If your organization sends a lot of mailings to large numbers of recipients, it's important that you understand and nurture your sender reputation. And your mailing-delivery practices are at the heart of your sender reputation.

This article details Deliverability best practices that your organization should follow when sending mailings through the Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Enterprise (Thrive Marketing Enterprise) system. These best practices better ensure that:

you remain in compliance with Higher Logic's "send" policies;
your mailings are successfully delivered to your intended recipients; and
your sender reputation gradually improves, and then remains positive.

There's no "one size fits all" method for ensuring a positive sender reputation, but if you adopt the practices in this article, you'll decrease the likelihood of having issues (e.g., being marked as spam) with your mailings and you'll be on your way to establishing a positive sender reputation.

Contact consent: Get it...or forget it!

Higher Logic embraces a commitment to permissions-based sending practices. If you are considering resubscribing Contact email addresses, Higher Logic encourages you to:

ensure that you have obtained consent from the contacts whom you intend to resubscribe, and
consider the ramifications of resubscribing a contact without their consent.

IMPORTANT: Higher Logic reserves the right to suspend and/or cancel an account that is sending to Contacts without their consent.

Stagger your mailings

A critical step when sending mail from a new IP address or a new domain is to slowly introduce mailing traffic to "receivers" (i.e., receiving mail servers, not your recipients).

If your mailing:

is between 100 and 10,000 recipients, send the mailing over the course of a few days to subsets of the intended list of recipients.
exceeds 10,000 recipients, send the mailing over the course of a week or more.

Continue to send at a regular, consistent volume in order to maintain a good sender reputation; "spikes" and "dips" in your mailing volume might act as a spam trigger. Predictable sending patterns are less likely to result in issues with the receivers.

IP address warming

It's important to start establishing a positive sender reputation before you start sending high-volume mailings.

Your sending IP address is a key element in your sender reputation, so you should make sure that its reputation is established in order to decrease the likelihood that mail receivers will classify your mailings as spam — and block them.

One of the best ways to start to establish a positive sender reputation for an IP address is to "warm" the IP address, especially if it has little or no recent sending history.

IP warming is the process of sending low-volume mailings over a period of time, and then gradually increasing the send volume — from that same IP address — as the address' reputation improves due to consistent, reliable, issue-free mailings.

IP warming example

The following example demonstrates a possible multi-day send scenario that would help to warm an IP address -- and be the first step toward building a positive sender reputation.

The following example is based on a mailing list of 10,000 recipients and uses the abovementioned staggered mailings.

NOTE: This is only an example. Following this pattern (or any other) does not guarantee a positive sender reputation because there are indeterminate factors that can affect mail sends and delivery. We recommend that you monitor your delivery metrics (blocks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.) with each day’s mailing to have a better chance of establishing and keeping a good standing with different mail receivers.

Day	Action
Day 1	Send a mailing to 1,000 of your most engaged subscribers (your organization has sent them a mailing within the past three months).
Day 2	View your mailing delivery metrics to see if there were blocks or bounces from your Day 1 send. If not, send your Day 2 mailing to 2,000 recipients. (If you experience any blocks or bounces, create a case and don't send your Day 3 mailing until you've adjusted your plan).
Day 3	View your mailing delivery metrics (as above). If your results are good (few or no bounces or blocks), send your Day 3 mailing to 3,000 recipients.
Day 4	View your mailing delivery metrics (as above). If your statistics are good (few or no bounces/blocks), send your Day 4 mailing to 4,000 recipients.
Day 5	Based on your delivery results, decide whether to send at your planned volume. Remember, you should check your delivery metrics for each mailing, and immediately address any issues.

If you are seeing less than desirable results, consider decreasing your send volume and frequency, and review your metrics (bounces, domain blocks, unsubscribe reasons, complaints, and content).

On the other hand, if you see positive results, consider slowly increasing your daily send volume.

TIP: Your sender reputation, like the trust in any relationship, takes much more effort to rebuild when it's been lost. The IP warming process might seem like a lot of effort, but it's far better to start on the right foot and to then stay there.

Maintain a positive sender reputation

Your sender reputation could be negatively impacted if you don't follow sender best practices. And if your sender reputation is poor, then your deliverability is likely to suffer.

Consider the following recommendations that will help you maintain a positive sender reputation.

