Owning the Inbox: Sure-Fire Tactics to Improve Email Deliverability

Ros: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our webinar today, “Owning the Inbox: Sure-Fire Tactics to Improve Email Deliverability.” First of all, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Ros Hodgekiss, the Customer Success Programs Manager at Campaign Monitor. And my role here is to partner with our customers to help them make the most of their email marketing. So what’s Campaign Monitor? In a nutshell, it’s easy-to-use, professional-grade email marketing automation for fast-growing businesses. And now, I’m gonna hand over to Jack so he can say a few words about what he does at Kickbox.

Jack: Thanks, Ros. My name is Jack Wrigley and I am the VP of Business Development for Kickbox. My specific focus is really working with great ESPs like Campaign Monitor and coming up with creative ways to partner and work together to bring high-quality verification to their customer base. Kickbox is a verification company. We are focused on permission-based only email data, but in essence, we determine whether or not an email address is deliverable. We do that through a couple of ways that you’ll learn about in this webinar and we’re certainly happy to be here.

Ros: That’s awesome. Thank you, Jack. I’m happy you’re here too. So we have a really action-packed agenda today in which we’re going to be delivering to you, both the theory and the practice to maintaining great deliverability and managing your lists as well as sending high-performing campaigns. So let’s get straight into it by talking about email deliverability. So when it comes to email deliverability, Return Path defines deliverability as the percentage of emails that make it into the inbox. That is, they don’t bounce or land in spam. With an understanding of your deliverability, you can detect issues before they even come out of control. For instance, if you start seeing that you do have high bounce rates, or, for instance, your emails are being flagged as spam, or, for instance, your open rates are especially low, you might find that you have email deliverability issues.

Think about it at the end of the day, with a high success rate, you’re gonna get higher return on investment. Spam filters are really something that is worth understanding if you wanna separate your email from malicious email and fraudulent email out there. ESPs like Gmail, Yahoo, and others do a very aggressive job at filtering out what they believe to be this malicious or fraudulent email and in fact, you’ll find that over $180 billion spam messages are sent and many of them are successfully filtered. In order to avoid that fate, it’s a good thing to understand how spam filters work. I mean, traditionally, spam filters would simply analyze the content looking for flags, for instance, large images, certain phrases, and other pieces of content which could cause harm to the recipient.

However, Gmail and others have now evolved to detect both good signals and bad in order to use algorithms which very, very intelligently detect whether or not an email is fraudulent or not. Some of these good signals include things like open rates and reply rates, but it might also be a surprise to you that unsubscribes are also a sign of good engagement. Simply, being able to have your subscribers opt out of an email does show that you abide by the law and also that the recipients can opt out at will. Now, I’m gonna hand over to Jack to give us a little more detail around the more technical sides of deliverability. Take it away, Jack.

Jack: Thanks, Ros. Appreciate that a lot. You know, I was fascinated a little bit by the discussion around spam filters and what spam filters view as good behavior with regard to, you know, positive open rates, reply rates, and things of that nature. The next three technologies that I’m gonna discuss really contribute to providing those which ultimately allow you to, you know, better avoid the spam folder. So what I wanna discuss here is just a little bit about IPs, whether that’s a dedicated IP or a shared IP. We’re gonna talk a little bit about SPF and why literally you should care and then we’ll also just briefly discuss DKIM. The great news here is this is a bit technical. I’m not going to take a heavy deep dive into any three of these, but the good news is, is the Campaign Monitor can assist you in handling all three of these.

So if this becomes a little overbearing, don’t worry, we’re all here to help you. So let’s talk a little bit about warming up an IP if you’ve made the decision to go with a dedicated IP. It’s necessary, really for many reasons but the reason that it’s necessary to have a dedicated IP is it does help you prevent bad actors from leveraging your IP to do nefarious things out on the web. It’s really important. It also really helps fight spam, email sending, and things of that nature from your IP. The reason that a dedicated IP is also important is ISPs always try to find trust in the sender and by having a dedicated IP, it is an element or a piece of building that trust with an ISP. It doesn’t mean that you’ll always have the green light to send through and everything will be great, but it’s an element of building trust and becoming recognizable by an ISP on the web.

