Engagement and sender reputation

Key findings on engagement and reputation

Email engagement: Sending the right signals

In Chapter 3, we mentioned how there are both positive and negative engagement signals that affect email deliverability. Essentially, this means mailbox providers pay attention to how your contacts interact with what you send.

The more positive signals there are, the more likely it is that services such as Gmail and Outlook will filter your messages into the inbox. Too many negative signals, and those providers may assume your emails deserve to go to spam instead.

Mailbox providers want people to have a good experience using their email services. When your subscribers send signals that your emails are unwanted, unimportant, or annoying, mailbox providers may not wait for those users to unsubscribe on their own. Services like Gmail proactively ask users if they want to unsubscribe from a brand’s emails when people haven’t engaged in a long time.

Inboxes are already overcrowded. The best way to prove you deserve to be in the inbox is to respect your subscribers and deliver valuable emails that are anticipated, timely, and relevant. In other words, you need to maintain or increase email engagement.

Why do people open, click, and unsubscribe?

The path to email engagement, Sinch Mailjet’s separate survey of consumers, asked people what encourages them to engage with emails – from the time they subscribe to their decision to opt out.

Here’s how consumers rated the importance of four common tactics marketers use to make email subject lines more engaging.

Unsurprisingly, when consumers opt in for promotional emails, promotions are what they want and expect to receive. When asked to choose the top three reasons they click on emails, many people indicated they click on emails to take advantage of deals or learn more about products and offers mentioned in the campaign.

These results indicate that familiarity with your brand, relevant promotional offers, and advanced email personalization are all effective ways to get your contact list to engage. However, it’s equally important to understand what prompts those negative signals.

If you want to keep contacts engaged with email, you’ll need to find the right balance between too many and too few communications. Too many emails and you annoy people, too few and they won’t remember signing up.

Above all, you’ve got to find a way to deliver what your subscribers want. If your emails are uninteresting, irrelevant, or considered nothing but clutter, you’ll eventually notice negative consequences on deliverability. That’s because mailbox providers are watching.

Understanding sender reputation

We’ve brought up “sender reputation” in previous chapters, but how well do you really know what it means to have a good sender reputation?

When we asked senders to rate their understanding of their sender reputation on a scale of 0 to 10, 25.5% claimed to have a high understanding (8 to 10). More than 42% of senders rated their understanding of sender reputation in the middle (4 to 7) and 32% rated it low (0 to 3).

Only around 25% of respondents feel confident about their understanding of sender reputation. So, what about the rest? Are there ways to learn more about how mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo view your email program?

Monitoring sender reputation

Some dedicated deliverability platforms provide reporting on sender reputation. That includes options like Mailgun Optimize’s Email Health Score as well as the Sender Score system, both of which provide an aggregate picture of sender reputation.

There are also free services from mailbox providers that offer insights into your reputation with those specific providers. Gmail has Google Postmaster Tools. Outlook has Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS), and Yahoo Mail/AOL has its Sender Hub.

Even though access to these reputation monitoring services is free, many senders aren’t using them. Our survey found almost 70% of respondents do not use any of these options to gain visibility into their sender reputation.

The most popular option is Google Postmaster Tools with 28% using the service. That makes sense as Gmail is the world’s most popular mailbox provider.

You might assume that Postmaster Tools is a complex, technical service meant for system administrators to set up and use. However, these reputation monitoring services also provide valuable information for email marketers and small businesses.

4 ways to use Google Postmaster Tools

Once you have access to Postmaster Tools, there are several things you can look for as a marketer or business owner.

1. Check your overall reputation with Gmail

Postmaster Tools assesses your IP and domain reputation and gives both a score. This pertains specifically to Gmail, which more than 1.8 billion people use for email.

• High: These senders have an excellent track record with Gmail. This means you’re following their guidelines and have a low spam complaint rate. Deliverability to Gmail accounts will be strong.

• Medium: These senders are known to send mostly quality emails with occasional low volumes of spam. Most emails will reach the inbox.

• Low: These senders are known to send significant volumes of spam. Most emails will be filtered into the spam folder.

• Bad: These senders have a history of sending lots of spam. Their complaint rate is high enough that most emails will be rejected or flagged as spam.

Postmaster Tools shows domain reputation improving

2. Monitor your complaint rate with Gmail

While email analytics often show your overall spam complaint rate, Postmaster Tools provides a specific number based on how often Gmail users mark your messages as spam.

