Deliverability for Peak Sales Season
Our Senior Account Manager Jason Crichton has over 20 years of experience in the world of email, including email marketing, strategy, deliverability metrics and deliverability consultation. In this piece, he shares what marketers should consider for their peak sales season sending strategies related to deliverability best practices. Learn how you can leverage them to build and maintain your email sending reputation.
The Email Landscape during Peak Sales Season
It is that time of year once again when marketers are vying for valuable inbox real estate to make the case for customers to consider purchasing from them during the peak sales season. In doing so, the email ecosystem landscape shifts to a much more active and competitive environment.
This peak sales season is the first where Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements will directly impact your sender reputation. At dmarcian, we take a holistic approach to email campaigns, recognizing the importance of both a strong sender reputation and a solid DMARC infrastructure. While these tips are tailored for the peak sales season, they can benefit your email sending reputation year-round.
Learn how to navigate Google and Yahoo sender requirements, including DMARC, launched earlier this year.
List Hygiene Services
If there’s one thing that can make the biggest difference for your deliverability reputation during the peak sending season, it could be investing in a list hygiene cleansing service. A list hygiene service will allow you to take your marketing list and flag potentially problematic email addresses that may be living on your list.
As mailbox providers clamp down on poor sending practices more than usual during this time of year (more on this a little bit later), one of those items is bounces—specifically hard bounces. A list hygiene service can help to identify addresses which may be malformed, closed, etc., which will result in a hard bounce. As many marketers ramp up sending volume for peak sales season, increased hard bounces can come back to haunt you; a list hygiene service can help lessen the impact of this potential issue.
How Far Back Should You Go on Your Lists?
Many senders will open up their marketing lists well beyond their normal sending criteria, i.e., opening the list up to contacts that are three, four, five, or more years old. While sending a larger quantity of emails, in theory, makes sense to cast a larger net to capture revenue, you are also capturing more issues.
Contacts that are excessively aged can lead to higher hard bounces, spam complaints from users who have either forgotten about you or are no longer interested, a higher number of emails that are never opened (no engagement at all which mailbox providers do monitor), or they delete without opening (which, again, mailbox providers do monitor). Each of these items can and will impact reputation markers for your brand.
How often are you sending?
One of the biggest mistakes that senders make, not only in peak sending season, is cadence. Sending a large send once a week with nothing for the next seven-plus days is not the ideal way to build and/or keep a steady reputation.
When possible, email sends should be happening on a consistent basis. If you have a send slated for 100,000 emails and nothing else for the next week until the next campaign, it is better to throttle that send over the course of several days, if you can, versus sending all 100,000 at once. In addition, take into consideration your “normal” sending cadence/volume and the increase reaching back may provide.
Going from your normal 10,000 emails a day to 500,000 a day out of nowhere will potentially cause throttling issues with mailbox providers. Understanding that some sends are time sensitive and this may not be an option in all circumstances, this tactic should be considered when applicable.
Are you monitoring your deliverability reputation?
Something free that every sender can do, and should be doing, is staying on top of their reputation. You can do this via free postmaster tools; one of which we have talked about previously with Google.
As Gmail has the largest user base of emails worldwide (according to Porch Media Group), keeping tabs on your reputation with this mailbox provider should be near the top of your list. Similar postmaster tools are available for Microsoft and Yahoo as well.
Competing for Inbox Real Estate
Something to keep in mind is that whether you are selling widget A, B, or C and even if you don’t fit into the mold of “peak season vendor,” you are fighting for the same inbox space and eyeballs that everyone else is.
It’s in your best interest to do your best to be a practical and responsible sender to maintain a positive reputation when the email inbox waters become more difficult to navigate over the next few months.
Is your DMARC policy set up correctly?
As a DMARC-focused company, dmarcian wants to make sure you are set up for success with your email security via DMARC. Something to make sure of is that your DMARC record is set up and in good standing for peak sending season.
Considering this will be the first peak sending season after Gmail and Yahoo’s updated sender requirements, this is doubly important. We strongly suggest auditing your DMARC set up and making sure it is where it needs to be per the sender requirements discussed here.
We’re Here to Help
With a team of email security experts and a mission of making email and the internet more trustworthy through domain security, dmarcian is here to help assess an organization’s domain catalog and implement and manage DMARC for the long haul.
