While the gmail landscape changes fast and frequently, there are some core concepts and features that make marketing in gmail really straightforward. In this blog post I’ll explore how gmail actually makes it easy – both for its users and for email marketers in general.

Reaching the inbox in Gmail

It really couldn’t be simpler to reach the inbox in gmail, but this is a fundamental challenge many marketers face.

Gmail operates filtering at two levels: individual filtering based on user-specific behavior, and general reputation scoring applicable to all emails sent from your sending domain. This means two things:

1. Emails from a brand you regularly engage with will end up in your inbox, but those same emails will end up in my spam folder if I’m not regularly opening them.
2. If you send to a high proportion of users who don’t engage and enough emails end up in their junk folders, your overall domain reputation score will be negatively impacted. This makes it more likely that emails sent to new gmail sign-ups in your database will end up in the junk folder. If your reputation gets bad enough, even users who are fans may see your emails start to appear in their spam folder instead of the promotions tab.

To avoid getting a poor reputation with gmail and hitting the spam folder, all you have to do is:

• send relevant, personalized content to recipients who give explicit permission for you to send them emails
• stop sending emails to recipients who demonstrate that they’re no longer interested by not opening/clicking

It’s really that easy. Even if you get into hot water with your gmail reputation, you can rescue it very simply by stopping sending for around 30 days to let the reputation reset; and then re-ramping your daily volume while targeting only the most engaged. Follow gmail’s best practices for bulk senders, give it some time, and you’ll be back in the inbox.

That darned Gmail promotions tab

We frequently get requests from marketers asking how to get their emails out of the promotions tab and into the primary inbox. But they’re overlooking one important thing: marketing emails are promotional emails and they belong in the promotions tab.

Gmail users have been trained to look for marketing messages in the promotions tab. When they’re ready to shop, that’s where they go looking for information, sales, deals, and discounts. The primary inbox is where they expect to see 1-to-1 emails from family, friends, and colleagues, or important transactional emails like order confirmations, delivery dispatch notifications, password reset emails, etc. (although these may go into an “Updates” tab, depending on the user’s settings).

Trying to force your marketing emails out of the promotions tab is a waste of resource for two reasons:

• Firstly, recipients are more likely to complain or mark these as spam because they’re not where they’re expecting them to be. This will damage your reputation, and then you’ll be trying to get out of the spam folder instead.
• Secondly, any ‘hack’ you find that prevents marketing emails from landing in the promotions tab will be quickly picked up on by gmail’s smart filtering algorithms. As soon as it’s identified, it’ll stop working and you’ll be back in the promotions tab anyway. In the past, representatives from Gmail have even suggested that there may be penalties for brands found exploiting any loopholes to force promotional emails into the primary inbox.

Instead of trying to get out of the promotions tab, make your emails stand out in the promotions tab. Try A/B testing subject lines and really personalizing content to target recipients with relevant and valuable content instead – you’re far more likely to see an increase in ROI.

Unsubscribe as a feature

Marketers are still shy of the unsubscribe link, trying to hide it at the very bottom of emails in tiny text; or forcing recipients to scroll down a lengthy preference center to find that “unsubscribe from all” button. So when marketers spot one of Gmail’s easy-to-use unsubscribe features they get concerned.

Let’s get this out the way: unsubscribes are not a bad thing. Emails marked as spam – either because the user thinks it’s the same as deleting it, or because they’re frustrated and can’t find the unsubscribe option – count as complaints, and they have a big negative impact on the reputation of the sender. Making it easy to unsubscribe makes it less likely that you’ll see complaints, and unsubscribes don’t negatively affect your sending reputation.

In general, making it difficult for recipients to unsubscribe is not a good idea, because of the above and reasons my colleague Mathias recently went into in his contribution to a Kickbox blog post. For Gmail, unsubscribes are your friend. Remember how sending to a lot of unengaged recipients can damage your sending reputation and jeopardize inbox placement even for fans? What if those recipients instead could really easily just remove themselves from your list?

Gmail is here to help.

Firstly, there’s an unsubscribe feature at the top of the marketing email, next to the sender details. This uses the unsubscribe information in the header of the email, and means the user doesn’t have to go scrolling around to find the unsubscribe link.

Secondly, for recipients using the Gmail mobile app, there’s a prompt to unsubscribe from brands they don’t frequently engage with.

