During the busy and festive seasons, even the most efficient marketers can expect to see greater variations in deliverability results than during quieter periods.

We don’t recommend taking risks with your data ahead of the busy period – as recently discussed in our festive spamtraps blog post. However, if you are going to take the opportunity to expand your sending volumes and try to get less engaged recipients re-energized by your brand, you need to do so strategically, and with a sharp eye on the results of every campaign sent.

In this blog, we’ll dive into deliverability analytics; set some expectations of what you might see over the next few months, and discuss what they tell us about what affects email deliverability.

Negative metrics are critical

Marketers are very familiar with positive indicators of engagement i.e. opens and clicks. However, email has evolved; pre-caching of images is now common (Gmail, Microsoft, and Apple all do this) and sophisticated anti-malware filters will now click through links to ensure they’re safe for recipients (aka non-human interaction). Relying solely on traditional open and click metrics simply doesn’t cut the yule log any more.

That’s why we’re starting off this blog looking at the negative metrics; while interest can only be indirectly measured, recipients (and mailbox providers) tell senders pretty directly when their expectations are not being met.

Unsubscribes vs complaints – useful but not equal

If you are reaching out to your older lists, expect an increase in unsubscribes and complaints (recipients marking your email as junk/spam). You can learn more about your subscriber’s journey by analyzing where these interactions happen. If a contact drops out at the beginning of their lifecycle, weak data capture or poor expectation setting are key. If you lose them mid life-cycle, content and frequency play an important role.

A healthy list interaction will show more unsubscribe than complaints. Unsubscribes don’t affect your sender reputation, but contacts marking your emails as junk/spam will; and these complaints have a heavy negative weighting. If you’re seeing more complaints than unsubscribes, then this may be an indicator that your unsubscribe journey needs some attention (we have a blog post here to help you optimize your opt-out).

Soft bounces

During the seasonal period, you may notice an increase in soft bounces. A sharp spike is likely to indicate that there’s a problem with the list you are targeting, especially if you haven’t sent to it recently. However, a gentle increase overall could be due to the whole email ecosystem being put under strain, and a healthy email program will recover.

Soft bounce data can provide a wealth of information about what affects email deliverability and how mailbox providers view your mail. So pay attention to whether they’re continuous or transient, and whether a single domain is affected, or if it’s across multiple domains. If the volume of soft bounces has affected engagement (opens, clicks, etc.), that indicates the mailbox provider may be junking your mail. Tweak the contacts you are targeting, and reduce the frequency at which you reach out to less-engaged and unengaged recipients.

Replies

It’s important to remember that email is a two-way communication channel, so you should be checking the replies to your emails. The positive side of replies is that you can see real interaction here; a snapshot into what affects email deliverability. A healthy list will likely receive some questions and comments in amongst the out-of-office replies. You can use these to see what contacts really think about your emails. From there you can work out if you have any weakness in other areas, such as poor data capture or expectation misalignment at the point of collection.

It’s especially important to keep an eye on replies during the festive period, as they’ll be a great indicator if you’re over-sending to your recipients. Failing to check replies could also mean missing questions from your customers about products or purchases, leading to lost sales or bad reviews for poor customer service.

Open rates

An “open” simply tracks the downloading of a pixel. It’s never been an accurate metric of a real open, because this is not the same as actual human eyes reading your emails. Open rates are part of the toolkit, but you should also be tracking other metrics. Ones that are important to the success of your email marketing strategy such as click-throughs, replies, purchases etc. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on trends over time to help spot what’s working well and also any potential challenges.

We’re well over a year on from the iOS 15 changes, so you should have a good baseline to work from. And if you don’t, now’s the time to do the work so you know how Apple MPP affects your metrics and how to account for that ahead of the festive season.

Clicks

Clicks continue to be an important indicator of how engaged recipients are, and whether emails have landed in the inbox or not.

Pay attention to trends in clicks over time, especially if re-mailing to non-openers during the festive period. Clicks can be viewed holistically along with open rates, measuring website traffic, and actual purchase data. This versatile insight can indicate whether sending again to contacts who didn’t open the first time is actually worth the revenue, or whether it carries high risk of damaging your sending reputation and could jeopardize the success of future sends.

As with open rates, B2B senders should now have enough data to know what impact non-human interaction (NHI) has (if any) on their click through rate reporting. If you are suddenly seeing NHI where previously there was none, this is a useful negative metric. Poor reputation is associated with an increase in filters checking links, so it could be an indicator that something is awry with your strategy.

