best practices
I’m busy as a bee this week, with so much going on with work (and outside of work), that I’ve not been able to update the blog as much as I would like to. But, I can spare a few minutes to talk about helping a client out yesterday, connecting with them just after he running their first inbox tests and sharing understanding on how to interpret the deliverability results. We walked through this snapshot data showing what it can show, with an eye to identifying difficulties. This time around, like is so often the case, Microsoft was the main problem/focus area found. No mail delivered means they’re probably blocked at Outlook.com/Hotmail.com (but not Office 365). Even before the client checks for the text of bounce messages in their sending platform, we know that they’re going to look like this: 550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [x.x.x.x] weren’t sent. Please contact
Email list hygiene is like normal hygiene—it should be a regular part of your routine. Growing your subscriber list is a critical element of a strong email marketing program. But it’s equally important to complement those efforts with regular email list cleaning. No one wants to lose subscribers, but unengaged recipients can hurt your email […] The post Email List Hygiene: 5 Tips to Keep Your Lists Squeaky Clean appeared first on SendGrid.
Hey Klaviyo users! Here’s a simple thing you can do to help improve deliverability success when sending emails from Klaviyo.Klaviyo has this “dedicated sending domain” setting that relates to email authentication, specifically DKIM authentication. If you don’t turn it on, Klaviyo still authenticates your email messages, but you basically get authenticated as “one of the group of Klaviyo customers,” not as yourself.If you implement this “dedicated sending domain” fully, you basically end up authenticating mail as yourself, being seen by yourself at mailbox providers (in particular, Gmail) instead of just being seen as “one of the group of Klaviyo customers.”This is a domain reputation thing that makes it easier for Gmail and others to tell you apart from other senders. And if you send good and wanted mail, it’ll make that mail more likely to go to the inbox. It helps you stand apart from the crowd, in a good
The other day, I talked about the spam seemingly sent by a local aldermanic campaign here in Chicago. When I talked about this spam on Facebook, one of the folks pushing back attempted to lead me down an existential rabbit hole based on the theory that we just can’t know whether or not a given email message is spam. That it is literally impossible to know with absolute certainty whether or not a single email message is unsolicited. Which is yet another one of those (possibly) correct but (definitely) not very useful kind of responses. Let’s break it down.First, let’s get this out of the way. Yes, it’s absolutely true that there is no “this message is unsolicited” flag or email header in an email message, allowing anyone, at a glance, to immediately know, whether or not a given email message is spam or not.The recipient has a pretty good
Today’s guest post comes from Sebastian Kluth of the Certified Senders Alliance. This is cross-posted from Linkedin, with his permission. Thanks, Sebastian, for helping encourage us to start thinking about the possibilities for the future evolution of bounces! (And click here to learn more about the Certified Senders Alliance.)Bounces are a primary KPI and measurement unit in email marketing and email deliverability. A bounce provides delivery status notifications (DSNs – see RFC 3463).Basically, when we talk about bounces, we are thinking of the following standard definitions:Hard Bounce: a permanent delivery failure due to an invalid email address or non-existing domain name.Soft Bounce: a temporary delivery failure due to a full inbox, server downtime, or the message size exceeding limits.Very straightforward, very top level and very technical. The idea behind sending bounces was to inform the sending MTA about the delivery status to the recipient MTA via SMTP. SMTP status codes were
Impress customers with appointment confirmation emails. Twilio SendGrid walks you through some examples to use in your emails. The post How to Write the Best Appointment Confirmation Email (With Examples) appeared first on SendGrid.
Learn about conversion rate optimization (CRO), what it is, and how it can help your email program and customer acquisition strategies. The post What Is CRO? Your Guide to Everything You Need to Know appeared first on SendGrid.
What makes a great mass email? Learn how to send mass emails that get people excited about events, products, and more with Twilio SendGrid. The post How to Send a Mass Email appeared first on SendGrid.
What’s the difference between soft bounces vs. hard bounces and what causes them to occur? Learn about email bounces and why they happen. The post Email Bounce Management: Soft Bounces vs. Hard Bounces appeared first on SendGrid.
My Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz has put together the ultimate guide to email headers. It’s the perfect place to start to learn more about what email headers are, what is in them, and how you can use them for deliverability troubleshooting. This kind of expertise is what makes her a great deliverability consultant and we are lucky that she loves to share that expertise with us!Here’s links to all four entries in the “Guide to Email Headers Series,” all found over on the Kickbox blog.Part 1: What are email headers? What are email headers, how are they used, and how to find them?Part 2: Why are email headers important? 4 ways email headers can answer your deliverability issuesPart 3: How do I read email headers? General guidelinesPart 4: Email headers you should know: 13 Email Headers That Can Identify Deliverability IssuesLearn and enjoy!