Бесплатный фрагмент - Inbox. The complete guide to delivering your emails

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Max Timoshenko, I am the head of the email marketing department at Gazprom Media Holding. In this book I want to talk about email deliverability, focusing both on the basic level and on those people who are already doing something in email marketing or maybe even working with large databases, so we will not only scratch the surface!

I will start with the global block — deliverability of letters, which worries many clients: «What to do? How to be?» And I can say that many large brands still do not even have the DMARC parameter set up, which is required by many email providers.

As part of the book I will mainly uncover technical aspects of deliverability and automation. What is deliverability, why we need it, what are the technical requirements for mailings, what must be done absolutely, what existing quality metrics exist, what relates to the marketer rather than the technical specialist. In general, let’s look at how to solve problems with examples of specific mail providers.

Some parts of the book will be useful for marketing department managers, some moments from the book will be useful for your system administrators, developers, some directly to email marketers as they will need to configure the technical part. There are things that are interesting on ESP (email server provider) — platforms. Their technical part is usually implemented by the platform itself, but it is always worth remembering that quality indicators relate directly to the marketer, the one who will send the letters.

The meaning of deliverability

Let’s think about what spam is. Spam is mass mailing of commercial emails to those who have not expressed a strong desire to receive them. When you send emails to people who are not expecting them, you need to get explicit consent so as not to send spam, and it must be expressed no earlier than 12 months ago. Practice shows that people who subscribed more than 12 months ago may forget about you. It is important to constantly clean up the database. A year is a long time. You can put yourself in the shoes of such people and think: if a year ago you subscribed to some service, would you remember it now if you haven’t been in touch with it for a year? I think the answer is obvious.

The second point: when you collect data at offline conferences, you must warn that you will send emails. At one point I intersected with «Infobusinessman» at some conference, we exchanged business cards, after which I received a newsletter. In other words, I was surprised how my work email got on their mailing list? In my opinion, it was not very correct.

At the same time, even if you have consent to receive newsletters, the content must necessarily meet the expectations of the subscriber, that is, if a person subscribes to tourism, you cannot send them newsletters about online business. If a person subscribes to marketing, you should not send them emails about toys. This causes negativity, and subscribers are very likely to click «THIS IS SPAM».

Another important point: there must be the ability to unsubscribe from receiving newsletters both within all communication and at the very moment of subscription. And when starting to use the service, you should give the opportunity not to subscribe, but simply register in it.

You cannot send emails if there is no explicit consent: hidden clauses incorporated into the personal data processing policy or the service usage policy are not very correct points that will cause more negativity than relevant customers.

Negativity also arises when you try to hide the fact that the emails are coming from you, that is, change the sender’s name or domain. This is all not very correct. In the US, Europe, Canada there are legally established fines for spam mailing, and the law clearly states that physical contacts of the sender must be present in each letter, so that there is an opportunity to contact senders.

What is deliverability at all? What are we talking about and why do we need it? Deliverability is very important in terms of making a profit from email newsletters because if emails are in spam, no one sees them, respectively, no one opens them and goes to the site, and you do not get the target actions you need and do not earn the money you need.

At the same time, deliverability is divided into two types: technical and qualitative, they are fundamentally different.

Technical is how many messages have landed in users’ mailboxes at all — regardless of which folder. The technical deliverability rate is reported by ESPs in the «Messages Delivered» column, and is typically 99.95%.

Qualitative deliverability is how many emails ended up in the inbox, that is, were not filtered into spam. And this is what we are trying to achieve in email marketing.

Deliverability can be influenced in two ways: as I said, technically, with settings, complex abbreviations, etc., and qualitatively: through reputation, loyalty, attracting subscribers to newsletters, communication.

The technical part is more related to IT specialists, infrastructure used for sending messages, and is not always dependent on the email marketer. However, qualitative indicators are directly related to those who create content and strategy.

It is also important to clearly understand that technical components are the primary foundation that must exist. That is, if you have an excellent strategy that your users will love, but simply do not have properly configured parameters, no one will see your emails. Thus, basic parameters like SPF, DKIM, DMARC policy need to be configured initially.

