For SMS Deliverability Best Practices, you can refer to our online documentation of SMS Campaigns, and see there SMS Deliverability Best Practices. |
In order for your email messages to reach the inbox of your users, you must have a good Sending IP and Sending Domain reputation.
Sender reputation is a score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as Gmail, Outlook, etc. assign to an organization identified by their IP and sending domain. The higher the score, then ISPs will more likely deliver emails to the inboxes of recipients on their network. On the other hand if the score falls under a specific limit, the ISP may send email messages to recipients’ spam folders, or even reject those messages altogether which will result in soft bounces.
The reputation is based on how recipients interact with the email messages coming from that organization's sending IP and sending domain. For example, the more recipients, open, click, and reply to those messages, the higher reputation that Sending IP and Domain will have. And the opposite, the more recipients, delete without opening, or if there are high rates of unsubscribing, or marking as junk, will reduce the organizations' Sending IP and Domain reputation.
Make sure you have your domains are authenticated as per the ESP guidelines. The two main authentications that allow you to establish your identity with ISPs are the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) protocols. It is mandatory to have these authentication protocols in place. Visit our Email Authentication Protocols page, for more about the Authentication Protocols.
When you are setting up a new Sending List; make sure to have a domain that does not crosswire with other domains in other sending lists. It is best to use List specific ESP connections by locking ESP connections to Sending List. You can restrict one or more SMTP vendor connections to a specific sending list. Visit our List Manager page and see How to allocate and restrict one or more SMTP vendor connections to a specific sending list.
It is best practice to have the Sending domain, Tracking domain, Image domain and Bounce domain, all share the same top level domain.
So for example, if your sending domain is “domain.com” then make sure to have a tracking and image domain that share the same domain.com, so they can be "track.domain.com" and "image.domain.com" (or "trk.domain.com" or "img.domain.com"). In case you are using vendors that require the Bounce domain to be setup in Ongage, then make sure to that the Bounce domain shares the same top level domain as well e.g., “bounce.domain.com”.
It is advisable to check your Mail Tester score when you start sending email messages and then do it periodically to identify if there are any issues with your IP reputation. Visit our Campaigns page and see How to Send a Test Campaign and use a Mail Tester.
It is highly recommended to use a List hygiene mechanism for all channels from which email data is going to be added into your lists. These mechanisms include:
By using Aggregate Reports, you can see the complete email delivery status as sent, success, failed, hard bounces, soft bounces per campaign. By using this report you can check the status of soft bounces by applying additional filters like Per Day, Per Week, Per Month etc., to see if the number of soft bounces is increasing or decreasing. Visit our Analytics page and see the Additional Analytical Groupings.
Per Day Report
The Aggregate Report displays the statistics according to per day, which is an easy way to see daily trends particularly in Soft Bounces, Unique Clicks, Unique Opens and CTRs. And thus identify any trending issues.
Per Week and Per Month Report
The Per Week and Per Month Reports are a great way at looking at trends across a wider span of time, and thus identify more consistent and long term trends.
The Matrix Report enables viewing and analyzing deliverability (sent, success, fails, soft bounces, etc.) and performance statistics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, etc.) grouped by the ISP domains. It gives you important insights about your sending domain reputation associated with the sending vendor connections used to send to those ISP mailbox domains. In the matrix report you can find the top ISPs you are sending to. Among those top ISPs, you can identify if there are any issues for that particular ISP. If you notice there are issues with Other domains, you need to check the full long tail report by using the Custom Aggregate Report (see below). Visit our Analytics page for more about the Matrix Report.
The Custom Aggregate Report provides a way to view full long-tail report of delivery stats to all ISP/Mailbox domains that you are sending to. The Custom Aggregate Report enables additional custom groupings including the Grouped by Top Level Domains. Visit our Analytics page and see there the Custom Aggregate Report.
Ongage has a built-in mail tester available using which you can send a Test Campaign from Ongage UI and generate a detailed Mail Tester report. Visit our Campaigns page and see How to Use a Mail Tester.
This email deliverability tool is used to track data on a large volume of emails that are being sent and find data about your sending domain. Google Postmaster is a great tool in order to monitor your sending domain reputation in Gmail. Login here to set up your: Google Postmaster.
This is the Outlook equivalent of Google Postmaster
https://postmaster.live.com/snds/
How to sign up with Smart Network Data Services (SNDS)
This is the equivalent of Google Postmaster for AOL, Verizon.
https://postmaster.aol.com/
This is the equivalent of Google Postmaster for Yahoo!
https://mxtoolbox.com/problem/blacklist/ - for spot checking of IP and Sending Domain reputation.
