We don’t recommend taking risks with your data ahead of the busy period – as recently discussed in our festive spam traps blog post. Expanding your sending volumes and engaging with less active recipients can be a great opportunity for your brand. However, it’s important to approach this strategically and keep a close eye on the results of every campaign you send. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions and ensure that your efforts are effective in re-energizing your audience.

In this blog post, we will delve into email deliverability analytics. We will set some expectations for what you may see over the next few months and discuss the factors that affect email deliverability.

Negative metrics are critical

Email marketers have long relied on opens and clicks as the primary indicators of engagement. However, email has advanced to the point where images are now pre-cached by many email providers such as Gmail, Microsoft, and Apple. 

Additionally, anti-malware filters have become more sophisticated and may click through links to ensure they are safe for recipients, which means that these clicks may not necessarily represent human interaction. As a result, relying solely on traditional open and click metrics is no longer sufficient to accurately measure engagement.

Let’s look at negative metrics. While interest can only be indirectly measured, senders are directly informed by recipients (and mailbox providers) when their expectations are not met.

Unsubscribes vs complaints – useful but not equal

If you are reaching out to your older lists, expect an increase in unsubscribes and complaints (recipients marking your email as junk or spam). You can learn more about your subscriber’s journey by analyzing where these interactions happen. If contact drops out at the beginning of their lifecycle, weak data capture or poor expectation setting are key. If you lose them mid life-cycle, content and frequency play an important role.

A healthy list interaction will show higher unsubscribe than complaints. Unsubscribes do not affect your sender reputation. However, if contacts mark your emails as junk or spam, it will have a heavily negative impact. If you’re seeing more complaints than unsubscribes, then this may be an indicator that your unsubscribe journey needs some attention.

Soft bounces

During the seasonal period, you may notice an increase in soft bounces. A sharp spike is likely to indicate that there’s a problem with the list you are targeting, especially if you haven’t sent it recently. However, a gentle increase overall could be due to the whole email ecosystem being put under strain and a healthy email program will recover.

Soft bounce data can provide insights into how mailbox providers view your emails and what impacts email deliverability. It’s important to note whether the bounces are temporary or persistent and whether they occur on a single domain or multiple domains. Focusing on these details can help optimize your email campaigns and enhance your deliverability rates.

If the volume of soft bounces has affected engagement (opens, clicks, etc.) that indicates the mailbox provider may be junking your mail. Tweak the contacts you are targeting and reduce the frequency at which you reach out to less engaged and unengaged recipients.

Replies

It’s important to remember that email is a two-way communication channel, so you should be checking the replies to your emails. The positive side of replies is that you can see real interaction here; a snapshot into what affects email deliverability. A healthy list will likely receive some questions and comments in amongst the out-of-office replies.

You can use these to see what contacts really think about your emails, and from there work out if you have any weaknesses in other areas such as poor data capture or expectation misalignment at the point of collection.

It’s essential to keep an eye on replies during the festive period, as they’ll be a great indicator if you’re over-sending to your recipients. Failing to check replies could also mean missing questions from your customers about products or purchases, leading to lost sales or bad reviews for poor customer service.

Open rates

An open simply tracks the downloading of a pixel. It’s never been an accurate metric of a real open, because this is not the same as actual human eyes reading your emails.

It’s important to keep track of more than just open rates when it comes to email marketing. Metrics such as click-throughs, replies, and purchases can also be valuable indicators of your campaign’s success. It’s a good idea to monitor these metrics over time to spot trends and identify what’s working and what’s not. By doing so, you can address any potential challenges and optimize your email marketing strategy for maximum effectiveness.

Clicks

Clicks continue to be an important indicator of how engaged recipients are and whether emails have landed in the inbox or not. With the introduction of iOS 17 and Link Tracking Protection, digital marketers have started to question the future of click-based engagement tracking.

