What’s playing out across the Atlantic in the USA is more of a slow wave than a sudden tsunami, but US businesses are still at risk of being swept away if they leave it last minute to scramble the flood defenses. 

One of the benefits of Dotdigital is we’ve been here before – we’re set up for these legislative changes as a trusted platform that knows how to navigate the waters this type of challenge brings. As you’re reading about what’s to come, remember we’ll keep you updated – we’ve got your back. We’re not your lawyers though – so remember to check with them for any legal advice. 

State legislation: the story so far

California blazed a trail in the USA when the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) went into effect on January 1 2020, granting Californian residents 6 rights that will feel pretty familiar to those of us fluent in GDPR: the right to know what data a company holds on them, the right to request deletion of that data, the right to opt out of sale of that data, making the sale of personal data for consumers under 16 years of age illegal without prior authorization, the right to not be discriminated against for exercising any rights and the right to privately initiate action if their personal data is breached. 

Jan 1 2023 was a busy day. The CPRA (California Privacy Rights Act) amendments to the CCPA came into force, granting a further two rights: the right to amend inaccurate data and the right to say what companies can do with and how much they’re allowed to share sensitive data about Californians. The Virginian VCDPA (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act) also went into effect for Virginian businesses that meet qualifying criteria.

Just this July, Colorado and my own adopted home state of Connecticut joined the GDPaRty with the CPA (Colorado Privacy Act) and CTDPA (Connecticut Data Privacy Act) respectively coming into effect at the beginning of the month. Colorado has gone further than other states so far by adding the right of portability: to be able to download and move your personal data to another platform.

US EU Adequacy Decision

On July 10 2023, the US EU Adequacy Decision was passed. This means that personal data can flow between the EU and US businesses that comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations – the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. 

This provides safeguarding for personal data about EU citizens from US government intelligence (outside of what is necessary and proportionate for national security). It also preserves rights established by GDPR, such as the right to be able to identify the data controller and how and why data is being collected and processed, and the right to access, correct, and have personal data deleted. Finally, it establishes access to free resolution mechanisms and arbitration if data is handled wrongly.

Where this is going

Utah’s UCPA (Utah Consumer Privacy Act) bill has been signed and is likely to become effective for qualifying businesses at the end of 2023. There are at least 5 more states which are due to have privacy laws come into effect by 2026. And while lobbyists, lawyers, and the FTC are skeptical about federal legislation passing, the writing is on the wall: state by state, more privacy laws are coming.

Targeted advertising is being, well, targeted by existing and upcoming legislation as consumers become increasingly aware of how they’re being tracked and the value of their personal data. Law makers are looking to crack down on the sale and sharing of personal data, including the transfer of data to third parties for monetary or other valuable consideration. The concept of a Universal Opt Out Mechanism (UOOM) – whereby if someone opts out on one device or browser, they’re opted out on all devices and browsers – is well within the realm of possibility.

There’s also increased talk of addressing “dark patterns” within privacy legislation or in separate legislation. A dark pattern is any technique that tries to manipulate people into doing something they would not otherwise have done. Examples include:

• trick or trap subscription programs, also known as negative option subscriptions; are free or cheap when you enroll, but if you don’t cancel then a fee is charged or the price goes up
• disguising advertising as editorial content
• junk or hidden fees
• manipulating people into sharing unnecessary data e.g. misleading people into selecting the highest data-sharing option
• uneven weighting on options; having “accept” or “reject” is evenly weighted, offering “accept” or “manage preferences” would be uneven
• creating a false sense of urgency; fake countdown timers that never hit 00:00, and those products where 99 other people always seem to have this item in their cart

What this means for US businesses 

While the specifics of legislation vary, the themes are the same – and it’s reasonable to expect future legislation to be similar. 