And then certainly by warming up the IP, it does allow you to ultimately deliver more email, preferably into the inbox without any issues of getting landed into the spam folder. So an IP is an important piece of the equation. If you make the decision to go with a dedicated IP, there are reasons to warm it up. It’s to build that trust with ISPs and ultimately deliver more email more frequently.

Many of you have probably heard SPF, some may know about it, some may not know about it, but what SPF is, it basically stands for Sender Policy Framework and it’s really designed to eliminate spoofing of a sender, meaning again, now when you’re talking about an ISP, the ISP can look at SPF records and things of that nature and determine very quickly whether or not that email is being sent by a legitimate sender. This is a real important piece of building that trust with ISPs and it’s a very important piece of ensuring that more of your email gets delivered and hopefully into the inbox, not the spam folder.

Just some technical things. SPF does need to be configured in the public DNS and if you’re using Campaign Monitor, for example, Campaign Monitor would need to be added as a trusted source in your setup. SPF though is an element of, again, building that trust with ISPs. It’s a very important piece. Don’t get overwhelmed with it, reach out to Campaign Monitor, and they can certainly help guide you and instruct you on how to implement SPF.

And the third element is DKIM and DKIM is again, it’s really designed to provide another point of reference for ISPs to ensure that the email being sent is from the proper sender. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Email and as noted, it’s just another level of security to protect your sender reputation. And the sender reputation, again…we’re throwing around some concepts here, but sender reputation is literally the trust that the ISP has with you as a sender. And if you are implementing technology, if you are following best practices, if you are collecting email addresses in a permission-based way, all of those compound and build upon your sender reputation and ultimately, ISPs want to see that as high as possible, therefore, your email will be delivered into the inbox, etc. And so these are all elements of developing that sender reputation, which is really important.

By implementing DKIM, you’re going to associate your domain name with the email you’re sending. So again, it’s saying that your company is watching over this email that is being sent and they’re completely tied together as one company unit. Again, when an ISP sees that, they typically bless it and they allow that through assuming that you’re following, you know, other best practices. But again, what they’re looking for is to ensure that the sender of the email actually owns the technology and the domain around that email so that it’s one consistent unit going through, being sent. Proper DKIM implementation, well, certainly, like I say, allow an ISP to further trust the email because again, they can see that it’s associated with a particular domain.

Just to wrap up this technical discussion, these are three very important aspects of sending email that you should consider and consider along with Campaign Monitor. The best part about it is they are all designed to create security for you, build on your reputation as a sender and ultimately, allow you to deliver more email, which, of course, then impacts all of the metrics that are important to you from open rates, and click-throughs, and things of that nature.

Ros: So now, we’re gonna share with you a couple of great best practices for growing and managing your lists. First of all, let’s talk about double opt-in. Double opt-in or confirmed opt-in is a form of email verification. It makes sure that from your first send, you’re sending to real recipients only. So really, as we see here, it’s really a two-step process in which generally, after signup, we send an email that includes a link that allows the recipient to then confirm that they’re in fact a real human being. Now, you might wonder if this has an impact ultimately on your ability to grow your lists, but my rationale here is your objective should be quality over quantity when it comes to your subscriber list and this is especially important if you want to maintain good deliverability.

As we’ll be discussing later on though, there are other methods to verify your email addresses. So let’s talk about this management now that we’ve spoken about confirmed opt-in or double opt-in. For over 50% of SMB marketers, the lack of an effective list strategy is a real barrier for success. And so we want you to not get stuck basically in this position where you’re not really sure how to look after your lists and you’re finding that your engagement rates are in decline. Ultimately, the cornerstone to a great list strategy is list hygiene. And one way to maintain great list hygiene is to really monitor the different cohorts that you have in your list or segments and see how they are responding to your email messages over time. So engagement segments allow you to analyze subscribers by activity. An example, you know, who is engaged with your most recent emails, who hasn’t engaged for say a few months, or folks that really have not engaged at all. And we find that year over year, usually, 20% of subscribers fall into that unengaged category.