Authenticate - Authenticate your sending domains through Thrive Marketing Enterprise before sending your first mailing; make sure your SPF and DKIM records are in place. To learn how, see Domain Authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Consistency - Send mailings that are consistent in volume and frequency. Avoid significant "spikes" and "dips" in the number of recipients of your mailings. Also, use similar Friendly From addresses.
Subscribers - Maintain active lists of engaged subscribers, opted-out subscribers, and unsubscribers. Do not send mail to opt-outs and unsubscribers because, if they complain, your sender reputation could be harmed!
- Ask your subscribers to add your email address to their safe-senders list.
- Encourage subscribers to interact with your messages (by opening, clicking links, and replying) and give them the means by which to do so.
- Create a group that contains your most recent engaged subscribers (i.e., those who have been sent an email within the past three months and have had open/click activity).
Content - Check your message content for spam triggers, such as exposed URLs, short links, and an excessive number of image. To learn more, see Avoid Spam Triggers in Message Content.
Bounces - Unsubscribe hard bouncers and repeat bouncers so that they aren't inadvertently included in your mailings.
Unsubscribe - Provide an obvious "unsubscribe" option for recipients to unsubscribe from your mailings. Recipients are less likely to mark an email as spam when unsubscribing is convenient.
- Periodically test the functionality of your opt-out and unsubscribe processes to ensure that they're working correctly.
Report - Run a monthly report to get some insight into the reasons recipients have unsubscribed from your mailings.
Lists - Avoid using any mailing lists that haven't been directly obtained by, or created from within, your organization. These may contain spam trap email addresses and trigger an increase in complaints.
Batches - Send your mailings in the smallest batches possible.

User inbox preferences in Gmail & Microsoft

Domain authentication and a good sender reputation provide a good foundation for getting your mailings delivered to the intended inboxes. Despite these, most receiving mail servers have filters that check:

the "From" address/IP address of the sender and its sender reputation
whether sender authentication (Sender Policy Framework [SPF], DomainKeys Identified Mail [DKIM], Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance [DMARC]) is in place
whether you're a bulk sender
the recipient's open rate
whether the recipient has engaged in a two-way conversation
whether the recipient moves the message to a filtered folder
whether the recipient classifies the message as a safe sender

Beyond this, some receiving mail servers have filtering mechanisms that also include user-set preferences for their personal inboxes.

Gmail and Microsoft Outlook and Office365 are two receivers that honor user-set preferences when filtering mail. These receivers also look at what the recipient typically does after opening mail. For example, does the recipient:

move the message to a folder?
flag the message as spam?
reply to the sender?

Inbox subfolders and categories

In addition to an inbox, there could be additional "repositories" in the mail application where a recipient can "save off" email messages of special significance or for later review. Some of these are available in Gmail (e.g., the Promotions and Important tabs) and Outlook (e.g., the Clutter folder) and are described below.

NOTE: These additional repos are not junk folders.

Gmail

There are two key things that you, as a sender, can do to better ensure the success of your mail delivery.

Separate different types of content with unique "From" addresses, domains, and/or IP addresses so that recipients have more options when classifying different types of mail.
Encourage your mail recipients to classify your mailings as Not Spam, to "star" them, or to move them to a folder. These actions increase the likelihood of your mailings being delivered without issue.

NOTE: Learn about Gmail bulk sender best practices.

Outlook and Office365

For Outlook and Office365, Clutter and Junk mail are filtered prior to reaching the inbox.

When Outlook and Office365 receive a message that meets the criteria for junk, they place the mailing in the Junk folder. If not, the mailing passes through any custom rules so that it can be classified in the corresponding folder. Next, Clutter analyzes the message based on the user's interaction history.

NOTE: Learn about how Clutter classifies mailings.

Avoid feedback loops and ISP Complaints

A feedback loop is a process in which receivers (mainly Internet Service Providers, ISPs) send feedback to the sender when recipients complain about an email message or mark an email message as spam.

All major feedback loops are configured through our system to automatically unsubscribe recipients who submit complaints; they are classified as an ISP Complaint in the subscriber's record.

NOTE: ISPs do not share all complaint data with senders, but they typically share enough information to provide some insight into how a sender is being perceived by their audience.

View email message complaints

You can view complaints for your sent mail by navigating to Mailings > Reports > Mailing Results and then selecting the mailing report you want to view. Within that report, click the Key Metrics tab to see the number of complaints and drill down to see from whom they came.