Gmail’s main focus, of course, is to help their users keep their inboxes clear of email they don’t want. But their two unsubscribe features also help you as a marketer to avoid complaints and keep your lists clear of unengaged contacts.

Reputation: domain or IP?

Unlike other mailbox providers which more heavily associate reputation with the sending IP address, when it comes to Gmail, your sender reputation is largely attributed to your sending domain.

If you’re sending sufficient volume to maintain a reputation, you should be using a custom sending domain and not a default domain shared with other brands. Sending from your own domain or subdomain allows your brand to build its own reputation with Gmail – without the time and expense of a dedicated IP – and puts you in control of your inbox placement.

Transactional emails

When it comes to transactional emails (order confirmations, password reset requests, etc.), Gmail is very good at separating out mailstreams – i.e. identifying which emails are marketing and which are transactional – and putting important transactional emails into the recipient’s primary inbox instead of the promotions tab.

There is a big caveat to this: if your transactional emails look like marketing emails because they also contain a lot of marketing-type content, then they’re more likely to end up in promotions. To make sure your transactional emails end up in the primary inbox, make sure they contain only information useful to the recipient and don’t include marketing material designed to drive more sales.

We do still recommend using separate subdomains for marketing mailstreams and transactional mailstreams (e.g. marketing.yourbrand.com and transactional.yourbrand.com). While Gmail is pretty good at separating out the mailstreams, if something unexpectedly or accidentally bad happens to the reputation of your sending domain due to a poorly executed marketing campaign, it can cause your transactional emails to end up in junk too (if they’re being sent from the same domain).

Whichever sending domains you decide to use, make sure they and your emails are properly authenticated with SPF and DKIM. If you’re a dotdigital customer, we handle this automatically for you.

In general, our customers see the same or better performance on shared IPs than dedicated IPs, and it’s faster and easier to ramp up a custom sending domain than it is to go through the process of warming a new IP. For Gmail in particular, reputation is so dependent on the sending domain that there really is nothing to be gained from the extra expenditure of provisioning a dedicated IP.

Further insights

If you’re sending from a custom domain and you’re curious about what your reputation is like with Gmail, you can find out using Google Postmaster Tools. This provides insights about your domain reputation, rate of authentication, and an indicator of reported spam and complaints. To sign up for access, go to the postmaster tools site, sign in using a Gmail or g-suite hosted email address, and add the domain you want to monitor.

If you’re a dotdigital customer, drop us an email at deliverability@dotdigital.com letting us know the domain and the email address you used so we can grant you access.

At dotdigital, we have a world class deliverability team who is here to help. We have a self-service product (Deliverability Perspective) which can help you further diagnose inbox placement issues, and we offer Deliverability Consulting packages with the team who can further advise on strategy.

For more Deliverability insight, check out our 101 guide here.

Sending to old data or data collected under less-than-ideal circumstances significantly increases the risk of degrading your sender reputation, reducing the chances of you reaching the inbox – even for recipients who are fans of your brand. Sending in this way also carries the risk of severe inbox placement issues or your emails being blocked entirely – especially if you send to a spam trap. Reputation damage can take a long time to repair and could negatively impact your ability to generate revenue from your email marketing for weeks or even months.

In this post, I’ll provide advice on the lump of coal in the stocking of deliverability: spam traps. We’ll cover what they are, why they’re so bad, and how to avoid spam traps and keep your inbox placement strong and healthy as we white-knuckle it through another festive season.

What is a spam trap?

A spam trap is an email address that would not actively sign up to receive marketing communications. They are part of the toolbox used by anti-abuse networks, security appliances, and mailbox providers to identify emails that would be unwanted or even harmful to recipients – and then to prevent senders of those emails from reaching the inbox of real people.

There are different types of traps:

• recycled traps – these are email addresses that were once valid but have been abandoned and have been repurposed as a spam trap
• typo traps – these are entire domains that look similar to popular mailbox provider domains (e.g. gmial.com instead of gmail.com) that are used as traps
• pristine traps – these are email addresses created to be spam traps and never used by an actual person to send or receive email

Why is sending to a spam trap so bad?

Regardless of your intentions, if you’re indicating that you’re a bad actor by sending to spam traps then your sender reputation will be negatively affected. This means your emails are more likely to land in the junk/spam folder, may take much longer to be delivered, or they may be rejected outright and not even delivered to junk.

Negotiating the removal of blocklisting and repairing the reputation damage caused is not fast or easy. It can take weeks or sometimes months to fully recover from a bad blocklisting due to hitting a spam trap. If your business is hit at the beginning of the holiday season, that could mean you’re only just back on your feet again in time for Valentine’s day 2021.

