Email marketers sharpen deliverability tactics at MailCon

A year of changes requires a shift in tactics for email marketers. At the start of the year, Yahoo and Google issued new rules for bulk email senders. Now marketers have to decide what steps they need to take to avoid getting emails rejected in the “post-Yahoogle” era.

This summer, marketers from across the email marketing community, including Google, gathered in New York at MailCon to share best practices in this new era.

“The state of email has been evolving more than ever, especially in 2024 due to Google and Yahoo’s new bulk sender requirements,” said Talar Malakian, CMO of Phonexa, the lead gen technology company that hosts MailCon. “Additionally, Google’s website domain upgrades and stringent spam threshold rates have all posed formidable obstacles for marketers.”

Approaches to maintaining high email deliverability and a healthy reputation in this climate came from Google and others. Here are some tactics for email marketers to consider.

Build up your sender reputation

To ensure deliverability, bulk email senders must authenticate emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC).

Dig deeper: Email deliverability and authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC)

Building a good reputation as a sender, however, requires more actions and, at least at Google, is an ongoing effort based on rankings.

“The question I get from senders is when will Google, or Yahoo, start rejecting my messages,” said Ebenezer Anjorin, lead project manager at Google, in a talk at MailCon. “I think that’s the wrong question. ‘Will the domain be evicted?’ That’s the bigger question. It takes time to build up reputation.”

Reputation depends on a series of actions email recipients take, rated from less severe to more damaging to the reputation of senders:

• Ignore
• Unsubscribe
• Report spam
• Block

A frequent complaint Anjorin said he hears from email users is there are too many low-value emails and users can’t easily unsubscribe from them.

To meet these user demands, Google introduced two new requirements for senders concerning unsubscribes. First, senders need to provide an easy one-click unsubscribe link in the body of the email message. Secondly, these unsubscribe requests should be processed within 48 hours.

Notice in the list above that “unsubscribe” is far from the most damaging action a recipient can take. Making unsubscribes easier will reduce the number of recipients who, for instance, block your emails or report them as spam. If they do, that could affect the sender’s reputation much more drastically.

“If you don’t make it easy to unsubscribe, the report spam goes up and then an outright block, and that’s just not good,” said Anjorin.

Email confirmations

Email marketers aren’t just at the mercy of recipients and the damaging actions they might take. There are steps marketers can take on their end to make sure they are in good standing with Google, Yahoo and other services.

Although one-click unsubscribe is a Google requirement, Anjorin said it’s a good practice regardless of which service the sender uses.

Bulk senders should make sure that the one-click unsubscribe function works properly. That’s one solid step toward better reputation and overall deliverability.

Additionally, senders should make sure to confirm addresses prior to sending a series of messages. If it’s the wrong address, a recipient is more likely to flag as spam or block the emails. Anjorin recommended a double-consent action that includes, for instance, a signup to receive emails in a form, followed by a confirmation email.

Marketers should also be cautious about using the same address on their side for transactional emails like order confirmations and more general-purpose marketing emails. There’s a risk that all of these emails will be automatically sent to spam because of the high volume of messages coming from a single address.

Anjorin also recommended email marketers use Postmaster Tools and Sender Guidelines as resources for Gmail-specific actions.

Review engagement metrics daily

Email marketers are already in the habit of looking beyond simple open rates. What’s important are the signals from customers when they engage with emails and what actions they take as a result.

“It’s good practice to develop a healthy metrics obsession,” said Kevin Vaudry, senior director, sales and marketing for marketing automation platform Campaigner. “The data you get is telling you something.”

This is where AI and machine learning can help marketing teams visualize data and pull actionable insights. Using these insights, marketers can adjust email campaigns to make them more engaging and less likely to be flagged as spam.

“I know marketing teams are constrained,” said Vaudry. “AI can help. I look at metrics on a daily basis. I can see what’s good or bad over a three- or four-day period. I don’t have time to wait weeks or months. And it all goes back to email at some point. Every metric matters. Watch your data because it’s telling you things, even on a daily basis.”

Break down email campaigns into six stages

When executing and measuring email campaigns, it helps to break the marketing program into six stages, according to Clinton Willmot, senior email marketing manager at web hosting company Namecheap. These stages inform the email messages and help personalize them.

• Acquisition: When customers make a purchase and join the list they receive a confirmation.
• Onboarding: New customers receive a welcome message about the company.
• Engagement: Messages are sent frequently to build brand awareness.
• Super-engagement: Highly engaged customers receive personalized messages at a high frequency that are triggered by abandoned carts or browsers, for example.
• Re-engagement: Customers who are latent or inactive receive messages welcoming them back into the fold with special deals and offers.
• Transition: Help process the customer’s choice to unsubscribe. In some cases, offer options for unsubscribing or managing multiple email subscriptions.

Here’s where customer data and insights help to identify which stage a customer is in.

“Email marketers facing significant challenges look to MailCon and Phonexa to connect, learn and adapt amongst their peers to identify the best solutions and strategies to overcome challenges and grow business,” said Malakian.

She added: “Our key focus this year was to offer the MailCon community carefully curated programming to improve their email marketing performance, specifically focused on email deliverability.”