So it’s important to really keep an eye on your lists and make sure that you are either actively re-engaging those individuals, or you’re removing them so that you can maintain great engagement rates and deliverability. So you can try sending a reengagement campaign and generally, everybody, you know, has a different way of going about this. But simply by focusing on, you know, the cohort that you believe is starting to become less engaged, you can really bump them back into this active category, getting them responding again. But then again, if you do have subscribers you do find are chronically unengaged, often the best thing you can do is just remove them from your lists or try another tactic in order to just verify that at the end of the day, these folks will not bring down your deliverability.

But as Jack is gonna explain, there are some things that you can do before you even start sending to maintain great list hygiene. So over to you, Jack.

Jack: Thanks so much, Ros. Yeah, so obviously, Kickbox as mentioned, is all about email verification and it’s important to understand what email verification is and it’s simply determining whether or not an email is deliverable, whether it will deliver, whether it will bounce, etc. And at Kickbox, when you leverage our service, we do provide that feedback based on the email address that we verify, but we also provide some other information that can be very helpful for marketers. So not only do we verify deliverable email addresses, we deliver or we identify the undeliverable, of course. We also will identify risky and unknown email addresses. And oftentimes people will say, “Well, our risk, can you send her a risky email address?” And in most cases, we say, “Of course.”

What risky for us is helping you understand is that, you know, perhaps the email address is a disposable address. Maybe it’s a role address, like [email protected] It could be a free address, a Gmail address, a Yahoo address, things of that nature, or it could be an accept-all domain. And all we’re trying to do from our perspective when we provide verification is to let you know whether or not it’s deliverable or undeliverable, and then if there’s something interesting about that email address that might be risky for you to send to, we try to put some context around that as well so that you as a marketer can better understand when you send that email, if engagement’s slow or other things, you can then, kind of, determine that based on how we classified that email address.

Now, the cool part with regard to email lists verification and certainly, our relationship with Campaign Monitor is that first and foremost, as a Campaign Monitor customer, you will receive a 10% discount on our services and that is a discount that basically runs into perpetuity. Once you are tagged as a Campaign Monitor customer, anytime that you come in to use our service, you’ll automatically receive that discount. Easiest way to get that discount if you haven’t signed up with us is just to go to kickbox.com/partner/campaignmonitor and that will get you to a landing page where you can sign up. But once you’ve signed up and created a Kickbox account, there’s a couple of different ways that you can verify with us and one of those, of course, is the traditional drag and drop a list into our application on the web. The other is to take advantage of a real handy integration that we have with Campaign Monitor that allows our platform to connect to your Campaign Monitor account and then you can seamlessly move list data back and forth to our service, have us verify, and then we can export those results back into Campaign Monitor.

Super easy, super handy and certainly, if you have any questions, you can always reach out to [email protected] Oftentimes, we’re asked, “Okay, I’ve got verification, I totally understand that, but how often should I do it?” And you know, a good rule of thumb is approximately every three months for B2B lists. B2B or business-to-business lists tend to change more often than a business-to-consumer list and so, therefore, because people move around and maybe take different jobs or move within a company into different areas and that can happen fairly frequently, we do recommend a verification, you know, cadence of about every three months. For consumers’ email addresses, six months is a good rule of thumb. Of course, both rules of thumb are, you know, they’re not written in stone. If you are a very active sender and if you really monitor the data the Campaign Monitor is providing back to you in terms of what you’re sending, you can probably go further in between verification rounds, but just as a good rule of thumb, three months on B2B, six months on B2C, and you should be excellent.

Indicators to help you determine when to verify besides timeframe, obviously include high bounce rates. If you are seeing a lot of high bounce rates, then most likely what will happen is Campaign Monitor may stop you from sending for a bit. You can come on over to Kickbox, we’ll help verify your email address list and get it sorted properly so that you can then begin resending through Campaign Monitor hopefully. But if you are experiencing high bounce rates, it’s a good time to verify. It’s also a good time to verify before big holidays. You know, there’s some folks that don’t, you know, send as frequently throughout the year as they do at the holiday time periods. So just before big holidays, whether that’s Halloween or, you know, anything around Christmas, Hanukkah, those types of things, it’s always good to just refresh your data and ensure that it’s as clean as possible and verify it with Kickbox.

Certainly, a big indicator is if you’re suspended by the ESP and that’s what I mentioned with the high bounce rates. Sometimes, the ESP will just kindly ask you to stop sending until we can get your data sorted. We’d love to have you wheel on over to Kickbox. We’ll, like I said, verify that data for you, hopefully, get you put into a better position where you can start sending again with Campaign Monitor. And then, you know, a big one for us is legacy data. There’s lots of people out there that have legacy email data. It was collected properly, sometimes, it might be from writing it down on paper to however else so that data might be collected. But anything that is legacy, you know, a year, year and a half, or older, really should be verified because there are many opportunities within old legacy data to bounce and just cause you all kinds of sending issues. So those are some of the reasons to look at when to verify and regardless of any of those, we’re here to help you.

One of the interesting aspects is something that, you know, we do as a verification company is typically what happens is a company will come to us because, you know, there may be a little fire drill going on with their ESP. Again, like in the previous slide, the ESP may, you know, stop you from sending for a bit and then ask you to just get your data cleaned up and then come back and start resending. That happens quite frequently and that also at that point gives us an opportunity to talk about our real-time API. The absolute best way to verify email is at the point of capture. It’s when someone is giving you that email address for the very first time. That is the best place to verify an email address. Fortunately, we have what we call a real-time API that is very easy to plug into any kind of form anywhere that you might capture an email address and what it ends up doing is it verifies in the background in milliseconds. A customer won’t even know that it’s been verified other than if they happen to enter in a wrong email address, if they fat finger an email address, if they, you know, say Gomail instead of Gmail, it will stop that and allow the correction to be made, you know, right then, and then once it’s been corrected, it then is able to be passed right into your database.

So it’s an awesome way to verify email addresses at the point of capture. It’s great on web forms. It’s great as part of a signup process. You’ll see here in a minute we’ve got customers using our API in EPOS systems. It’s basically anywhere an email address is captured, it can be used, and just highly encourage that as a best practice.

Ros: Great. Thank you, Jack. This has been awesome information and very, very practical too. So, let’s change modes a bit and talk about creating personalized experiences which are ultimately very engaging experiences for our recipients. We’ll, kinda, go through a couple of personalization techniques, starting off from ones that are fairly fundamental, and that you can use regardless of how little or much data as you have on your customers and then go and have a look at some more next-level personalization techniques after that.

So first of all, what makes somebody want to open your email? Well, according to 68% of Americans, they base their decision on whether or not they should open the email based on the “from” name. Ultimately, you want to create a familiar “from” name for yourself and the fundamental way to do that is to simply be consistent. Yes, it’s okay to test your “from” name, but do make sure that your brand is always recognizable and then once you’ve established a “from” name which you find to be giving you a great response rate and keeping you out of spam, you should then consider a follow-on tactic which is to ask your recipient to add you to their address book. The thing is about being added to the address book is it ultimately means that you won’t land in the spam folder and it does provide that extra degree of recognition whenever your emails land in the inbox.

So an example of a customer who is really, really consistent in how they use their “from” name is Topshop. As you can see, here in the inbox preview, the desktop and mobile, Topshop is front and center. It gives an immediate recognition straight away. Now, one could argue that the precious real estate in the subject line, could be used to speak more for the offers inside the email, but you have to give them top marks for consistency with the Topshop branding. So now let’s talk a bit about really creating a more personalized experience. Now, if you collect very basic customer data such as name or maybe even location, you can use that information to really drive response with your email campaigns. Now we know this because even just including the customer’s name, personalizing, like in this example from Converse, when we say, “John, you get 20% off the Chuck Taylor All-Star II today,” we find that with campaigns like this, they’re just simply 26% more likely to be opened than say not having that personalization, that John, that customer name in there.

Talking about engagement again, there is, you know, a big increase to be had in open rates when you are using the first name in the subject line and you can imagine that the improvements can only get bigger and bigger as you start using more and more tailored customer information to personalize, not just the subject line but your email messaging. So the take away here is what information do you have readily on hand on your customers? And what additional information can you be collecting to create a more personalized engaging experience?

So let’s talk a little bit about behavioral segmentation, which ultimately is a really next-level way to personalize and target your email campaigns. So the thing is with things like visit-a-website data is you have to understand that the information you use to personalize your campaigns and target your campaigns doesn’t just have to be collected at the time of signup. We can use things like behaviors too and this information can be collected passively. Now, some examples of information that you could use to create more target, more engaging campaigns are, for instance, things like type of content that’s being visited by your subscriber. You know, they might’ve been watching certain videos and that shows a certain interest in different topics or products. You can also look at things like the number of pages they’ve previously visited or in an e-commerce scenario, the products in their shopping cart.

In addition, you might also want to consider leveraging information collected during the purchase process. For e-commerce businesses, this is really, really powerful and becoming more and more common to do. So this information can be really explicit. For instance, how much a previous order cost, but you can also look at information in aggregate, for instance, like number of purchases. A lot of information like this, like number of purchases and order value, is commonly used by e-commerce businesses to establish really effective loyalty programs or simply to reward returning customers. So you should start thinking about some of the great information you can collect from the interactions your customers have had with your website or your product.
So again, bringing all this information together, we can actually create trigger journeys which is a time to send when the customer is most engaged with your brand. Trigger journeys are a great way to deliver relevant content such as product recommendations when your brand is still top-of-mind, and ultimately, you can use them to expand your customers’ interests and increase their lifetime value. So now let’s go through some great case studies to bring it all home. And so I’m gonna hand over to you, Jack, to tell us a bit about one of your customers over at Kickbox.

Jack: You bet. Thank you very much. I wanna talk a little bit about Steamer Trading. Before I say that though, I’m still wanting a pair of those Chuck Taylors that you showed earlier. Those things were bad to the bone.

Ros: You and me both, Jack.

Jack: Very nice, I’m gonna order some when we’re done here. In any event, let’s talk a little bit about Steamer Trading and what use case that they have had with verification and how they’ve been able to basically improve sales, and revenue, and all kinds of things. But typically, when you talk verification, a lot of people immediately think, well that’s great for lists and then if they take the next step, it’s really cool to use the API at the point of capture. And at that point, most people think that it’s, you know, point of capture online and it’s always fun to, kind of, take a little twist on that and show how dynamic and how powerful verification can be in different places. So with regard to Steamer Trading, what makes them, kind of, interesting and unique is, first of all, they’re a 41-store chain headquartered over in England, so they have a very strong physical store presence.

And they leveraged our API to verify emails at the point of capture, but at their store. So at checkout, and we’ve all experienced this before, when you’re checking out in a physical location, oftentimes they’ll say, “Can I get your email address?” And most likely in most cases, people provide their email address obviously because they enjoy the store, but the human interaction of providing an email address and somebody actually typing it into a point of sale system, the propensity for that to be wrong is extremely high. And so what ends up happening is these email addresses are collected, but oftentimes they’re typed in wrong, people might be embarrassed about asking how to spell a name. There’s all kinds of reasons that go into that, right? But by integrating our API into their EPOS system, it allowed the person behind the counter, when they asked for an email address to get it right. And so as they typed it in, we verify and if it’s wrong, it can’t go until the person gets an accurate email address from the customer.

And there’s a lot of really cool things around that that benefited Steamer Trading and continues to benefit Steamer Trading to today. The reason that that was so important to get right was they use that email address to then market to that customer after they’ve left the store. They use that email address to provide information around similar, like products or interests that that customer have based on what they’ve purchased from the store in the past. And without a proper email address that communication piece just died. By verifying within the electronic point of sale, they were able to dramatically reduce bounce rates, which ultimately allowed them to communicate more effectively with their customer and by communicating more effectively with their customer, they were able to drive that customer back into the store for repeat business.

And so it’s a wonderful, kind of, experience to, kinda, watch how they leveraged technology and where we tend to think that it can only be done on a web form or at a web signup, how they integrated it into their electronic point of sale when two human beings were talking back and forth to one another. Allowing that to be verified at that point, just dramatically improved their business. And so it’s a fun kind of use case study, it’s a good one to read. Certainly, you can read all about it at kickbox.com/case-studies, we’ve got a few of them there. But it’s just a creative way to leverage email verification to improve not only the traditional aspects of sending email, the open rates and things like that, but literally to improve communication and to drive a customer back into a physical location because you took the time to verify that email address in the beginning, at that point of capture.

Ros: Great. Thanks, Jack. Very, very interesting hearing about Steamer Trading and, yes, I’m gonna be reading that case study after this. So, I’d love to talk about a customer that I’ve worked with personally to help them use segmentation to really increase revenue and also increase engagement. That customer is Flight Centre, which is a travel agency group that operates across 23 countries and generates $20 billion in revenue. Now, as you can understand, with an established business like this, especially with 2,800 outlets across the globe, there’s a lot of information that’s coming in about the customers all the time. And so, really the project that we had as part of onboarding them, bringing them on board to Campaign Monitor and getting them to send successfully was simply looking at these, almost like spaghetti of data that was existing across different properties. For instance, email, social, their booking systems, their backend system, point of sale, etc., and start to bring some sort of order to that and start using it to create really more impactful campaigns and very sensible, sort of, email marketing strategy.

So, with Campaign Monitor’s help, we were able to integrate Flight Center’s system into Campaign Monitor and automatically start segmenting based on a number of different things like customer interests and behavior, course engagement with marketing properties, for instance, if they actually looked at various vacations or, you know, browsed to different parts of this site, which, for instance, would allow them to then ascertain what kind of trouble or activities, etc., that they’re interested in, all this information was used really for segmentation at the end of the day. One thing that isn’t mentioned on this slide, is they take their global view and their global marketing strategy very, very seriously. The number one segment that we’re really creating at the end of the day were city-based segments so that we could create these personalized emails that were very much tailored to the region or ultimately the closest airport that say a customer could depart from.

At the end of the day, really what happened is with this integration, we were able to create these segments and actually have this information flowing into Campaign Monitor in real time. And the great thing about that is then we were able to create these automated customer journeys. We did very, very personalized vacation offers that basically went out at a regular cadence and for the most part, allowed the email marketers to focus on their strategy instead of generating like…how do I put it, very, very manually-created content time and time again.

So ultimately, this was a great win-win. We could use information on the customer as the customer was interacting with the brand and we were also able to reduce a lot of the manual workload in general on the email marketing team. The results really speak for themselves. With a more segmented approach to email marketing, especially focusing on city and persona and, sort of, vacation preferences, we were able to achieve a 57% increase in click-through rates, which is really quite incredible and I have to say I’m a little proud of it myself, so good on, Flight Center.

So finally, we’re coming up to our end segment here, question and answer time. So I already see we’ve got some great questions coming in from folks on this webinar. Please do keep engaging with us. We’ll grab a few now and hopefully get them answered. So far, we’re getting some really, really great questions from our customers today. Jack, it does seem like we’ve got a few questions for you here, so you ready? Yeah?

Jack: All right. Yeah, I’ll do my best to answer them. Yeah, yeah.

Ros: Awesome, that sounds great. That sounds really, really good and I’ll see if I can help out too. So, the first question I’ve got here from a customer is, how would I redeem that 10% discount that was previously mentioned?

Jack: That’s a great question. So there’s a couple of ways to do that. You can navigate over to kickbox.com/partner/campaignmonitor and you will land on an offer page and at that point, you can sign up and when you sign up through that offer page, the discount code will be automatically attached to your account forever. If you miss doing that or don’t wanna do that, or in some cases, maybe you already have a Kickbox account but aren’t taking advantage of the 10% discount, just reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll be more than happy to manually place that code on your account so that you don’t have to worry about it any longer. So those are really the best two ways to do it.

Ros: That’s awesome and that sounds super simple actually. So, I do have another question and, you know, we do work with customers both big and small, so this does actually come up quite a bit for us too. The question is, does email list size matter when it comes to verifications?

Jack: No, certainly not for Kickbox. You know, we pride ourselves in being able to verify one email address to many, many millions of email addresses. We work with some of the largest internet properties, very well known names down to, you know, awesome small Mom and Pop, you know, stores, kinda, doing their thing. So for us, it literally doesn’t matter how large or small your email database is, we have the ability to verify it all and do so in a very consistent way that provides just, you know, exceptional results from the beginning all the way through the end.

Ros: That’s awesome. Yeah. Wow and, you know, really talking about this big group of customers that you work with here, I guess a very important question to us is is Kickbox only available in the U.S.?

Jack: Yeah, that’s a great question and the glorious answer is no. You know, fortunately, we have customers all around the world, from Australia to Germany to Canada to wherever. The other important aspect just for people to understand is we’re headquartered in Dallas, Texas, but we do operate an office out of Denver, Colorado, and we also have a office in London to handle our growing EMEA business. So we are open for business worldwide and to this day, have many customers from around the world.