US businesses are going to need to be able to provide data subjects (people they hold personal data about) with ways to:

• find out what data has been collected
• find out why their data is being collected and processed
• obtain a copy of their data
• amend the data held
• restrict or opt out of the selling or sharing of some or all of their personal data with third parties
• restrict or opt out of the use of some or all of their personal data for profiling or targeted advertising
• request processing of their data be stopped
• port their data to another platform
• request the data held to be deleted

Consumers will be able to initiate action against businesses if their personal data is breached or in the case where they’re unable to exercise the above.

US businesses that have a robust opt-in process and where records are kept of explicit consent for data collection and processing are going to be in a much better starting place. In addition to keeping opt-in data, brands that understand what data they collect and process and why, who document their data flows, and who use integrated platforms are going to be better able to fulfill the rights of their contacts and data subjects, as well as more easily implement a UOOM for targeted advertising.

Dark patterns also need to be on your radar; just because something is a common technique in your industry or vertical doesn’t mean that it’s not a dark pattern, and you could be penalized.

How to prepare for the new changes

I love hanging out with our fabulous legal and privacy teams here at Dotdigital, but I understand that talking to your lawyers or DPO might not be your idea of fun. Unfortunately, it’s going to be needed so you can stay on top of the rapidly changing privacy landscape.

If you want to avoid the legal conversations being long ones, then you can always decide to implement best practices when it comes to personal data. Best practices almost always trump the legal minimum. So rather than arduous legalese on what you might be able to get away with, make it a quick conversation where you ask for a review of your best practice plans or implementation to make sure all the boxes are ticked.

 Here’s some homework to do before you go talk legals:

• get familiar with GDPR; the US legislation looks similar, and having an understanding of some of the terminology and framework will help you understand the new laws. We have some great resources in our GDPR advice center to help you get started.
• understand what personal data you are collecting/processing – and why. Ask whether the collection and processing are necessary, ensure you have consent, and map out your data flows to include where storage and processing happen.
• talk to your developers and your vendors’ solutions architects to identify opportunities for integration to improve the flow and oversight of your data. 
• identify any marketing or advertising strategies that include manipulative techniques that could be identified as a dark pattern, and start investigating best practice alternatives.

Dotdigital can help

We’ve seen the writing on the wall and, having held our UK and European customers’ hands a few years back, we’re in a great place to help our US customers adapt to the changing landscape. We’re ISO 27001 certified in Information Security Management Systems, meaning that you can trust us to do our part when it comes to managing your data safely and securely. Our trust center has more details, as well as contact information for our Security Team who are happy to answer questions. 

Dotdigital customers can also leverage our CXDP superpowers, using our many integrations to connect all your customer data. Our solutions consultants are always happy to discuss your needs and how the Dotdigital platform can help you manage your data effectively. Reach out to your CSM or Dotdigital Support so they can put you in touch.

And, as always, our Deliverability Team is here to help advise you on best practices to stay ahead of the legal curve. Just drop an email to support@dotdigital.com and we’ll get back to you.

That’s because we know how valuable email is to your business. The 2021 DMA report showed that for every £1 spent on email campaigns, the return on investment (ROI) was an impressive £38. Moreover, in 2022, email marketing yielded a $36 ROI for each $1 spent. But to get this kind of return, you need to make sure your emails are reaching the inbox. And that’s where we, the email experts, come in.

The deliverability team

We’re the Deliverability & Messaging Operations team – Dotdigital’s experts in email & SMS delivery and inbox placement – and we’re here to ensure your messages, you guessed it, get delivered to the inbox. If you’re new to sending email at scale, some of these terms might be new to you. But if you’re here, we’re guessing you’re something of an expert too, and are reading this to get an edge over your competition. 

No matter your familiarity with the subject, deliverability is something you should constantly be considering. So whether deliverability is a new concept to you, something that’s recently become an issue, or something you want to learn more about so that your campaigns and comms are getting the very best return they can, here are the top six things every marketer or communication manager needs to consider.

There are 6 C’s we consider for every customer

1. Consent
2. Content
3. Cadence
4. Contacts
5. Consistency 
6. Change

All of these factors contribute to your sender’s reputation. Reputation in deliverability terms means the priority that mailbox providers give to email traffic. Put more simply, reputation influences whether emails land in the inbox or the spam folder. 

Missing the mark on just one of the 6 C’s leaves marketers or communication managers using self-service platforms wondering what on earth is happening to all the messages they are sending into the ether. Perhaps you have been burnt by one of these 6 C’s in the past. Luckily for you, not only are we going to talk you through the 6 C’s of deliverability, but at Dotdigital, we have in-house experts and services at our fingertips to offer advice on every single one of them.

1. Consent is the cornerstone of deliverability

Obtaining consent has always been important for successful email delivery, even before GDPR was introduced. Which is why we’ve always preached best practices in this area. If customers receive messages that they don’t expect or haven’t consented to, it’s only a matter of time before they hit the spam button or unsubscribe. Consent is also a crucial aspect of data privacy and regulations. Without it, building a successful relationship between your brand and your customers is unlikely. As we’ll go on to discuss, this is crucial, not just for the customer experience but also for deliverability’s sake.

At Dotdigital, we log something called ConsentInsight, which is all that you need to gain and demonstrate evidence of consent. This way, you can be sure to maintain excellent customer relationships, now and in the future.

But consent isn’t just about that initial sign-up – consent doesn’t last forever, and you need to keep an eye on your engagement to ensure that your contacts still want to hear from you. Your provider should have tools and services to help you continuously measure that continued consent, re-activate and re-engage lapsing subscribers, and know when it’s time to say goodbye to a contact who no longer wants your emails.

2. How deliverability is affected by content

Your customers and prospects shouldn’t just be content with your content – you want them to be delighted. And when we say content, we mean everything from the subject line, the friendly from address, the pre-header preview text, the body text, and even the imagery within your emails. 

Filters affect how much folks engage with your brand, but maybe not in the way you’d think. Most filters are a lot smarter than they used to be, and it’s less about whether specific words or content look “spammy” to the receivers and more about how recipients interact with your emails. 

Sometimes recipients don’t expect your emails, don’t recognize your brand, and think your emails look like spam. Your emails are unlikely to be opened, read, or clicked, or worse, they may be marked as spam or junk. 

This is a strong indicator to mailbox providers that your emails are unwanted, so they’re more likely to place them in the spam folder. The more relevant your content is to your targeted audience, the more engagement you’ll get from your emails and the better reputation you build up.

In a nutshell, content is the key to engagement, and engagement is key to deliverability. Pay attention to every aspect of your campaign content to make sure you’re delighting your contacts.

3. The effect cadence has on your reputation (especially during ramp up)

Sending frequency can impact your email inbox placement and delivery. It’s not just about the content of your email. For those who are unsure about the difference between delivery and deliverability, delivery refers to whether your email reaches the recipient’s inbox, while deliverability is concerned with its placement in the inbox. In other words, it determines whether your email makes it to the primary inbox or if it’s marked as spam.

How often you send can be a delicate balance. Too much, and your customers may unsubscribe. Too little, and they may forget you and become disengaged. 

Additionally, when new traffic is seen over a domain or IP that is inconsistent, it has the potential to look risky to the receiving mailbox provider. A common mistake is getting the send cadence wrong during the “ramp up” or “warm up” strategy phase when brands are still building the reputation of a new sending address. The problem is that going too fast during ramp up can damage reputation. Going too slow can cause you to lose it. Your provider should pay special attention during this crucial time to ensure everything goes to plan and continue to advise long after the first big campaign drops. 

4. Your deliverability is only as good as your contact data

The quality of the data you use for your contacts is crucial for both delivery and deliverability. Consider the following questions: 

• Where was the data sourced? 
• Is the information accurate enough to segment and personalize your emails, resulting in better engagement?
• How recent is the data? 
• Are your emails relevant to their situation, role, or interests?

The initial opt-in is a crucial aspect of consent: it’s an opportunity for you to set expectations around frequency and content, ensuring that recipients know what they’re signing up for, meaning they’re less likely to complain later. It’s also a key factor in keeping your contact data clean; using confirmed or double opt-in at the point of sign-up (where recipients need to click a link in an email to confirm they want to hear from you) means non-existent email addresses will be removed from your lists, and the email address signing up belongs to the person who entered it. 

We frequently see issues with bounces, complaints, or spam trap hits negatively affecting sender reputation and inbox placement because the email address that’s been added to the list (either accidentally or intentionally) either doesn’t exist or does not belong to the person or entity who filled out your subscription form. Using confirmed opt-in results in a more engaged source of contacts.

No matter the situation with your data, you or your provider should be asking the right questions and finding a way to move forward to make sure you get the absolute optimum ROI per email.

5. Nothing bolsters deliverability like consistency

Put yourself into the customer’s shoes. When you sign up for an email subscription, you already expect the messages you are going to receive – especially when the sender has followed best practice for consent and laid out the kinds of messages you will be receiving. 

When the consistency of this message varies, be this the content style or subject matter, customer engagement drops off because an expectation has suddenly not been met. Leave bait and switch to the fraudsters, focus on valuable content and be as consistent and dependable for your customers as you would like to see from your favorite brands. 

6. Monitor and refine your change management practices

Change is inevitable. You need to move with the times and keep up with your customer base and leverage the latest marketing program techniques. The last thing we want to do is dissuade you from changing when all successful businesses change to survive. But as we’ve outlined above, with consistency so integral to deliverability, if you made a change to your marketing program on any of the five other C’s, you could be putting your inbox placement and deliverability at risk. 

Luckily, we’re well-versed in change management. Every day, we help marketers adjust their campaigns and strategy, all whilst reducing the risk changes can pose. This is a vital piece of expertise most businesses can’t live without.

When to bring in the deliverability experts

The best way to think of all the 6 C’s of deliverability is as dominoes that have a long, viral-worthy domino effect. For example: the better your consent practice, the better your contact data, the more relevant content you can deliver, the better your engagement, the better your reputation, the better your deliverability.

Keep in mind that our experts are here to guide you in achieving those impressive engagement rates. Whether you’re launching a new campaign, troubleshooting an issue, or exploring a fresh approach, reach out to us for assistance. Remember, the £38 return on £1 spent is an impressive feat, but neglecting the 6 C’s of deliverability can hinder your full ROI potential. Stay informed and proactive in utilizing these 6 C’s of deliverability to optimize your campaign success.

Did we double our mail servers? Ramp up hundreds of IPs? Finally, implement that secret code that all delivery engineers know but refuse to implement, which makes email even faster. Well, the last one.

The simple change that made a big difference

The change was actually small; we just altered the order of the recipients we sent them to. Previously, it was random, but after the change, the first recipients we sent to were those who had most recently downloaded the tracking pixel in the email, i.e., recent “openers”.

That’s it. Super simple, huh?

Based on my (at the time) 7 years of experience in bulk email delivery, constant data analysis, and the relationships I’d built with other email delivery engineers and postmasters, I had a theory. Mailbox providers can dynamically adjust how fast they’ll receive emails depending on who you’re sending emails to, and how recipients interact with those emails.

If you start off sending to inactive recipients who never engage with emails and your emails get sent to their spam folder, that’s a big indicator to the mailbox provider that your emails aren’t wanted. They aren’t eager to accept more unwanted mail.

So if, instead, we order sends to go to those where the tracking pixel was most recently downloaded first…

The power of email openers

An “open” hasn’t been actual human eyeballs reading an email for a long time. It’s been many years since Gmail started pre-caching images, and since then, many others have followed suit. As much as it’s a headache for marketers, there are really good reasons receivers pre-cache, from providing a more seamless customer experience when scrolling between emails (no lag while images download for the next one) to reducing technical overhead (just the sheer volume of DNS lookups required to fetch the images can be punishing, and mailbox providers hit rate limiting too). 