How can I avoid spam traps during the holiday season?

Most commonly we see clients hitting traps when they’ve succumbed to pressure to increase their sending volume and send emails to recipients they don’t usually send emails to. This a bad idea for a few reasons:

• Mailbox providers:
  a.) like to see consistency from senders.
  b.) are often on the verge of overwhelm given mail volumes at this time of year.
• Recipients are also overwhelmed with far too much email and are less likely to engage with and more likely to complain about receiving emails they don’t remember signing up for.
• A lot of the ways marketers try to quickly increase volume at short notice significantly increase the risk of hitting spam traps.

What is a high-risk strategy and why?

Strategy 1: Send to lists that haven’t been sent to for over 12 months. Or ever.

Risk: Recycled traps tend to be found in old data, even if it was originally collected using permission marketing best practices.

If you’ve found a segment missed by your automation or some other permissioned data you haven’t sent to for a while, and you know you’re going to want to send to them over the holidays, my advice is to start now.

It’s much better to do this early to give you time to resolve any issues before critical sending days. Send slowly over a period of days or weeks, include a reminder of why contacts are receiving your emails (in case they’ve forgotten about you) as well as a clear unsubscribe link, suppress any soft bounces and remove anyone who continues to not engage.

If you’re a Dotdigital customer and you want help with re-activating lapsed contacts, contact your AM or CSM to start a conversation about our re-engagement package.

Strategy 2: Try to “reactivate” contacts from the suppression list

Risk: Abandoned email addresses will usually hard bounce for at least 6 months before being repurposed as a recycled trap.

Good ESPs will automatically suppress contacts that hard bounce, so these traps are likely to lie within your suppression list.

Strategy 3: Purchase or rent data to send to.

Risk: Not only is this against most ESPs T&Cs which means you risk having all your sending suspended when they spot the purchased data, but lists for sale/rent tend to contain a lot of scraped data.

Spam traps, especially pristine type traps, are very commonly found in this kind of data – and they tend to be the ones that cause the most serious kinds of block listings that have the widest impact across mailbox providers and take the longest to resolve.

If you are importing data into your Dotdigital account during the holiday period (or any other time of the year) then our Watchdog will be taking a look and flagging anything suspicious. An import that’s got a high-risk score is more likely to contain a lot of nasties including spam traps, so we’ll block the upload while you take a look at the data sources and remove anything risky that’s made its way into your list.

What if you do hit a trap?

The key here isn’t identifying the specific spam trap you hit and removing it from your list. Spamtraps are intentionally a closely guarded secret, and for every trap you find, there could be ten or fifty, or a hundred more in your list. That’s because spam traps indicate underlying problems with your data collection or management.

The first step is to use whatever information is available to try to identify the source of the problematic data. Different trap operators will offer up some information that’s redacted to a greater or lesser extent; some offer a rough estimate of the date and time when the trap was hit, and others will provide the subject line of the email sent that hit the trap.

The next step is to temporarily stop sending to all data that’s come from the high-risk source while you go through step three: segmenting out contacts who you know are engaged. Purchase history, opens, clicks, etc. can all be used holistically to identify recipients who are most likely to be real people who want to hear from you.

Finally, it’s time to plug the hole in your data collection. Depending on the type of trap, it can indicate different areas of vulnerability:

• Pristine traps – make sure your forms are secured with CAPTCHA or double/confirmed opt-in, and remove any third-party data from your lists.
• Typo traps – ask your web devs to add some basic validation to points of collection to check that the email addresses are valid. It’s pretty easy to add some logic that suggests someone might mean “hotmail.com” instead of “hotmial.cmo” in the email field. Plus double or confirmed opt-in at the point of data collection can help weed these out as well.
• Recycled traps – make sure you have a strategy for sunsetting contacts who never engage with your brand or who haven’t engaged for a very long time. Use knowledge of your sales cycle and typical customer journeys to plot the point at which the risk of keeping an address on your list outweighs the potential that they might convert into a customer. And engage a responsible ESP that suppresses email addresses that bounce.

In conclusion

It’s so easy to sabotage yourself in November by making some choices that temporarily boost revenue for Singles Day or Black Friday, but then tank your reputation so you’re in the spam folder throughout December and even into January. It’s far less risky in the short term – and more profitable in the long term – to be smart and stick to your sustainable sending and organic growth strategies to avoid jeopardizing inbox placement.