Ros: That’s awesome. All right, so we’ve just jumped into the questions. I can see more and more are coming in here. However, there’s one question I’d really, really love to hear about sender reputation. And the question is, can you shed some light on sender reputations and how they influence deliverability? Now, this is an excellent question. I really, really love talking about sender reputation because it’s something that, you know, we talk about maintaining a great list. Well, what comes from that is ultimately maintaining a great sender reputation with ESPs like Gmail, right? So the idea is that if you do have a sender reputation which is almost like a score, and it’s…how do I put it, above a certain threshold, chances are your email is more likely to make the inbox.

So the thing about this is that with the sender reputation, these ESPs are always looking at these good signals, you know, they’re looking at the open rates that are occurring, they’re looking at, for instance, you know, of course, the ability to unsubscribe and whether or not you are having unsubscribes going through, but ultimately it’s tied to your sending domain. The thing is about this, is like if they, say Gmail sees that you’re sending from say, you know, Kickbox, [inaudible 00:41:51], or campaignmonitor.com, I mean, we’ve maintained an excellent sender reputation, which I know that we have. Right, Jack?

Jack: Really, yeah, yeah. I hope so.

Ros: You’re right. You know, ultimately, our deliverability should be good. You know, we’ve basically developed this great reputation for sending high-quality content that gets responded to. The thing is, it does take a while to build up and, you know, but once you’ve got a really good sender reputation, it’s super great. The thing is…

Jack: Yeah, you know what? Oh, go ahead, I’m sorry.

Ros: Oh, sorry, I was just gonna mention that, you know, if you do unfortunately bring down your sender reputation, it’s actually pretty difficult to redeem. It takes a lot of work and, you know, working with companies like ours to build it up again. Sorry, Jack, I did cut you off there. Let me know, what are your thoughts on that?

Jack: No, no, no. That’s totally fine. What’s really great about this question as well is your emphasis on sender reputation is dead on. And one of the ways that I like to articulate sender reputation sometimes is just that simple context of trust between the sender and the ISP, that context of trust really is your reputation and in this case, in sending email, it’s your sender reputation. And what we discussed early on in this was about not only best practices of, you know, the type of email that you send, and subject lines, and all those types of things, but we also talked a little bit about the technology that you can leverage and that’s where the conversation with regard to DKIM and SPF really come into play because both of those technologies are designed to build trust between you as a sender and the ISP. And by adding that technology, that trust increases, which increases your sender reputation, which basically keeps you, you know, in a positive light and able to send a lot of emails.

So I just wanted to, kinda, sprinkle that in there because that’s such a great question and there’s so many, kinda, different aspects, but the technology that we discussed early on along with other best practices, really is designed to build that trust of creating just a wonderful sender reputation.

Ros: That’s awesome. And it’s actually great talking about trust too, it’s a very, very positive note. I really hope that people that are listening today will really think about just being consistent and developing a great trusting relationship. Not only with ESPs but really focusing on that in the content that they send out. Well, unfortunately, it looks like we’re out of time. This has been a really, really great session. Awesome questions, great content. I would love to hang out longer with you, Jack, I mean, seriously.

Jack: Oh, yeah. These are wonderful.

Ros: Yeah. So, look, you know, thank you very, very much for your attention today, for really engaging with this session. This is a bit of a housekeeping item, this session was recorded and we will be sending you an email with a link to the recording in the next 24 hours. So please, do listen in again if you just wanna hear it all over again or do forward it onto your friends. We really do want to get more people interested in maintaining great deliverability. We do wanna get the word out there on these best practices, so that’s great.

As for the questions, you know, we really appreciate all of them. We’ll do our best to respond offline after this session, so do keep your eyes open for emails from us. Great. So thank you so much, Jack. This has been a really, really awesome session. Hey.

Jack: Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. We really do appreciate the relationship that we have with Campaign Monitor and love working with your customers.

Ros: A hundred and ten percent, it is always a pleasure working with Kickbox and I really hope that we get the opportunity to do this again very, very soon.

Jack: Sounds good. Thank you.

Ros: All right, have a great day.