Pay attention to trends in clicks over time, especially if re-mailing to non-openers during the festive period. Clicks can be viewed holistically along with open rates, measuring website traffic, and actual purchase data. This versatile insight can indicate whether sending again to contacts who didn’t open the first time is actually worth the revenue, or whether it carries a high risk of damaging your sending reputation and could jeopardize the success of future sends.

As with open rates, B2B senders should now have enough data to know what impact non-human interaction (NHI) has (if any) on their click through rate reporting. If you are suddenly seeing NHI where previously there was none, this is a useful negative metric. Poor reputation is associated with an increase in filters checking links, so it could be an indicator that something is awry with your strategy.

Analyze your deliverability analytics to avoid list fatigue

Recipients can be overwhelmed with email during the holidays, and they may not engage with content as they normally would. By increasing the volume you send, you can decrease the average list engagement – this is list fatigue. 

Mailbox providers are also under heavy load receiving the influx of seasonal emails. An increase in volume coupled with a decrease in engagement is more likely to be interpreted as a sign that your emails don’t belong in the inbox. This can result in a further decline in the success of your emails, even when sending relevant content such as promotions to encourage interaction.

It’s a good idea to analyze the reporting data for your emails, but if you want to take it to the next level, our Deliverability Perspective package provides you with access to more comprehensive inbox placement data, including seeding. This package provides a wealth of information that can help identify potential issues, such as list fatigue, during critical business sending times.

Please get in touch if you’re interested in any of our deliverability products – or if you need any assistance with inbox placement over the festive season.

Sending emails to outdated or improperly obtained contact lists can significantly damage your sender reputation, making it harder for your emails to reach the inbox, even for those who are loyal to your brand.

Sending emails in this way can result in severe inbox placement issues or even cause your emails to be blocked, particularly if they are sent to a spam trap. Reputation damage can be long-lasting and may negatively affect your ability to generate revenue from email marketing for weeks or even months.

In this post, we’ll guide you on how to avoid spam traps. We’ll explain what spam traps are, why they can harm your email deliverability, and provide tips to help you maintain a healthy and strong inbox placement during the holiday season.

What is a spam trap?

A spam trap is an email address that would not actively sign up to receive marketing communications. They are part of the toolbox used by anti-abuse networks, security appliances, and mailbox providers to identify emails that would be unwanted or even harmful to recipients – and then to prevent senders of those emails from reaching the inboxes of real people.

There are different types of traps:

• recycled traps – these are email addresses that were once valid but have been abandoned and repurposed as a spam trap
• typo traps – these are entire domains that look similar to popular mailbox provider domains (e.g. gmial.com instead of gmail.com) that are used as traps 
• pristine traps – these are email addresses created to be spam traps and never used by an actual person to send or receive email

Why is sending to a spam trap so bad?

A mailbox provider’s priority is to protect its users from unwanted and malicious emails. Regardless of your intentions, if you’re indicating that you’re a bad actor by sending to spam traps then your sender’s reputation will be negatively affected. 

This means your emails are more likely to land in the junk or spam folder, may take much longer to be delivered, or may be rejected outright and not even delivered to junk.

Negotiating the removal of a block listing and repairing the reputation damage caused is not fast or easy. It can take weeks or sometimes months to fully recover from a bad block listing due to hitting a spam trap. If your business is hit at the beginning of the holiday season, that could mean you’re only just back on your feet again in time for Valentine’s Day.

How to avoid spam traps during the holiday season

Most commonly we see clients hitting traps when they’ve succumbed to pressure to increase their sending volume and send emails to recipients they don’t usually send emails to. This a bad idea for a few reasons:

1. Mailbox providers a) like to see consistency from senders and b) are often on the verge of being overwhelmed given mail volumes at this time of year. 
2. Recipients are also overwhelmed with far too much email and are less likely to engage with and more likely to complain about receiving emails they don’t remember signing up for.
3. A lot of the ways marketers try to quickly increase volume at short notice significantly increase the risk of hitting spam traps.

