messages based on individual data points and customer attributes, Cordial clients like Branded Online and Bebe rely less on the traditional, generic batch emails.

Secondly, monitor your metrics and monitor them well. Nothing tells you more about your domain reputation than open rates and subscriber trends. Are your contacts falling out of the program after a certain number of days? Are you seeing a particular segment underperforming compared to others? These are contributing factors when gaining a clearer understanding of your domain reputation.

So there it is. Paying attention to domain reputation is one key step to becoming customer obsessed and differentiating yourself from the hundreds of other brands trying to do the same thing.

The post What is domain reputation and why it’s important for every marketer appeared first on Cordial.

You should expect to receive some complaints in most promotional mailings you send. If you don’t generate complaints, I’d say you’re either the best sender in the history of senders, or some of your mail is not receiving good inbox placement and not being seen by the recipients.

Before we dive in, let me cover some basic spam/abuse complaint info. Abuse complaints are reported back to the sender via a feedback loop (FBL). This happens when a recipient clicks on the abuse or spam button located within the internet service provider (ISP) email interface or the “report abuse” button within the message footer.

A few other things to note: 

• Not every ISP has a feedback loop that reports abuse complaints.
• Gmail does things differently. Instead of individual complaints you get a percentage of complaints for the mailings sent that day.
• Some ISPs don’t use an FBL but still allow their customers to click the spam button. When the complaints hit a certain level, the ISP will end up blocking the mailing. They often provide the reason for the block as receiving too many abuse complaints.

Generally speaking, abuse complaints happen for three reasons, often a combination of reasons #2 and #3:

1. The recipient doesn’t remember signing up for the mailing or doesn’t recognize who it is they are receiving mail from
2. The content is not relevant at the time of the send
3. There has been a change in the frequency of the mailings

It’s also not very difficult to reduce complaints—here are some things I’d recommend:

Don’t send anything to anyone who has not explicitly signed up for your messages. Make sure opt-in forms are clear upon purchase so you can capture email addresses and follow compliance regulations.

Only send email about things or topics that each recipient wants to receive (read: what they signed up for), when they want it. This is where personalization and features within your email service provider (ESP) enable you to target within your messages. Once they provide data on what they like, you can send them content based on their preferences to avoid opt-outs and spam complaints.

Honor your frequency agreement at the time of signup. If a customer signs up at your site under the impression that they’ll get a newsletter every week on Thursday, and a weekly sale email—don’t send them four mailings a week. Set and keep expectations. If you’re looking to increase the send frequency, create a poll and ask recipients if they’d like additional mailings, and include an email preference center. You can reduce spam complaints by allowing the recipients to control the volume of messages they receive.

Move the opt-out link to the top of the email. It may feel counterintuitive, but you should make it easy to unsubscribe. We’re all familiar with scrolling to the bottom of a message to click on a link in a size 6 font. Remember if someone opts out, they can always opt back in. If they click the abuse button, they can never receive email from you using that same address.

So, could you consider a spam complaint your friend? 

Yes, because they can provide you with clues as to how to confirm inbox placement, delivery, and the general interest levels of your audience. Let’s dive in.

Confirm inbox placement. Let’s say your message was delivered into the inbox, and the recipient flagged that message as spam. Most people don’t go into the spam folder and say “this message is spam.” Yes, you can look at your open rate and check to see the message was delivered into the inbox. The abuse complaint is another source confirming inbox delivery.

Discover delivery issues. Email experts sometimes overlook messages bouncing due to too many abuse complaints. Since not every ISP offers a feedback loop to process abuse complaints, these blocks (bounces) can be an indication there’s a problem. There are many reasons why emails bounce, but if you see an uptick in bounces by domain, investigate the reason. 

Indicate boredom or burnout. How do you know if your content is stale or if you are sending email too often? Lower open rates and higher abuse or unsubscribe rates can be signs of content fatigue, boredom, or burnout. 

Trigger a re-engagement campaign. Increased complaints or opt-outs indicate that it may be time to run your unengaged segment through a re-engagement campaign. Segment out older inactive addresses and begin a win-back program to get unengaged recipients back into the fold. This will also reduce the likelihood of this segment of subscribers rendering more spam complaints down the road.

While spam complaints can indeed be damaging to your overall reputation as a sender and should be avoided as often as possible, they can also provide valuable data and insight into how your recipients are reacting to your messaging. Regularly checking the results of your sends is an important part of a healthy program. Marketers should understand how each mailing performs. Which messages generate the highest abuse/unsubscribe metrics? What about days of the week—are complaints higher on Wednesdays or during a particular time of day? You get the idea.

Consider using Cordial to implement an automated re-engagement campaign if you notice an uptick in complaints or unsubscribes from a segment of your audience. And remember, any time you can ask a subscriber for more info about what and when they want to receive from a sender you absolutely should; as long as you are sure to respect their requests.

The post Spam complaints: Friend, foe, or both? appeared first on Cordial.

For instance, brands that sell snowboards or swimwear exclusively would be considered seasonal because the products are seasonal. But there are also service-based brands that are affected by seasonality. 

“Examples of such businesses include operators of vacation cottages, lawn care service businesses, and businesses that contract to do snow removal,” explain’s Inc.com’s Encyclopedia. “Extremely seasonal businesses may close down completely for part of the year or drastically scale back operations during their off-season, managing only basic services such as accounts payable and/or maintenance work.”

With this type of business model, the cutoff for how “old is an old email address” is much further out than what normal senders would consider old. It’s possible that a seasonal company may have many 12 to 16 month inactive addresses that become active. So, what do you do with seasonal brands’ databases? Let’s discover how.

Gather your data and start to dig

Most companies with warm-season products have off-season sales in the winter months,  while cold season products run holidays-in-July sales. In fact, it even seems that Black Friday is now 10 weeks out of the year… 

With all these seasonal caveats, your off-peak mailing data should provide plenty of metrics to digest. Once again, you are looking for the point when the inactivity leads to little or no business.

At this point we’ve created our re-engagement database and segmented that data into months inactive. Now we have a couple of big decisions to make: What are we going to send this new segment; and how often should we send whatever it is we decide to send?

How to craft content for a stellar win:back campaign

Without the risk of sounding completely obvious, there are multiple approaches to take. 

Strategy ideas:

• You can provide offers or discounts to motivate your inactive recipients. 
• You can list the benefits or reasons for staying with your company. You can use guilt to complete the call-to-action—”we miss you” messaging works here. 
• Finally, you can just tell them that they are going to be removed from your list unless they click the button or link. 
• Personalization is key to all of your messages. If you want someone to engage with your brand you’d be better off not starting with “Dear Sir/Madam.” 

We recommend you use all of these strategies at different times for different groups. But, if your normal emailings often include discounts then that takes this option off of the list. Giving a larger than normal discount might open a can of worms you may want to stay closed.

Let’s also not forget about A/B testing on subject lines and content. Regardless of your approach, you want to do some solid A/B testing on all of your messages. If you are going to do this work, let’s get the best results. 

Frequency 101: How often do you reach out to re-engage? 

The basic rule is, the older the email address, the fewer number of times you should send to that recipient. We want to get the word out without generating complaints. 

If we use a 9-month cutoff, then let’s consider the following segments:

• Segment 1, consisting of 10-12 months inactive, would receive 3 +1 messages.
• Segment 2, consisting of 13-15 months inactive, would receive 2 +1 messages.
• Segment 3, consisting of 16-18 months inactive, would receive 1 +1 messages.
• Segment 4, consisting of 19+ months inactive, would receive the +1 message.

The +1 message is the “you are removed from our list” emailing, which includes a “click here to continue to receive your mail.” Remember, this message is your last chance to include reasons and benefits to continue to receive your emails. Some recipients will get FOMO anxiety and click on the link!

Tools and templates to help you be agile

If this sounds like a lot of work: you’re right, it is. But have no fear, there are some tools that can help you in your quest. There’s technology that offers the ability to look at an individual recipient and determine the likelihood the address is about to leave based on inactivity. Another type of tech suggests different emotional words in the subject line to improve open rates based on previous success.

More good news: Cordial and our partners can offer you these tools, and more, to help you with your re-engagement campaign. If you’re curious on how we can help you, just book a time to chat with us here. 

If you’re looking for inspiration right now, let’s talk about subject lines and email content. As you know, the subject line is the first thing a recipient sees when they receive your email. Here’s a sampling of some of our favorites, and then more ideas for the email content itself.

Example subject lines:

• “We missed you” 
• “It’s been a while…” 
• “Was it something we said?” 
• “Come back and rediscover us today!” 
• “Come Back, We Think You’ll Love These…”
• “Sometimes you just need space.”
• “Why the cold shoulder?” 
• “Don’t Miss Your Free Birthday Reward!”  
• “Good friends are never forgotten!”

Re-engagement email content and campaign ideas:

Who knew Pinterest could be such an amazing place to find examples of successful win-back templates? Check out this curated board here. 

• These diverse examples of re-engagement campaigns are crush-worthy at the least, and easy for anyone to attempt at best. Check them out here and here.
• For more ideas on how to send great win-back email campaigns, check out this blog for some inspiration.

Hopefully you didn’t miss part 1 of this series where we tackled all the fundamentals of reengaging your email subscribers, the elements of a win-back campaign, and how to clean up your email list—if so, read it here!

The post How to manage your seasonal brand’s email database appeared first on Cordial.