Analyze your results to avoid list fatigue

Recipients are overwhelmed with email during the holidays, and they may not engage with content as they normally would. By increasing the volume you send, you can decrease the average list engagement – this is list fatigue. Mailbox providers are also under a heavy load receiving the influx of seasonal emails. An increase in volume coupled with a decrease in engagement is more likely to be interpreted as a sign that your emails don’t belong in the inbox. This can result in a further decline in the success of your emails, even when sending relevant content such as promotions to encourage interaction.

Analyzing the reporting data for your emails is a great start. If you want to level up further, our Deliverability Team are on hand to help. Please contact us using the form below and we’ll be in touch.

Account monitoring metrics

As the sender, you will have access to email platform reporting. Check the account reporting metrics to look for trends in email performance and to see if you have a temporary issue or an ongoing one. Look for anything out of the ordinary – for instance, did a sudden increase in sending volume lead to messages being flagged as spam? Was there a spike in bounces? Or in complaints? Or perhaps you received weird replies that triggered a response from your email box providers?

The ‘account reporting’ metric will help show if you have a transient issue or an ongoing one. You can look at your deliverability success rates with different ISPs and investigate your marketing emails over time. This in turn will help you work out how to move forward.

The ‘email domain performance’ metric is also a great source of information. You can use it to check the open rate (how many emails were opened by customers) for each mailbox provider. This will show if you have an isolated deliverability issue with one ISP or many. Perhaps your CEO’s spam was one in a small minority of sent emails or instead, maybe it occurred across the board.

Spam filter score

Accessing your spam filter score (corporate IT should be able to help here) is another troubleshooting step. Your ESP can show whether the mailbox provider accepted or rejected the message, but this helps you look further along the line by showing how the spam filter on your own system classified the email after your ESP accepted the message and sent it on to you as the receiver.

It may be that IT needs to change your own internal spam filter settings to accept the message you sent. This will also help you going forward – if it didn’t get past your own spam filter settings will it get past the settings of your clients?

IT may well be able to sort things out, particularly if the spam filter reckoned that the email wasn’t sent from a genuine source. IT should be able to add the domain to the ‘safe sender list’ or even implement ARC (Authentication receiving chain) changes to email authentication in case the message is breaking authentication with internal forwarding servers.

Then again, you may find that an external party has created a lookalike domain and that it is, therefore, necessary to create a subdomain to protect your business going forward.

Email headers

Email headers are a further diagnostic tool that can also help build your future strategy toward successful delivery. For this, it is necessary to engage with the email that landed back into the CEO’s spam filter, not anything forwarded to you (because forwarding would add to the email’s journey, potentially putting it through additional spam filters and could really mess up diagnosis).

Your CEO (or another colleague who has it in junk) needs to save the spam email as .eml or .msg. This gives further information on the path that the outgoing email took towards your customer through the email infrastructure – for example timestamps, queue durations as it hopped, authentications of the sending server and the receiving server, IP addresses, and spam filter classifications in different ESPs.

If getting the original email saved and sent to you in the right format is problematic then another approach could be to do a live send to a test email address in your corporate domain to see if you can replicate the issue.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Emails can hit the spam folder for data acquisition reasons. It is important to know it is okay to be sending the email in the first place and – especially if it is an email that was not sanctioned by a customer – whether you are meeting the legal requirements and the necessary levels of opt-in and sign-up form’s protection against third-party entries (typo/bot sign-up).

When you have made your various checks you may find that the Spam email was a technical problem that can be quickly and effectively fixed at the point at which it occurred. But often a spam folder issue is a signal of a deeper issue in customer relations that deserves to be a high priority within email deliverability. It deserves a strong strategic focus and a longer-term outlook.

Longer-term strategies and solutions

How you nurture your relationship with your recipients can make all the difference in successful deliverability.

Very often, the spam folder points to the need for strong strategic values. If you have empowered customers who have given the kind of consent that brings a real connection you are less likely to end up in Spam.

The spam folder points to the importance of knowing how your list has grown, whether you fell into the temptation of buying ‘GDPR compliant’ purchased data, relied on Wi-Fi sign-ups/competition, or other data acquisition methods that might not add strong connections with your brand.

As the data owner, you can see rankings and can filter email far better than the smartest spam filters and the most technologically savvy mailbox providers.

If you groom lists regularly and focus on the frequency of sent emails to both the engaged and the non-engaged. If you send the right quantity of strong quality messages at the right frequency you are much more likely to hit the CEO’s inbox every time.

Further insight

Our ‘Deliverability Perspective’ package gives you access to check extended inbox placement at the seed level. This adds breadth and depth of information that can help provide early flagging for potential inbox placement challenges. Please get in touch if you’re interested in any of our deliverability products or if you need any assistance with inbox placement issues.