3 risky strategies to avoid

To ensure your email deliverability stays strong during the holiday season, steer clear of these risky strategies:

1. Sending to lists that haven’t been sent to for over 12 months. Or ever.

Risk: Recycled traps tend to be found in old data, even if it was originally collected using permission marketing best practices. 

If you’ve found a segment missed by your automation or some other permissioned data you haven’t sent to for a while, and you know you’re going to want to send to them over the holidays, our advice is: start now. It’s much better to do this early to give you time to resolve any issues before critical sending days.

Send slowly over days or weeks, include a reminder of why contacts are receiving your emails (in case they’ve forgotten about you) as well as a clear unsubscribe link, suppress any soft bounces and remove anyone who continues to not engage. If you’re a Dotdigital customer and you want help with re-activating lapsed contacts, contact your Customer Success Manager to start a conversation about our re-engagement package.

2. Trying to“reactivate” contacts from the suppression list

Risk: Abandoned email addresses will usually hard bounce for at least 6 months before being repurposed as a recycled trap. A good email service provider (ESP) will automatically suppress contacts that hard bounce, so these traps are likely to lie within your suppression list.

3. Purchasing or renting some more data to send to

Risk: Not only is this against most ESPs T&Cs which means you risk having all your sending suspended when they spot the purchased data, but lists for sale or rent tend to contain a lot of scraped data. Spam traps, especially pristine type traps, are very commonly found in this kind of data – and they tend to be the ones that cause the most serious kinds of block listings that have the widest impact across mailbox providers and take the longest to resolve.

If you are importing data into your Dotdigital account during the holiday period (or any other time of the year) then our Watchdog will be taking a look and flagging anything suspicious. An import that’s got a high-risk score is more likely to contain spam traps. So we’ll block the upload while you take a look at the data sources and remove anything risky that’s made its way into your list.

What if you do hit a trap?

The key here isn’t identifying the specific spam trap you hit and removing it from your list. Spam traps are intentionally a closely guarded secret, and for every trap you find, there could be ten, fifty, or a hundred more in your list. That’s because spam traps indicate underlying problems with your data collection or management.

The first step is to use whatever information is available to try to identify the source of the problematic data. Different trap operators will offer up some information that’s redacted to a greater or lesser extent; some offer a rough estimate of the date and time when the trap was hit, and others will provide the subject line of the email sent that hit the trap.

The next step is to temporarily stop sending to all data that’s come from the high-risk source while you go through step three: segmenting out contacts who you know are engaged. Purchase history, opens, clicks, etc. can all be used holistically to identify recipients who are most likely to be real people who want to hear from you.

Finally, it’s time to plug the hole in your data collection. Depending on the type of trap, it can indicate different areas of vulnerability:

Pristine traps

Make sure your forms are secured with CAPTCHA, double or confirmed opt-in, and remove any third party data from your lists

Typo traps

Ask your web developers to add some basic validation to points of collection to check that the email addresses are valid. It’s pretty easy to add some logic that suggests someone might mean “hotmail.com” instead of “hotmial.cmo” in the email field. Plus double or confirmed opt-in at the point of data collection can help weed these out as well.

Recycled traps

Make sure you have a strategy for sunsetting contacts who never engage with your brand or who haven’t engaged for a very long time. Use knowledge of your sales cycle and typical customer journeys to plot the point at which the risk of keeping an address on your list outweighs the potential that they might convert into a customer. And engage a responsible ESP that suppresses email addresses that bounce.

Summary

It’s so easy to sabotage yourself in November by making some choices that temporarily boost revenue for Singles Day or Black Friday, but then tank your reputation so you’re in the spam folder throughout December and even into January. It’s far less risky in the short term – and more profitable in the long term – to be smart and stick to your sustainable sending and organic growth strategies to avoid jeopardizing inbox placement. 

If you need any help this holiday season with how to avoid spam traps or anything else related to inbox placement, our expert Deliverability team is always around to assist you in making the best choices for your business.