The service provides an aggregate spam rate, which is unlike other providers that use a traditional feedback loop (FBL). Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and AOL, for example, send more detailed notifications about individual spam complaints. Google’s FBL does allow users to track spam rates by campaign and customer.

Postmaster Tools shows spikes in spam complaints

The reporting you see here shows extreme spikes in spam complaints. By monitoring Postmaster Tools, this legitimate sender learned a bad actor was spoofing a subdomain and causing serious problems. See the full story on Reddit.

3. Get insights to inform email strategy

In addition to a reputation score and spam rates, Postmaster Tools offers other datapoints marketers can use to optimize their efforts. That includes:

• Aggregate data on email engagement in Gmail.

• Delivery errors explaining why emails are rejected, failed to deliver, or were suspected to be spam.

• Whether your emails are passing or failing authentication protocols.

When you have deliverability challenges with Gmail, this information can often help you pinpoint problems and adjust.

4. Cross-team email program collaboration

Google Postmaster Tools and similar platforms can serve as a bridge between technical teams and marketers. It gives both sides a source of truth for understanding email deliverability.

Technical teams can focus on proper configuration for email security as well as IP and domain reputation. Marketers can gain deeper insights into what’s working and what may need to change to improve sender reputation.

“Mailbox providers like Gmail want you to do the right thing. They want senders to have all the information they can. The fact that so few organizations are using Google Postmaster Tools is sad. If you’re not checking all the information that’s available to you, then you’re missing out.”

Nick Schafer

Sr. Manager of Deliverability & Compliance, Sinch

What impacts your sender reputation?

There are many factors that impact your sender reputation with mailbox providers. Some involve technical details like DNS records. Others are influenced by what you send and how your contacts respond to emails. We asked survey participants to choose the three factors they believed would have the biggest impact on improving sender reputation. These were the top responses:

1. Improving list hygiene (34.5%)

2. Reducing spam complaints (28.3%)

3. Reducing bounce rates (26.8%)

The truth is, every one of the options found on the following chart can affect your reputation as an email sender. Yet some of the factors, like engagement, should get more attention.

Less than 15% of respondents chose increasing email engagement (14.7%) as a top factor for boosting sender reputation. However, with domain reputation playing an increasingly important role, that’s one of the best ways to show mailbox providers your emails should reach the inbox.

Many aspects of email are connected. So, when you focus on list hygiene, reducing spam complaints, A/B testing, or using segmentation and personalization, you’re also likely to increase email engagement in the process.

“Engagement is your lifeline to reputation as a sender. It is extremely important. If you think about what mailbox providers are doing, they want their users to get the emails they want to receive... And the way they do that is by looking at engagement.”

Nick Schafer

Sr. Manager of Deliverability & Compliance, Sinch

Three tactics to improve email engagement

Improving email engagement leads to improved deliverability. But it’s not the IT system administrators who have the creative strategies that prompt more people to open and click. That comes from the minds of marketers.

Of course, compelling subject lines and creative calls to action can only get you so far. The best ways to boost engagement involves more advanced email marketing tactics:

1. A/B testing

2. Segmentation

3. Personalization

These methods help you build more engaging, data-driven experiences for customers and contacts.

1. A/B testing in email

One of the best ways to understand how to build emails that your contacts find engaging is to experiment. A/B testing for email marketing involves sending two versions of an email to find out which performs best. A/B testing allows you to test specific elements in your email, like subject lines or calls to action (CTA), so you can define what makes a difference.

2. Segmenting your email list

List segmentation involves putting contacts into different groups so that you can deliver emails that are more meaningful and relevant. Instead of one email for everyone, you can send campaigns to people that have targeted messaging, specific product recommendations, and pertinent information.

You can also segment your list by how engaged contacts are. People who open and click often could receive emails more often, while less engaged subscribers are segmented on a separate list and only receive your most important campaigns.

3. Personalizing email campaigns

As stated earlier, our engagement survey found more than 80% of global consumers say personalized email content is important to them. However, consumers view name personalization in the subject line as less important.

A campaign with advanced email personalization

These two examples represent personalized emails from the same travel brand’s campaign. Both use the contact’s first name, which the company would collect during signup.

Each one also features a different destination and related imagery. That could be collected based on what web pages the contacts visited, or what they clicked on in a previous email campaign. The result is a more targeted and personalized message that is more relevant and more likely to get good engagement.