Learn Deliverability Best Practices and Remediation Tactics
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the key factors that influence deliverability performance.
- Troubleshoot and remediate the most common deliverability issues.
- Engage with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement resources that can help you with deliverability issues.
Root Causes of Poor Deliverability
Sometimes even the best senders experience a lapse in deliverability performance. The most common cause of poor performance is sending emails repeatedly to long-term inactive and redundant subscribers and mailboxes. These subscribers are more likely to disregard your email, flag your email as spam, bounce, or even be a potential spam trap. All of these can open the door to potential ISP blocks and negatively impact your overall deliverability performance.
Deliverability Best Practices
To prevent these problems from hindering your deliverability, employ deliverability best practices. This starts with managing subscriber expectations from the initial opt-in. Make it clear from the beginning what exactly the subscriber is opting in to. And combine that with a healthy subscriber lifecycle management process to handle the various stages of subscriber interest, activity, and status.
This should always include a welcome journey. The welcome journey sets subscriber expectations and builds on those expectations. It gives subscribers access to a custom preference center where they can control the type of emails they receive and the frequency they wish to receive emails. Your goal, above all, is to ensure you send content that the subscribers want and expect.
It’s also very important to periodically employ a reengagement journey. The reengagement journey gives lapsing or dormant subscribers an opportunity to either recommit their interest in receiving emails from you or unsubscribe once and for all. If anyone in your list continuously fails to engage, even after a series of attempts to recommit them, it’s time to move on and remove those subscribers.
This may be hard to accept. But keeping them only pollutes the overall quality of your list and increases the risk of greater deliverability challenges in the future. Don’t sacrifice quality over volume where deliverability is concerned. ISPs pick up on the negative signals that come from a list that contains many inactive subscribers, and that impacts your overall ROI in email.
Now, review our list of best practices for optimal deliverability.
Best Practice |
Explanation |
Consideration |
|---|---|---|
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Ensure that all subscribers you send to have given permission.
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All of the names on your subscriber lists must give explicit permission for you to send them email via the application. Even if you’ve received permission, people often forget they signed up for emails. |
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Have an easy unsubscribe process.
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Ensure the unsubscribe process is easy and hassle-free for the end user. It’s better for a user to unsubscribe than mark your email as spam. |
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Send to engaged subscribers.
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Adapt your sending practices to ensure you only email subscribers who want to hear from you. |
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Deal with bounce rates greater than 10%.
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Proactively remove your bounced addresses before your next send. Though the application automatically holds undeliverable emails after the third bounce, a bounce rate over 10% can dramatically harm your deliverability and mailbox provider reputation. |
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Be easy to identify.
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Make sure your from names in email addresses and subject lines are easily recognizable. |
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Proactively monitor spam complaint rates.
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Keeping spam complaints to a minimum (under 0.3% per Gmail’s guidance) helps ensure your content continues to make the inbox at the various mailbox providers, but it’s also an indicator that your product or message still resonates with your subscribers. |
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Practice good data hygiene.
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Do you have names you haven’t mailed to in six months? How about customers who haven’t opened an email or clicked a link in that same time period? If yes, it’s time to see if these old or inactive addresses bring you joy, or if you need to get rid of them. These customers cost money to mail, reduce your ROI, and are more likely to complain. |
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Manage frequency and content.
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Are you sending your emails more often than you promised? Less often? Is the content different from what you promised? Remember that permission communications are to be anticipated, personal, and relevant. If your users don’t anticipate your email or your content, reevaluate why you are sending them email in the first place. |
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Remediation Tactics
You’re following best practices but are experiencing deliverability problems. Now what? From time to time it might be necessary to call in the emergency crew. You might need to unblock delivery to a particular ISP, remove a sender from a particular blocklist, or perhaps remedy low open rates. Before embarking on any remediation effort though, it’s critical to understand and address the root cause of any deliverability issues first. Otherwise the problem will simply continue to return.
Here are some basic approaches to diagnosing and fixing deliverability issues.
- Review SMTP error logs. This can often help you diagnose the issue. And depending on the quality of the error description provided by the ISP, it can sometimes provide specific instructions and URLs to remediate the issue as well.
- If the issue is related to Microsoft or Google, look up the IP reputation on their relevant postmaster sites (Microsoft SNDS and Google Postmaster Tools). This can help you narrow down the issue and monitor performance at these ISPs during any recovery process. You can also improve your troubleshooting skills and better gauge the overall impact of your remediation efforts with these tools.
- Depending on the issue, you might need to temporarily pause sending emails outright or scale back on volumes at a specific ISP until the issue subsides. It never makes sense to send more volume when there’s a problem.
- Refine your segmentation criteria to identify better-quality subscribers, for example, people who subscribed within the past 90 days because this usually helps boost results.
- Monitor results for each send carefully until performance improves, such as when delivery rates and open rates are back up and in line with the averages. Only when it’s clear that your performance has improved is it sensible to gradually increase volumes again.
Need Deliverability Assistance?
If you are experiencing deliverability issues, we want to help! Here at Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, we have dedicated Deliverability Support teams who can offer general support and best-practice guidance. We also have a global team of expert Deliverability Services Consultants who can provide paid services engagements such as IP warming, Remediation, and Account Health Checks.
How do you get in touch?
- To raise a case for Deliverability Support at any time, click Salesforce Help & Training in the Settings dropdown next to your name in your Marketing Cloud Engagement instance.
- For expert Deliverability Services engagements, reach out to your account executive/account partner for more information.
In this unit you explored deliverability best practices and learned that by following them at all times, you can lay the foundation for success in your email marketing program. Healthy deliverability is essential to maximizing revenue for your business. You also learned about remediation tactics to troubleshoot common ISP deliverability issues.
But what if you’re sending email primarily business-to-business (B2B)? In the next unit, take a look at the additional challenges faced when sending exclusively to B2B domains and how to overcome them.
Resources
- Marketing Cloud Engagement Help: Email Deliverability Best Practices for Email Studio
- External Tool: Google Postmaster
- External Tool: Microsoft SNDS