Accordingly, if you do not configure the technical part, most likely you will be in spam, because at the moment mail providers very clearly check all these nuances. If they are not there, they consider mailings as spam, because it is normal for a spammer not to bother and buy a one-time server, make a mailing and throw it away.

Quality senders, good email marketers and major brands configure for long-term communication with users, so they monitor such things and try to build long-term relationships.

Let’s talk a little more about dedicated IP addresses: first about separating sending IP addresses, and then about how emails are sent. Let’s assume you have a mail server (SMTP Server) that is typically tied to your subscription form, that is, your subscription form is not tied to the platform, because you configured the mail server yourself. The mail server has sending parameters: the sender domain and the IP addresses from which the mail is sent. This is what is on your side, and you control them, you can change them. Why is this important? For example, take the GetResponse service — this is a platform focused on medium and small customers. Accordingly, allocating an IP address pool for each customer does not make sense, it is an unjustified use of resources on the part of the platform. Therefore, GetResponse, as well as Unisender, MailChimp and other ESPs — all platforms of this level use common IP addresses for a large number of their customers, which means the reputation of IP addresses is distributed across each sender and is also formed cumulatively from the reputation of each sender.

What can this lead to? To the fact that at some point the platform will miss the moment of lowering reputation due to one of the senders. For example, someone uploaded a huge purchased database, mailed it, and got complaints, the IP reputation dropped, and now your good newsletters that use the same IPs go to spam. Such situations happen often, and this is the risk that shared IPs carry.

Not all platforms provide dedicated IPs, but those aimed at a good level of work have them. And dedicated IPs are not always given for free. So dedicated IP addresses, on the one hand, are good because you shape the reputation yourself, on the other hand, it’s a problem because if some bad traffic accidentally goes through, you drown yourself. Accordingly, with dedicated IPs everything depends on you in terms of reputation.

Let’s talk about why it makes sense to separate news and transactional emails from different IP addresses and different domains.

Transactional messages are password recovery, order tracking, registration confirmation — these are emails that must be delivered to users.

Marketing messages — promotions, sales, etc. — are emails that make you profit, but if they don’t arrive, you only lose profit.

For a subscriber, not getting that promotional email will not be critical. At the same time, if they do not receive an email with a password reset, they will completely abstain from using your service. That’s why there’s a tactic of separating domains and IPs for different types of messages.

How is this done? For promotions, a domain like promo.<domain>.com is used, and for transactions — order.<domain>.com. Accordingly, reputation is divided across these domains, and if your mass mailings end up in spam, password recovery emails will still arrive.

The basic principle is to separate your core corporate domain from the domain used in mass mailings. A similar tactic is used to separate different types of messages.

Domain replacement can also be used, changing IPs depending on the country you are sending to, that is, for example, if you are sending to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, you can use the same IPs there. And if you also send emails to America or China, for example, then it makes sense to take other domains, other IP addresses. For China — it’s very strict there: you need to have a server that is physically located in China.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR MAILINGS
SPF RECORD

ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

SPF (sender policy framework) is a signature containing information about the servers that can send mail from your domain. The presence of SPF reduces the likelihood of your email ending up in spam.

It is important to remember that there can only be one SPF record per domain. An SPF record can contain multiple entries (for example, if emails are sent from multiple ESPs — unlikely, but I’ll give an example later). Subdomains need their own records.

SPF record example:

The SPF record defines which IP addresses you can send emails from, that is, this is the record that the mail provider like mail.ru, yandex.ru, gmail.ru and others check for correspondence between the IP address from which the email actually came and the IP address from which you allowed sending. The SPF record is published openly in DNS format. You can look up the SPF record of any domain simply by using the appropriate service.

Let’s take Lamoda as an example. Their record looks like this:

lamoda.ru. TXT «v=spf1 include:_spf.lamoda.ru include:_spf.google.com include:ofsys.com -all»

From this record we can see that they are allowed to send from the IPs specified at spf.lamoda.ru, from Google IPs (apparently they have mail hosted there) and from a platform IP. Accordingly, all other IP addresses are excluded. This means that emails from other IPs will be sent to spam. How to check this? I will name a few services that I use personally:

— dsnwatch.info / type = TXT

— mxtoolbox.com / SPF-check

— Google.com: SPF checker

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)

ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail