Just imagine it’s the first day of school for your 5 year old. Everyone has been getting ready for this day and with great excitement it is finally here. The bus pulls up at the bus stop and all the kids get on. Your kid turns to wave as they leap up the last step and disappear inside the bus. You breathe a slightly discernible sigh of relief.
Only on this day, and nearly every other day afterward, the school bus is stopped just before it enters the school gate because, for some reason, the bus doesn’t adhere to the school’s strict codes. On some days the bus sneaks through as it’s tucked in a long line of other “good” buses, but most days it’s blocked at the gate.
You are a frustrated parent wondering what can be done.
Email marketing can be a bit of this challenge. Beginning in 2024, it’s about to get harder. Gmail and other platforms are set to start enforcing more stringent rules and changing a best practice into a standard practice.
New Standard practices you need to use:
1. Authenticate Your Email:
Every email sent out must be from a verified email domain, this verifies your email domain is owned by your organisation.
Ensure DMARC authentication by publishing a DMARC record for your domain.
Messages must be authenticated by SPF and/or DKIM.
Set your DMARC enforcement policy to none at least.
For infoodle users, if your email address is not verified, infoodle will use its verified infoodle email domain to send your emails. Here is further information and request form to verify your domain
2. Make It Easy To Unsubscribe
Include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the email body.
Ensure the unsubscribe process is easy to use and requires just one click.
infoodle has a built-in subscription process designed to give the user or recipient control over the email content that they receive from an organisation that utilises the email functionality of infoodle.
When the Unsubscribe Functions are enabled for an email that is sent out through infoodle, the user is able to select one of two system generated links on the bottom of the email: Unsubscribe and Email Preferences. Email preferences allows the recipient to choose which email types they would like to receive from your list of email types ie. General communications, monthly newsletters etc.
3. Ensure You’re Sending Wanted Emails:
Avoid sending unsolicited or irrelevant emails.
Email platforms will enforce strict spam complaint rate thresholds.
Gmail requires a spam complaint rate reported in Postmaster tools to be below 0.1% and strictly avoids rates of 0.3% or higher.
For those using a shared-service such as Mailchimp, Zoho, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, or Hubspot, your rates may be higher as these services lump millions of email sends from all sorts of organisations together. Unfortunately, some of those emails are from bad actors with poor results. Your email can be caught in the backwash of these bad actors on their shared IP address.
In case you were wondering, at infoodle, our promotional emails receive a .01% complaint rate. (The new standard is .1%) and has a 99.9% delivery rate. infoodle also has a high open rate of 66%.
Other good practices:
- Keep your email list clean and up to date
- Make sure the list is current and there are no typing errors in the addresses.
- Do not buy email lists, make sure you have some connection with the recipients. Often paid lists are old and out of date email addresses. If it has been sometime since you have had communication with a contact try to call and check their email address is correct and check they are receiving your communications.
- Deal with Bounces. Remove known bounced email addresses from your lists. If it has been sometime since you have had communication with a contact try to call and check their email address is correct and check they are receiving your communications. Ask them to check their spam or promotions folders and then white label your email address or add to their directory.
For users of infoodle; You may like to read more on this subject of Getting emails through and information on How to handle emails that have failed.