If you need any help this holiday season with how to avoid spam traps or anything else related to inbox placement, our expert Deliverability team is always around to assist you in making the best choices for your business.

Google outage and what it meant for our customers

We were all put to the test this week when Google experienced notable outages with widespread impact. As frustrating as this has been for ESPs and senders, I have no doubt the team at Google has felt similar pressures to what we feel during this busy time. My heart goes out to that team.

The outages caused senders to see false errors returned stating the recipients being sent to didn’t exist.

This posed a challenge: under normal conditions, all senders, including dotdigital, have a commitment to make sure that they don’t continue sending to recipients that don’t exist. Suppressing recipients that bounce for this reason is usually the right thing to do, to prevent sender reputation damage from repeatedly trying to mail non-existent email addresses. Seeing the spike in bounces and additions to suppression lists means that the platform was working correctly – it’s a sign that dotdigital is committed to making sure only recipients that want and expect to receive emails are being sent.

How did Dotdigital respond?

As soon as we realized that these were not genuine bounces and instead reflected a problem with Gmail, dotdigital sprang into action. The teams identified three key areas for action:

• Stopping processing of the incorrect bounces during the outage

We added a rule to our bounce processor that matched the false-positive error we were seeing from Gmail and ignored these bounces, instead of processing and suppressing the contacts. Once we’re confident that Gmail has fully resolved its issues, we can easily remove this rule and continue to process these bounces again.

• Reversing the suppression of recipients that actually do exist and want to receive emails

We ran a database update to unsuppress Gmail and Googlemail contacts who had been marked as suppressed in customer accounts during the time period of the outage.

• Restoring these contacts to our customers’ address books

If we had just left the contacts unsuppressed, our clients would have had to do all the hard work to get them back in the right address books – that’s the last thing they need to be doing so close to Christmas, plus we wanted to help more. We used a database backup from before the outage to identify which address books the contacts had previously been assigned to. We then used this data to restore the subscriptions, putting the right contacts back into the right address books for our customers.

How could we respond so quickly?

Mobilization was swift thanks to our proactive monitoring and close working relationships between multiple teams, each comprised of amazing people with decades of specialized experience and intimate knowledge of Dotdigital and email delivery.

We were able to work on all three key areas simultaneously. This meant that in less than 24 hours of being notified that the latest outage had been resolved, dotdigital was able to complete the unsuppression of affected recipients and restoration of the Gmail and Googlemail contacts into customers’ address books.

Here at Dotdigital, I am proud of the teams and their ability to roll with what was thrown at them at the moment. They quickly found a solution and hopefully, we’ve taken away some of the added stress that I’m sure our customers were feeling over this.

We know this time of year brings a certain amount of pressure along with the added fun, and we are here to help.

If you would like to see the platform in action, and learn more about how we were able to mitigate this issue so quickly, please request a demo here.

Merrily you go on your way, importing this list full of hope and promise into Dotdigital. But wait, something’s wrong: your data has been quarantined by the Dotdigital data Watchdog. The import has been blocked. “Why!?”, you scream internally as you frantically raise a ticket with our support team.

High-risk data is a deliverability risk and can jeopardize revenue

There are certain addresses which are never going to give consent to receive marketing communications. For example, we keep an eye out for role alias addresses (generic/shared inboxes used for a sales team, support team, abuse reporting, etc.), as these almost never actively sign up to receive emails. Uploading a list which contains these kind of non-consenting addresses is an indicator that the process for ensuring consent wasn’t reliable at the point when the data was collected. Even if your permission game is strong now, it might not have been in 2016 – or even in early 2018, before the GDPR came into effect.

Sending to recipients that have not given explicit consent to receive marketing emails from your company can have disastrous results for your business.

Reduced engagement, increased complaints

The best-case scenario, in this instance, is that recipients ignore your emails. If they do this, mailbox providers like Hotmail and Gmail will notice the lack of engagement and decide your emails are unwanted. Your future sends, even to previously engaged and fully consented contacts, are more likely to end up in the spam folder or the junk box.

It gets worse though…

Some recipients might see your emails and, having not recently given permission for you to contact them, actively mark the emails as junk or spam. These are recognized by mailbox providers as complaints and are given much more weighting as an indicator that you are sending unwanted email. Your marketing ending up in junk or spam will become even more likely.