Monitoring, Analysis and Tips:
Positive Interaction with your Sending Domain
Double opt-in is the feature where email addresses are verified by sending an email asking to confirm the subscription. Double opt-in is the way to ensure that your email list is populated with accurate addresses from individuals who have consented to receive messages from you. Double opt-in is not a mandatory practice, but we recommend it to ensure the quality of your list. This feature helps you in maximize engagement rates, and keeps negative signals at check, which helps in building high sender reputation which means you'll have great email deliverability.
In this method you first obtain the subscriber’s email address through a contact or sign-up form. Then you send an email to the address they provided, asking them to confirm their interest and consent. See our List Settings help doc on how to implement Double Opt-in in Ongage.
List Validation is the process where you can clean your email address lists to ensure you have removed all the invalid, high-risk, low score and even spam-trap emails addresses. Validation services typically employ an array of network data, Internet data and AI technologies in order to determine these factors.
As of 2023 Ongage offers a built-in Validation service! We recommend checking it out – contact Support or your account manager for more details and pricing.
Alternatively, here's a list of several major 3rd party services:
Using this method, you first obtain the subscriber’s email address through contact or sign up form. Then you send an email to the address they provided, asking them to confirm their interest and consent. Double opt-in is not a mandatory practice, but we do recommend it to ensure the quality of your list. The Double Opt-in feature helps you in building relationships, maximizing engagement rates and keeping negative signals at check which also helps in building high sender reputation which means you have excellent email deliverability.
It is strongly advised not to buy/rent lists from third party sources. There are a number of reasons that will affect your email deliverability when using third party lists. A few of the reasons include:
An increase in the number and rate of Soft Bounces is one of the strongest indicators of diminishing/poor sender reputation.
There are other reasons for soft bounces and those include:
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Additional deliverability tools to identify the reasons behind your soft bounces are:
Typically increasing higher soft bounce are going to go hand in hand with lower open and click rates. If your soft bounce rates are fine and still you have low open/click rates, these could be some of the factors related to that:
In order to improve your open/click rates check the following action items.
Run-Mail-Tester to confirm that your authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) are in place which will protect your messages from landing into the Junk/Spam folder.
You are targeting audiences that engage with your messages.
One of the important factors that affects open/click rates is if there are increasing or higher soft bounces rates.
Sending Volume: Initially start sending emails in low volume. Gradually increase the number of contacts over time as you gradually build reputation with engaged contacts.
Maintain your sending schedule and frequency.
Maintain diligent list hygiene.
Note: increased unsubscribe rates is not a delivery issue (in fact, it's a sign of good deliverability, as unsubscribes is typically only done by users after the emails have reached their inbox!). By and large it is a targeting issue. Factors for increased unsubscribe rates can be:
Following are some action items to perform to try and understand the cause of increased unsubscribes:
Check the Aggregate report for a period of at least 6 weeks to see if the phenomena is cyclical, e.g., more unsubscribes on weekends or certain days of the week.
Run the aggregate report using the default campaign grouping and try and identify any set of campaign(s) that triggered higher than usual Unsubscribes.
Create a segment of unsubscribes for those days where you seen a notable increase, and run a contact search on it to see if there's any correlation between their Create Date and Unsubscribe Date.
You can use these tools to analyze your current email sending reputation. These tools will show you what is impacting your score, and reputation, and provide info on what is missing or needed, in order to improve it, for better inbox placement.
There are a variety of common Spam filters that are used to examine the spam score of an email, and thus determine if an email will be directed to the inbox or spam/junk folder, or even rejected altogether. In addition, ISPs like Gmail have their own proprietary algorithms they use to determine this.
Vipul's Razor is a checksum-based, distributed, collaborative, spam-detection-and-filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalog of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content.
Important to Know about Razor:
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SpamCannibal uses a continually updated database containing the IP addresses of spam or DoS servers and blocks their ability to connect using a TCP/IP tarpit.
The following web tools can assist you in determining whether the domains you're using in your emails are listed in any Blacklist. Simply enter your domain in one of the provided tools and examine the results:
http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/ (recommended to run the test twice). Recommended to check this one out. In drop-down there you want option 1.
In Q2 2020 Ongage launched “Ongage Deliverability Services.” If your emails are landing in the SPAM folder, our deliverability expert team can help you turn that around, landing your emails in the inbox.
For more details see: https://www.ongage.com/deliverability-service