• “My third party consultant says our emails land in spam because they contain words like ‘sale’, ‘offer’ and ‘discount’.”
• “Will including words related to Web3 such as NFT, blockchain, and crypto affect my inbox placement?”
• “Our company name includes the word ‘finance’ – do we need to not reference our brand to get to the inbox?”

Back in 2021, I collaborated with my Australian colleague Toshi on a blog post about spammy words in subject lines – TL;DR: no, including a spammy word or emojis in the subject line is not going to be the key reason your email is landing in the spam folder. This doesn’t just apply to your subject line but to all the copy in your emails.

This wasn’t news in 2021 – it’s been a long time since the weighting attributed to Bayesian filters looking for specific words in content was drastically reduced by most major receivers and filtering software. 

Instead, mailbox providers look at how their users engage with your emails to decide whether or not they belong in the spam folder. A lot of positive engagement such as opens, read time, and link clicks indicates a wanted mail stream that belongs in the inbox, and a lot of negative engagement like deleting without opening or actively marking as junk indicates an unwanted email that belongs in the spam folder.

So, why does the outdated concept of spammy words refuse to die? I have some theories – and some more useful advice that’ll actually help you reach the inbox this holiday season.

Tackling email deliverability beyond spammy words

Everyone wants that silver-bullet quick change they can make to get their emails out of the spam folder and into the inbox – including me.

Marketers are busy people at the best of times, and the pressure is even greater around revenue critical sending periods like Singles Day, Black Friday, and Christmas. Changing words in subject lines or copy is faster and easier to do than the hard work of reviewing your sending strategy and implementing best practices. 

It’s also easier to report to your manager or CMO that the problem with a poorly performing database or campaign was a few specific words, as opposed to telling them you need to review your whole strategy for a mail stream (especially when you’ve got your holiday content calendar all lined up).

Unfortunately, simply asking WinstonAI for subject line alternatives to “huge savings this Black Friday” is not a golden ticket to the inbox. If your emails are landing in the spam folder, it’s going to be because you’re not hitting the key rule of deliverability: right person, right message, right time, and right frequency. Your recipients are interacting with emails in negative ways that indicate they’re unwanted, and you’re going to need to change your strategy to achieve your revenue goals this season.

Being told by an expert that you need to change up how you collect and manage your contacts, personalize and target your content, decide on the frequency at which you send, maintain consistency and meet expectations, or manage changes to your program is hard to hear and tougher to implement. That’s why you need to be looking at your strategy now, and not the week before Cyber Monday.

Email filtering and its role in modern deliverability

As discussed in the 2021 blog post, we do occasionally find some rare examples where there is more weighting placed on spammy words. Usually, the exceptions are older, regional ISPs that provide mailboxes or old versions of filtering software used by independently run corporate mail servers. However, the volume of emails sent to these receivers and filters tends to be extremely small, and this isn’t something used by major B2C mailbox providers like Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, and Yahoo, or modern corporate B2B mail exchange providers or filtering services such as O365, G-suite, Proofpoint, or Mimecast.

Bayesian filtering is still in use by receivers and filters but in a much more intelligent way. Blocks of content (including branding, images, copy, and footers) and technical headers for emails are sampled to create a “fingerprint”. A score is then created for the fingerprint based on recipient engagement to create a level of confidence as to whether emails that match the fingerprint are likely to be wanted or spam. The key thing is that engagement is used; a fingerprint isn’t spammy because of specific words. It’s spammy if actual recipients have previously marked emails that match the fingerprint as spam.

I rarely come across instances where fingerprinting is the cause of spam foldering. Usually, I’m able to work with senders to identify where they’re not following best practices, and once they change their strategy they’re back on track. 

Choosing the right deliverability expert

“My third party consultant says our emails land in spam because they contain words like ‘sale’, ‘offer’ and ‘discount’.”

This example came from a new Dotdigital customer who had previously commissioned a deliverability review from a third party “deliverability consultant”.

There are many deliverability consultancy companies out there, and most are reputable and have teams made up of people who are highly experienced and well-known subject matter experts and thought leaders in the industry. Most – but not all.

When you seek deliverability consultancy outside your email provider, keep in mind that less reputable companies may have different goals. They may want to provide what look like quick and easy wins with the minimum of time spent on their side to really analyze your sending strategy. 

They may partner with one or more ESPs and get a kickback from referring you by suggesting changing ESP will fix your deliverability issues (spoiler alert: your sending practices and inbox placement will follow you). Some consultants are simply inexperienced with deliverability or have knowledge that was relevant a decade or more ago but doesn’t align with modern mailbox providers, filtering software, or deliverability practices.

Always start out by talking to your email marketing platform’s deliverability experts – any ESP worth their salt should have dedicated and experienced consultants to talk to. They’re invested in your success on their platform and they can often provide added value when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the user interface and making strategy changes. 

They should also be up to date on the very latest and greatest trends and changes in deliverability because they’re so close to the actual sending daily. If they’re like the Dotdigital Deliverability & Messaging Operations team then they’re active in the deliverability community and are members of amazing groups like M3AAWG, where they work alongside postmasters on initiatives that better the ecosystem.

If you’re looking for an external deliverability consultant, be sure to ask for some examples of what they analyze and advice they commonly give clients, and if you see anything about looking for spammy words in content then run for the hills.

What can I do if my emails are landing in spam folders?

Our in-house team of deliverability experts here at Dotdigital wants you to be as successful as possible on our platform to keep you as a customer. We’re always going to take the time to really understand your sending, and we’ll be honest and give you the tough advice you need to hear and implement to actually achieve your inbox placement goals.

Whether you just want a quick deliverability health check before the busy season, are looking for data and insights on your inbox placement through Christmas and beyond, or want support from a dedicated Consultant for a challenge/project or on an ongoing basis, we have a deliverability package that will suit your budget and needs. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support@dotdigital.com for more information on our deliverability products.

We’re here to provide resources for your cross channel strategies that will help you meet the rising expectations that your customers have. Here are some frequently asked questions and resources to help you kick off the holiday season.

Should I be sending to everyone on my list for [insert holiday season name here] to maximize my results?

Be strategic! Show recipients that you respect them and that they’re more than just a number in your marketing database. During the holidays, recipients can become overwhelmed by the high volume of messages they receive. So, resist the urge to send to all.

• Build an email sending strategy focused on consent and active recipients who are engaging with the emails being sent to them.
• Complement any email sending strategy with strategies focused on other channels, like SMS for example. Meet your customers where they are at, don’t make them work to meet where you are at. 
• Segment contacts who aren’t engaging with your emails regularly and target them on other digital marketing channels.
• Respect those who are actively saying they don’t want to hear from you – unsubscribes are really important

Where’s my email?

During busy periods mailbox providers are handling a lot; year over year, Dotdigital alone consistently sends over double our usual daily volumes on Black Friday.

The huge jump in the number of inbound emails can mean that the journey of mail through filtering and infrastructure to the inbox is slower than usual. Mailbox providers like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are likely to prioritize 1-to-1 emails if they’re busy, so you might receive Great Aunt Erma’s festive update email (she should really add an unsubscribe link) before marketing mail appears.

Additionally sending reputation matters. Particularly for larger sends, if you have a poor reputation or the MBP deems your email in some way suspicious (e.g. because you’ve sent to spamtraps), they may release some emails to the inbox and then wait and see what recipients do with those emails. Depending on how their users interact with this first batch, the MBP will decide whether to deliver the rest of your emails – and to where (inbox or junk). This is why email deliverability is important all year round, especially when prepping for the holidays when sales emails need to reach the inbox promptly.

If you’re struggling with deliverability to internal stakeholders, this can actually be a great opportunity to start a conversation. Take a look at our advice on how to handle your emails landing in the CEO’s junk folder.

Why is there an ongoing conversation about the value of opens and how do we use that metric to define success?

Email has evolved significantly in the last couple of years, and your open and click through rates may look significantly different this holiday season than in previous years. Using metrics like those need to be done holistically and measured against the goals of the messaging program. Compare opens to revenue or some other KPI to assess success. Gone are the days of being able to use opens and clicks on their own. We’ve written about navigating deliverability analytics over the busy period, and you can also take a look at the following blogs about the industry changes that are causing this question:

• Apple iOS 15
• Non-human interaction
• The value of an open and other ways to measure success

Help, I need to know more about deliverability

Learn about the 6 C’s of deliverability or check out our Deliverability 101 guide below to find out more about what it is and why email deliverability is important.

Did we double our mail servers? Ramp up hundreds of IPs? Finally, implement that secret code that all delivery engineers know but refuse to implement, which makes email even faster. Well, the last one.

The simple change that made a big difference

The change was actually small; we just altered the order of the recipients we sent them to. Previously, it was random, but after the change, the first recipients we sent to were those who had most recently downloaded the tracking pixel in the email, i.e., recent “openers”.

That’s it. Super simple, huh?

Based on my (at the time) 7 years of experience in bulk email delivery, constant data analysis, and the relationships I’d built with other email delivery engineers and postmasters, I had a theory. Mailbox providers can dynamically adjust how fast they’ll receive emails depending on who you’re sending emails to, and how recipients interact with those emails.

If you start off sending to inactive recipients who never engage with emails and your emails get sent to their spam folder, that’s a big indicator to the mailbox provider that your emails aren’t wanted. They aren’t eager to accept more unwanted mail.

So if, instead, we order sends to go to those where the tracking pixel was most recently downloaded first…

The power of email openers

An “open” hasn’t been actual human eyeballs reading an email for a long time. It’s been many years since Gmail started pre-caching images, and since then, many others have followed suit. As much as it’s a headache for marketers, there are really good reasons receivers pre-cache, from providing a more seamless customer experience when scrolling between emails (no lag while images download for the next one) to reducing technical overhead (just the sheer volume of DNS lookups required to fetch the images can be punishing, and mailbox providers hit rate limiting too). 

The good news is that while an “open” doesn’t necessarily mean a real human did the opening, it’s a good indication that the email landed in the inbox. If the email lands in the spam folder, the receiver doesn’t trust the email and doesn’t want to give spammers any indication that the email address they sent it to is active, so they don’t pre-cache images.

Enhancing email deliverability and inbox placement

My theory was that if we started sends by delivering to recipients where we have strong evidence that the email has recently landed in the inbox, that’d be a good signal to the receiver that we’re sending wanted mail, and so they’d accept emails faster. And, as a Taurus, I do so love it when I’m right.

Cutting send speeds in half

Overall, the send speed was cut in half. This was particularly pronounced for sending to Microsoft freemail addresses (hotmail.com, outlook.com, etc.), where send speeds were 80% faster, and for some of our senders who have slightly higher-risk sending strategies, where send speeds were ten times faster. It’s important to note that this logic isn’t applied to split tests, as it would artificially skew the open metric, so campaign A would always win. 

Now, email is still not an instant medium; after we relay emails, they pass through filtering and infrastructure to land in the inbox. How long this takes is down to the receiver; the volume of other senders they’re dealing with, and how well their infrastructure handles the volume.

Dotdigital sends as quickly as receivers will allow (faster since 2020, when we rolled out the change to send ordering), but my top tip for marketers is to not send at the top of the hour or at 15 or 30 minutes past the hour. These are the times when most senders schedule their emails to go out, and so all receivers see a spike in volume and an increase in processing times. 

I’ve spoken to postmasters directly about this, and it’s one of their top requests for marketers: stop sending emails at the top of the hour! If you want your email to really fly out the door and reach recipients quickly, try multiples of 7 instead. This will avoid those peaks when others (including your competitors) send.