guest post
TrueAccord’s Josie Garcia is a good friend and very savvy deliverability wizard who has helped many senders address inbox woes and data hygiene issues throughout her career. Currently she’s helping a debt collector improve their sending practices — very much a challenging industry from a deliverability perspective. When she told me of her recent successes, I asked her if she would be kind enough to put something together to share with the world, and she was kind enough to do so, leading to today’s post. Take it away, Josie. When a sender’s email program assigns different engagement levels to groups based on specific criteria, naturally, some groups will perform better than others. This can, at times, be challenging. Adding to the challenges, Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented stricter requirements for bulk senders, set to be enforced in 2024. If you use Gmail Postmaster Tools, and one of your domains
Today’s guest post comes from Steven Lunniss, Deliverability Lead for Cordial. Steven is a seasoned email marketing expert with over 15 years of experience – including six years working with top email service providers as well as nine years client-side.The goal of sunsetting is to focus your resources on engaged subscribers and maintain a healthy email list. As part of a “subscriber lifecycle strategy” methodology, it helps to boost deliverability success (and inbox placement) by boosting your engagement metrics. You’re boosting those engagement metrics by suppressing subscribers who aren’t engaging.It’s important to strike a balance between re-engagement efforts and the need to remove those unresponsive subscribers – you want to maximize engagement but not at the cost of throwing away live subscribers.How to properly sunset your inactive subscribers:Define Inactivity Criteria: Determine what qualifies as “inactivity” for your specific business. It could be a certain period of time (e.g., six months)
Florent Destors, Deliverability Manager at Marigold, recently found and shared some very good and timely information related to an increase of mailbox full (over quota) bounces that folks are seeing when sending to Microsoft domains. With his permission (thank you!), I’m sharing his info here:Florent writes:In case you noticed a drop these last weeks on your delivery rates towards Microsoft domains and see an increase in mailbox full bounces received, you should be aware that Microsoft recently changed their cloud storage calculation method.Starting February 1, 2023, cloud storage used across Microsoft 365 apps and services will now include Outlook.com attachments data and OneDrive data. This update may reduce how much cloud storage users have available to use with their OneDrive. If they reach their cloud storage quota, their ability to send and receive emails in Outlook.com will be disrupted.According to Microsoft, the new quota bar should have been gradually rolled
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
Will Easton is an expert email strategist and nonprofit fundraiser, and the webmaster of ethicalemail.org. He was recently laid off and looking for work, so feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn or by email to weaston@igc.org.Today’s topic? The deluge of fundraising spam you’re likely to receive after making a political contribution and handing over your email address.First, let me make it clear that I’ve managed email communities for generally progressive nonprofits, B2C companies & candidates throughout my career, so my focus here is on that side of the aisle. Republican email fundraising is a separate kettle of fish with its own problems, highlighted in this piece from the NY Times focusing on the Trump campaign … as well as a followup article pointing out that elderly donors to both parties are particularly susceptible to unethical tactics, and represent a disproportionate share of refunds requested for donations they don’t
Today’s guest post comes from my Kickbox colleague, Jennifer Nespola Lantz. Don’t forget to check out her posts over on the Kickbox blog. Take it away, Jen!Yesterday, a colleague shared a link, a much anticipated link, a link that adds clarity to a topic that caused some hair to catch on fire (mine in particular), some ire and anger, much speculation, and little support. That topic: Gmail’s Political Pilot Program or as Gmail has coined it Gmail Verified Sender Program Pilot (some speculate there are reasons for this, but let me learn my lesson and not talk about that just yet).I was hot on the topic when I first read about it and quick to comment judge. I was also quick to jump right into this newly shared link, filled with (what I hoped was) answers to some lingering questions. And what an enjoyable read it was. Not because it was
Today’s guest post comes from my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability at Kickbox, keeping us updated on a potentially upcoming Gmail spam filtering process change that is likely to have a great impact upon all of us. Take it away, Jen!On June 28th, I saw a news article by Axios reporting that “Google moves to keep campaign messages out of spam.” At first glance I was very surprised about the statement knowing all Gmail does to protect users and how hands off they tend to be (outside of the machines doing their magic.) What I originally defined as campaign messages was coming from a too in-the-weeds mental dictionary about email production. I always coined campaigns as a singular email marketing effort. And then I read it…”Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up
Today’s guest post is from deliverability expert Alison Gootee. She writes:I’m here to offer some empathy. If you’re experiencing difficulties delivering to Microsoft domains like Hotmail, Live, MSN, and Outlook, you’re not alone! Many industry veterans have reported similar struggles in their efforts to deliver even the best and most desired mail to Microsoft users in recent weeks. People with years (and decades) of experience are reporting longer remediation processes, requests going unanswered, and details being ignored. Microsoft has been in the game for a long time now, so I picture their mail filtering processes as a Rube Goldberg machine made of old rules, new patches, and conflicting priorities, held together by some Dunkaroos crumbs & Fruitopia that have been there since Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1996 (90s snacks were the best, you can’t change my mind). They’re fine with the way things work, though. It’s Microsoft’s world and we’re
Today’s guest post comes from my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability at Kickbox, keeping us updated on yet another change that affects email privacy and tracking. Take it away, Jennifer!🔔 Ding, ding, ding 🔔 More fun updates about privacy in email. But first, those sneaky ‘spy pixels’ in email are still out there plundering the email world. So to combat them, we have another competitor out there vehemently shaking their fist in their air at them.Full disclosure, I’ve been an active user and proponent of open tracking as a tool for deliverability, but because it’s early in the week, I thought it would be fun to play the antagonist.On January 20th, Bleeping Computer reported on ProtonMail’s introduction of their email tracker blocking system. ProtonMail’s support page confirms that their new “enhanced tracking protection” is now enabled by default for all users. From what I’ve seen…