Plus, if you’re on a dedicated IP then it’s possible that receiving mail servers will start throttling your IP, slowing down how quickly they’ll accept emails from you. This can be incredibly tough when you’re against the clock, with time-sensitive content and flash sales going out the door.

Deliverability alert: inactive inboxes

Do you still use the same email address today that you were using last year? How about in 2016? How about in 2011? (Showing my age here, but I’d just graduated from university and set up my first professional-looking tamara.bond inbox and ditched the old g0thg1rl4lyf alias…) Maybe you had your own website or blog and signed up using that domain which has long been defunct – who has time for personal blogging these days? Sending to lots of addresses which don’t exist anymore is another sign to the mailbox provider that your strategy is targeting people who haven’t opted in, and is likely to land you in the spam folder. They might have even turned the unused inbox or domain into a spam trap.

Spam traps: the real nightmare before Christmas

Hitting a spam trap is the worst-case scenario. Traps are addresses that are operated by mailbox providers and anti-abuse networks to identify senders who are not following data collection and management best practice.

There are different types of spam trap that indicate:

1. sending to old data or emailing recipients who haven’t verified their email addresses
2. collecting contacts using a form that’s open to abuse

and much more…

Increasingly, information collected about mail sent to traps is used in machine learning. You really don’t want your emails to be used as examples to train an AI filter how to identify spam, as it’s likely to negatively impact your inbox placement for a very long time.

Hitting one or more spam traps can result in a mailbox provider directly blocking your emails. Hitting one or more spam traps operated by an anti-abuse network can result in them blacklisting your sending domain, your IP, or (in the really bad cases) all 255 IPs in the range that your sending IP belongs to. Mailbox providers can query these blacklists and block your emails if they find you or your IP on the list.

Reputation and revenue

If your recipients can’t see your emails because they’re not in the inbox or promotions tab, they’re less likely to engage with your brand and make purchases. During the busy period, they’re receiving so many emails (including from your competitors) that they’re unlikely to have time to go through their spam folder and retrieve your messages. There’s a potential for a lot of revenue loss. However, hitting a spam trap or being blacklisted and not being able to deliver any emails at all… well, that’s a nightmare before Christmas, make no mistake.

It can be really difficult and take a very long time to repair reputation damage, get unblocked or de-listed, and make a come back to the inbox or promotions tab. Our deliverability experts are here to help you with this, but we’d rather not see it happen at all. That’s why we created the WatchDog – to protect your reputation as a sender, as well as protect other customers using the platform.

Don’t give me problems, give me solutions

When an import is quarantined, customers often ask us to tell them which addresses are the ‘bad’ ones so that they can remove them and continue uploading their data. The catch 22 is that there’s no real way to tell which contact is going to be your deliverability Achilles’ heel. Sure, you could go through and remove all the role alias addresses, but those are simply indicators of the health of the list as a whole. The rest of that import is still a revenue-ruining minefield riddled with complainers and spam traps and people who aren’t interested in what you’ve got to stay.

List validation and data cleansing

We’re often asked about using a third party email validation tool to ‘clean’ the list. These can check for and remove things like misspelled addresses or those with no active mail server to receive emails. Depending on the service, they may be able to identify some spam traps or known unused inboxes. However, they aren’t perfect. In particular, spam trap addresses are closely-held secrets and new ones are constantly being created, so no validation tool can guarantee removal of all traps from a list.

More importantly, list validation can’t confirm that the recipients actually want to receive your emails. ‘Spam’ doesn’t mean illegal; it means unwanted. And if you’re sending unwanted emails, sooner or later there will be consequences for your deliverability that impact your revenue.

Analyze how your data was acquired

You should be checking:

• whether data was given explicitly for your brand
• whether there was an incentive such as a voucher or WiFi access that could have tempted people to put in false details
• whether the email addresses submitted were confirmed to be correct and active using double opt-in
• whether the submission form had CAPTCHA or other preventative measures against bot submissions

You could also analyze other sources of information, such as your website or CRM data, to see if any email addresses are associated with people who have recently purchased your products or services.

In our experience, we never see any success from emailing an old list; instead, we’re picking up the pieces and walking customers through the arduous process of rebuilding their reputation after succumbing to temptation. If Winston the WatchDog has quarantined your import, it’s best to heed his advice: ditch the risk to your revenue and instead focus on your existing engaged, valued, and loyal customers

If you’re looking for more actionable deliverability best practice, check out our free 101 guide here.