As an email service provider, we send emails on behalf of many customers. Keeping a good sender reputation for our email servers, avoiding blacklists, and preventing spam is a constant operation. We don’t create the content or control the recipient lists, but it’s our job to make sure all our customers send emails in a responsible manner.
These are some of the parameters that affect our email delivery:
Spam complaints
If you send emails to recipients with content that they don’t recognize that they signed up to receive (and thus do not want), they can report your email by sending in a spam complaint. If a sender receives a high number of complaints, that sender is flagged with a bad reputation. That does not only affect the sending servers (eMarketeer) but also the sending domain (your email from-address). This makes delivery of all emails, even legitimate ones, more difficult. More emails will automatically be blocked.
No matter if you follow the email regulations and laws and send legitimate emails, if enough people complain about your emails, the filters will block your future emails. Rebuilding your sender reputation is much harder than paying a fine.
eMarketeer tracks spam complaints and automatically unsubscribes any recipient that complains.
High bounce levels
When a spammer tries to reach people’s inboxes, they try a bunch of different email address combinations, hoping that some of them will work. But that also means that they send their spam emails to email addresses that don’t exist.
This means that if you send emails to large and old email lists where many of those email addresses don’t work and bounce back, you look like a spammer to the filters. This also leads to lowered delivery rates.
If an email address bounces, eMarketeer marks the contact as undeliverable and prevents it from being sent to the next time you adress it.
More about how bounces work in eMarketeer.
eMarketeer automatic protection
If a customer of ours exceeds certain levels of bounces or spam complaints, the eMarketeer account is paused from sending more emails until the problem is sorted out.
This is to prevent all eMarketeer emails to be affected by a bad sender reputation.
Our support will reach out to the customer and review what has happened and unpause again once any future outbreaks have been prevented.
Is your account paused?
If your account is paused, especially by spam complaints, you need to make changes. Why would a recipient that receives your email mark it as spam?
- Do you follow the GDPR laws for consent? If your signup does not capture explicit consent you need to start complying with these rules.
- Did you send to an old or a bought list of emails? This is not good practice and will most likely cause complaints. Even if you think it’s B2B emails, it is people opening them and reacting to them.
- Is the content relevant to the list you are sending?
- Why would they not recognize your email as a legitimate sent email?
Actions
To get your account unpaused you need to provide some action on how to prevent a similar pause in the future.
Reduce complaints:
- Look at your current recipient list. Which are complaining? How did they end up on the list? Find similar recipients and remove them from the list.
- Next time you send the same type of email; create a noticeable block in the email that says “This email is sent to [email address] because [reason]. If you do not want this email, click here to unsubscribe”. The reason could be “Because you bought something previously and opted to get newsletters” or similar.
Reduce bounces:
- Look at the list you sent the emails to. Why are they bouncing? If they bounced, they are now blocked for future sends, so most importantly, will the new email additions to this list be fresh or from a source that might risk many bounced emails?