For most companies, an email subscriber list sits in the corner growing each year, but not being used to its full potential… Are those cobwebs? Well, it’s time to dust them off.

In this two-part series, we’ll share best practices and how-tos to help you get your data back into tip-top shape by segmenting out inactive recipients from your database. Then we’ll dive into designing a re-engagement or win-back campaign. The time is now, what have you got to lose?

Cleaning your email list for win-backs

First things first, I want to highlight the word “campaign” in a re-engagement or win-back campaign. In the email space, a campaign means a long running program versus a single blast emailing. 

By cleaning up your email list, you can set up a self-feeding list of subscribers for re-engagement. Meaning, every month you should start setting aside a block of email addresses that’s considered too old or inactive to be included in your regular emailing list. These addresses are what you’ll use to begin the re-engagement campaign. We’ll share some recommendations on what parameters you should use to scrub that list further on in this post, so keep reading…

The purpose of the win-back campaign is twofold. The main reason is to get people to opt back into your program. The other is to reduce abuse or spam complaints. 

Your re-engagement campaign should allow recipients to opt out of your mailings by unsubscribing instead of hitting the spam abuse button. This allows those recipients the ability to opt back in to future emailings. Once they click the spam abuse button you are no longer able to send any email to that address. (Cue the doomsday music. Dun, dun, dun…)

Another benefit of getting rid of the dead weight of inactive recipients, is that this weight is impacting your open rate. Sending emails to inactive addresses impacts mailbox placement.

With re-engagement as your strategy, you want the recipient to perform two actions:

• Open the message
• Click on a link in the email

Anything other than both actions is considered a “no,” meaning the open by itself does not constitute an opt-in. Not opening the email is also considered a “no.” 

Two options for scrubbing your list

Now that you’ve determined you have to clean up your list, the next thing to determine is how old is too old? There are two options. 

First option:  Go with a blanket setting of six, nine, or 12 months of inactivity, which is the easier of the two. Here’s a step-by-step:

1. Pick a date and any inactive address older than that date falls into the re-engagement database. 
2. Once the date is selected, segment that new database by month inactive. 
3. If the cutoff was 9 months, then inside this database you should create a 10-month inactive segment, an 11-month inactive segment, a 12-month inactive segment continuing until you run out of addresses. 
4. These segments will be used to determine the frequency and order of your re-engagement emailings.

The second option requires a bit more research and work, let’s tackle that next.

Second option: Option two is a deep dive into your database which allows you to select a date based on your metrics. It requires a lot of digging, querying, and studying the data. If this sounds like too much work—see option one above. But, there are nuggets of gold to be discovered if you are willing to dig.

Determining when an address is inactive depends on your mailing frequency. Everyday senders will have different metrics, versus weekly senders or seasonal senders. The more frequently you send, the earlier you would/should consider an address inactive.

The goal of your quest is to find the date range when recipients stop doing whatever activity you want them to do. That date is determined when “opens” no longer lead to the expected behavior.

How to implement your strategy

The best way to start thinking about this is to use a tangible example:

The expected behavior of a “regular” email campaign is the recipient going to the website and purchasing something, right? Let’s call this the “buy rate.” Other expected behaviors might include making donations, completing a form, or generally acting on a call-to-action.

Looking at your data, you should determine: 

• Recipients who open your email once-per-week have a buy rate of “A”%.
• Recipients who open twice-a-month have “B”% buy rate.
• Recipients who open once-a-month have “C”% buy rate.
• Recipients who open at 60 days have a “D”% buy rate.

The further out in time you go, the more data you will have to determine the date. Splitting the months in half or by week will provide even more granular data. In addition, if you’re tracking visits to your website, that’s another metric worth digging into. 

By examining your data, you can also find the answers to questions like:

• What happens when customers receive an email, don’t click on a link but instead go to the site and buy something? 
• How often does this occur? 
• How long of a time period is it when people stop doing that behavior?

If this data is not available, let us know! We can help.

Let’s say after parsing through the spreadsheets and bar graphs, you’ve determined email addresses older than 8 ½ months are no longer considered productive. This means an ideal re-engagement campaign would include email addresses that are 7 ½ months inactive. The goal to win them back before they go “dark” at 8 ½ months.

Now that you’re hopefully feeling inspired and understand all the fundamentals of reengaging your email subscribers, the elements of a win-back campaign, and how to clean up your email list—stay tuned for part 2 next week where we’ll take a deep dive into seasonal email lists, and how to write the most effective re-engagement emails. 

For more content like this, follow Cordial on LinkedIn and sign up for our monthly newsletter. Better yet, if you’re curious how Cordial can help you win back your inactive customers, request a demo and we’ll show you how our team of messaging experts can help.

The post How to clean up your email subscriber list for win-back campaigns appeared first on Cordial.