FAQ: Deliverability

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What is and open rate?

Email open rate is the percentage of the total number of subscribers who opened an email campaign out of your total mailing list. These rates can vary depending on the target list, from address, subject line, timing and the relevancy of the subject matter for subscribers. Open rates are calculated by the number of unique opens divided by the number of emails sent, minus those that bounced.

Benchmarks range anywhere form 0.3% – 60% depending on the list or segment you are using, if your list is a house/member list or cold/acquisition, what day/time you are sending the email, and maybe most importantly, how well your subject line resonates with that audience.

What is a click-through rate?

Better known as CTR, click-through rate is the number of members who have clicked a link to an external destination from an email out of your total mailing list. Usually displayed as a percentage, it is calculated by dividing the clicks by the total number of opens.

Click-through rate is a better measure of engagement than open rates, as it shows the users interest level and intent to take action (even if just to learn more) is elevated from those who simply open an email and can lift overall reputation.

How is an invalid email address determined?

An invalid email occurs when you attempt to send email to an address that is formatted in a manner that does not meet internet email format standards or the email does not exist at the recipient’s mail server.

Examples include addresses with syntax errors (e.g. jsmith@website,com), spelling mistakes (e.g. jsnith@websit.com instead of jsmith@website.com) or finally, the user has provided a “fake” or non-existent email address, like mickeymouse@mickeymouse.com. If you run promos or contests that only require the email to enter, but not confirm, this will drive up the number of invalid addresses you receive. Best practice is to require email validation to avoid invalid addresses.

What is a hard bounce and how does it differ from a soft bounce?

A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason an email cannot be delivered. In most cases, bounced email addresses are cleaned from your database automatically. Email addresses that hard bounce will be excluded from all future campaign sends. Common reasons for hard bounces include A) the address doesn’t exist, B) the domain does not exist, or C) the recipient email server has blocked delivery.

Alternately, Soft bounces typically indicate a temporary delivery issue. Unlike hard bounces, soft bounced message delivery will be reattempted several times. There are many reasons an email address may soft bounce, these are some common reasons this could happen.

1. Mailbox is full (over quota).
2. Recipient domain is temporarily throttling due to high volume.
3. Recipient email server is down or offline.
4. Email message is too large.

If an email address continues to soft bounce in additional campaigns, the address will eventually be considered a hard bounce and suppressed from your list.

Can I “unbounce” a customer?

The quick answer is “yes”, but there are some contingencies. Hard bounces are not determined by our servers, but rather a response we get back upon sending. While we can remove a user from the hard bounce list, unless the status of their email address has changed with other providers, the address will likely come back as hard bounced on the next attempt as well.

Also keep in mind your IP reputation. Resending to hard bounced addresses is viewed as “spammer behavior”. You can do it on a one-by-one basis here and there, but it is poor practice to do it on mass for a large block of addresses as this can permanently damage your reputation as an email sender.

Does Experiture meet all privacy acts including TCPA, CAN-SPAM, GDPR & CCPA?

YES. As a certified email provider, Experiture meets or exceeds all known privacy acts including TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).

We work in some of the most highly regulated industries so you can rest assured that we take every necessary precaution to assure our systems and platforms are fully outfitted to meet any and all regulations.

Why does my target list matter so much in delivery?

The importance of building good lists and list hygiene cannot be understated. Think of it this way: If your ability to get into a hot night club depends on the reputation of your entourage, you would not bring anyone with you that you did not know well. If you did and they act poorly, this reflects directly on your reputation and may cost you the ability to be welcomed back the next time.

Email lists are similar. Every unknown or “bad” email address lowers your reputation. Lower it far enough and you can be “blacklisted” or disallowed to send emails from your domain.

So how do you build and maintain good lists? Here are some recommendations you should follow:

Use Explicit Opt-In. 

Requires the customer/member to voluntarily (and explicitly) sign up for email marketing. Often, this takes the form an explicit sign-up for updates, or a checkbox on a registration page that reads something like, “I want to receive offers, news and updates.”

Validate Email Addresses

Put a program in place to validate your customer email addresses by sending a follow-up to the email provided. This method is common for many sign-up moments consumers encounter, so for most it is simply part of the process. Your Experiture project manager can you configure a validation program. Identify the Types of Emails You Will Send

Customers/Members are more likely to opt-in and not mark emails as spam if they understand what they are signing up for.

Send out Welcome or “New Member” Emails

Ensure your customers/members immediately get communications from you so they associate your emails with their recent opt-in. Users often forget they opted-in when they receive emails long after they originally signed up.

Monitor Engagement & Unsubscribes

As you send out different messages, watch your email stats including open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes and other stats that provide indications of how your email campaigns are performing with your customer/member base. Use this data to augment your programs to better fit the engagement patterns.

Segment by Activity

Your open rate also plays a part in your overall reputation, so using engagement activity and segmenting by email opens is a good approach. In Experiture’s segmentation engine, you will find a host of ways to segment based on activity. You can also view user’s profiles to see which emails they are engaging with an which they aren’t. Moreover, you can also set scoring by email types to help assess your user base.

Resending to users who never open your email will play a role in degrading your overall reputation as a sender, and, your messages are not getting read. For these users, it’s probably time to try another channel to reach them.

How do I clean up my target list?