The good news is that while an “open” doesn’t necessarily mean a real human did the opening, it’s a good indication that the email landed in the inbox. If the email lands in the spam folder, the receiver doesn’t trust the email and doesn’t want to give spammers any indication that the email address they sent it to is active, so they don’t pre-cache images.

Enhancing email deliverability and inbox placement

My theory was that if we started sends by delivering to recipients where we have strong evidence that the email has recently landed in the inbox, that’d be a good signal to the receiver that we’re sending wanted mail, and so they’d accept emails faster. And, as a Taurus, I do so love it when I’m right.

Cutting send speeds in half

Overall, the send speed was cut in half. This was particularly pronounced for sending to Microsoft freemail addresses (hotmail.com, outlook.com, etc.), where send speeds were 80% faster, and for some of our senders who have slightly higher-risk sending strategies, where send speeds were ten times faster. It’s important to note that this logic isn’t applied to split tests, as it would artificially skew the open metric, so campaign A would always win. 

Now, email is still not an instant medium; after we relay emails, they pass through filtering and infrastructure to land in the inbox. How long this takes is down to the receiver; the volume of other senders they’re dealing with, and how well their infrastructure handles the volume.

Dotdigital sends as quickly as receivers will allow (faster since 2020, when we rolled out the change to send ordering), but my top tip for marketers is to not send at the top of the hour or at 15 or 30 minutes past the hour. These are the times when most senders schedule their emails to go out, and so all receivers see a spike in volume and an increase in processing times. 

I’ve spoken to postmasters directly about this, and it’s one of their top requests for marketers: stop sending emails at the top of the hour! If you want your email to really fly out the door and reach recipients quickly, try multiples of 7 instead. This will avoid those peaks when others (including your competitors) send.

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.

By now, most will have a plan in place that is well on its way to ensuring holiday success. Here are three ways you can double check your strategies to make sure they are not trading long-term gains for short-term wins.

1. Will your list expect to hear from you?

The holiday sending period is known for increased volumes. Audiences are naturally larger and there are more things to communicate.

As a customer, I want to know what’s going on with the brands I love and I’m more likely to have some purchase goals to take advantage of seasonal deals. Targeted emails from marketers who are smart with their data analysis show me exactly what I want and are highly valuable. Unwanted messages clutter my inbox, hiding the ones I’m really looking for – this makes for a frustrating experience and I’m more likely to complain or move messages to the spam folder.

As you’re preparing to communicate the wonderful things you have to offer to your recipients, take a hard look at the risk of sending to those that aren’t expecting to hear from you and proceed with caution.

2. Are you giving your recipients choices?

There are always going to be people who, for one reason or another, don’t want to hear about a specific holiday or sporting event.

For people experiencing grief or hard times, they may not be looking forward to Thanksgiving as much this year. For the World Cup specifically, it’s no secret that there‘s some controversy about the host country chosen by FIFA. When it comes to social issues, you need to ask if or how you as a brand have chosen to respond, and whether it will alienate your recipients and jeopardize ROI.

Along with giving recipients the ability to opt-out of holiday emails, give them the ability to choose not to hear about the World Cup as well. This makes sure you’re maximizing your efforts to give your recipients what they want.

3. Have you incorporated all channels?

Take a look at what you have planned for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – is it cohesive with your World Cup strategy?

Having a strategy that elegantly combines both will ensure your recipients needs are the focus and ultimately get you the best success. Remember that there are other ways to communicate with your recipients. Make sure to use SMS or other channels where email doesn’t make sense.

Using an approach that strategically incorporates all methods so that everything is working together will make for the best success.

This is a fun time of year, and all of us are doing what we can to make sure we are prepared and helping our businesses be successful. It’s important to be reviewing the plans we have in place to make sure we are set up for wins. Look critically at your strategies, and then go enjoy something festive – I’ll be having some pumpkin pie.

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.