Experiture is automatically helping to keep your lists clean. This includes managing unsubscribes, hard and soft bounces, invalid addresses and more on every campaign you send. These are automatically pulled out and suppressed from your database.

However, there are other action steps you can take on the list itself to keep it as clean as possible, and your Experiture delivery team can help.

Identify and Remove Spam Traps & Abusive Addresses

Experiture’s email deliverability experts track spam trap data and use it to remove them from email list data helping to elevate your reputation by avoiding known traps and abusive addresses that are often mark emails as spam.

Identify and Remove or Validate Inactive Addresses

Inactive addresses with little to no engagement can hurt your overall reputation and can also become spam traps over time. Customers/members who have not opened an email in the last 12 months or more should be removed or sent reactivation messages to reengage or remove them depending on activity.

Give Customers/Members Opportunities to Confirm Their Email Address

Using validation programs, on-site kiosks or other methods, ensure your customers/members are presented with opportunities to confirm their email addresses to ensure misspellings and typos are corrected.

Re-Validate Addresses That Have Hard Bounced

While emailing addresses that have hard bounced is possible, your better bet is to re-approach customers/members whose emails have hard bounced and request they update their address (using opt-in best practices).

Run Email Update Incentive Programs

Good email addresses don’t just help keep your reputation up, they allow you to engage customers/members and generate additional revenue. Running programs that provide offers and incentives for users to update their email addresses and provide the most current can be well worth the marketing spend.

What is a Spam Trap and why do I need to avoid them?

Spam traps are a type of fraud management tool, used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to identify spammers so they can block emails from them. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn’t belong to a real person and can’t be used for any kind of communication. Types of Spam Traps Include:

Pure Spam Traps

These are email addresses that have never been used by anyone. Pure spam traps are set up with the sole intention of luring in spammers, which is done by leaving them out as bait. The address is placed on the Internet where people or robots harvesting email addresses illegitimately will find them.

Recycled Email Addresses

Recycled spam traps are very old email addresses that are no longer in use by the original owner. The address has been abandoned for so long the provider has repurposed it as a trap to expose, and block emails from, senders who are not responsibly managing their email marketing programs.

Typos

Typos are email addresses with a typo in the domain, such as @gnail instead of @gmail. Typos on the domain side of the address, after the @, are the most common spam traps, but you can also strike one with a misspelled username — the bit before the @.

Fake Addresses

When users register online for say, a whitepaper download, they may enter a fake email address. For example, someone submits an address like donotmailme@please.com which might just happen to be a spam trap address.

Avoiding Spam Traps

Your Experiture delivery team can work with you to run your list through powerful tools that track all the known spam traps across the web. Removing these is key, as they directly impact your reputation. Many companies assume they will have no spam traps if users are directly providing email addresses, but this is often not the case. Even in well curated house lists, we have found spam traps to exist so it is important to regularly check as your database grows.

What is IP reputation and why does it matter?

IP reputation matters much like your business reputation matters. If you are a straightforward businessperson who works hard, is known to treat colleagues with respect and are fair in your business practices, you will likely enjoy a good reputation. In fact, that reputation may even proceed you in circles where you are not well known providing a fast entrance into them.

IP reputation works in the same manner. If your IP is trustworthy, meaning you follow best practices and avoid “spammy” behavior, you will enjoy a good IP reputation. As a good business reputation opens doors in your professional life, a good IP reputation does the same for but with mail servers and providers. 

Mail servers and spam filters are looking for any signs of suspicious behavior. A good IP reputation means mail servers and spam filters will view you as positive sender and lower their blockers to let messages from your domain/IP come through. On the converse, having a poor reputation will put a mail servers guard up, and make it much more likely your messages will be blocked.

How does my content affect my ability to land in inboxes?

Content matters more than you might think. The single best thing you can do to avoid spam filters when it comes to content is to not look like spam. As obvious as this may seem, there may be some design or content decisions you make that will unwittingly flag those filters. Here are best practices you can use to ensure you don’t look like spam:

Maintain balance between text and images

Some of the best performing campaigns use strong hero imagery to great effect and the key here is balance – use strong images, but also ensure your email has enough context to deliver your message even without them. Use of alt text (the text that is shown when images are turned off) is always recommended.

Watch your text to link ratio

As with text/image ratio, this is another area that does not have a hard and fast rule that will work for all receiving inboxes. Spammers often send emails with just a few lines of text and numerous links. Most importantly, balance the number of links you have in your email with quality content. Of course, you should always check every link before sending your campaign. Including a link to a spam or malware infected site is another way to get fast-tracked to the spam folder.

Be cautious of URL shorteners

The use of URL shorteners is something you should avoid in your email campaigns. Even if the URLs you are linking to are legitimate, the widespread abuse of URL shorteners to transmit spam has made them red flags for many ISPs. Instead, provide clickable hyperlinks on keywords in your copy or on images.

Tighten up your content

Avoid spammy words and phrases like “WINNER!” or “100% Free”. Also, be careful when using special characters ($%#), avoid overuse of punctuation and always proofread your copy for spelling mistakes. As discussed previously, half the battle when trying to avoiding the spam filter is to avoid looking like a spammer.

For more information, see our Email Best Practices How-To Guide and How to Avoid Common Spam Keywords article.