Mitigate email message complaints

Complaints about your email messages and mailings are detrimental to your sender reputation, so it's important that you do whatever you can to avoid them. If you are receiving a lot of complaints (or just want to prevent them), Higher Logic recommends that you:

check the sources of your mailing lists,
purge existing lists that may have invalid email addresses or un-engaged subscribers, and
have a clear "unsubscribe" mechanism in place.

Changing your From address

There's more to changing your "From" address than just updating your templates and mailings with the new email address. It's important that you "warm" your domain, just as you warm your IP address.

If you plan to change the "From" address of your mailings, review the following recommendations to better ensure the success of future mailings.

Make sure the domain in the "From" address has been authenticated to send mail through Thrive Marketing Enterprise.
Inform your recipients of your plan to switch to a new "From" address and ask them to add the new address to their safe-senders list to ensure uninterrupted delivery (this may be something to add to your pre-header).
Consider keeping the same "Friendly From" address to maintain consistency throughout the transition. Also, maintaining familiarity with your recipients could help your deliverability.
When you are ready to send with the new "From" address, send a few test mailings to ensure that messages with the new "From" address make to the inbox.
- First, send to a few internal contacts to make sure the message is received.
- If it is, send to another small, engaged group to make sure you are getting a good amount of opens.
- When the tests are successful, you can either begin using the new "From" address for all of your contacts or incrementally send messages to larger groups until all mail is transitioned.

List best practices

In order to maximize your deliverability and maintain compliance when sending mail through the Higher Logic system, you should familiarize yourself with international anti-spam laws, Higher Logic's rules of use, and the following best practices for mailing-list maintenance.

Permission

As part of our Email Policy and Rules of Use, we strictly enforce permission-based sending, so it is required that all contacts on your lists have directly and affirmatively opted in to receive mail from your organization. This means that a third-party (purchased, leased, email appended) list cannot be used if the recipients did not directly opt in.

Sign-up process

The first thing to look at when building and maintaining a mailing list is how your subscribers got onto the list. Whether you have your own subscription form or one that is built with Thrive Marketing Enterprise, it's important that accurate email addresses are obtained. This can be accomplished by providing an email address confirmation field to prevent typos and/or a captcha to deter bot sign ups, or a confirmed (double) opt-in process.

Unsubscribes

Having an unsubscribe mechanism is not only the law, but is necessary in order to: maintain an accurate and current list, deter spam complaints, and provide information on how your organization is being perceived.

Thrive Marketing Enterprise allows you to set up custom unsubscribe forms to capture why recipients are unsubscribing which allows you to adjust your content and audience for better deliverability. If you send mail through multiple platforms, make sure all unsubscribes, opt-outs, or other suppression types are being carried over.

Preference management

If you send out different types of messages, allow your subscribers to choose what types of communications they receive, and then be sure to update your list accordingly. This can decrease the amount of unsubscribe requests and spam complaints you receive. Thrive Marketing Enterprise provides a preference management form that you can customize.

Bounce management

Thrive Marketing Enterprise has an industry standard in place to suppress repeated bouncers. However, you should review your "sent mail" report metrics to find potential list issues, and then fix them (e.g., unsubscribing hard bouncers) before they damage your sender reputation.

Learn about the different types of bounces and how to resend bounced messages in Bounce Types.

Email types

It is important that you periodically review your mailing lists to ensure their integrity. In particular, look for:

"role-based" email addresses (such as "admin" and "info") and
email addresses with non-existent domains (such as "example.com" and "test.com").

You should suppress or delete these email addresses and try to discover how they got on your mailing list so that you can prevent a repeat.

Stale lists

A "stale" mailing list is one that you have not sent to in more than three months.

One of the obvious "problems" with these lists is that you don't know how current they are. If someone on the list has changed their email address, you probably don't have the new address.

Therefore, sending to a stale list of recipients can be risky because it might result in a lot of bounces and spam trap hits.

Before sending to this list of recipients, reflect on why you haven't sent to them recently. For example:

Is the list specific to an event (e.g., a yearly conference) or topic, in which case it is used only a few times each year?

Whatever the reason, consider an alternative plan that increases the send-frequency to the recipients on the list, and protects your positive sender reputation.

Email address validation

Thrive Marketing Enterprise has a process that checks email addresses for things like unnecessary tags, characters, spaces, and punctuation. The process then:

removes any "bad" email addresses and
where possible, corrects email-address issues that could harm your deliverability and sender reputation.

Thrive Marketing Enterprise also cross-references the email addresses with industry-standard email suppression lists and applies our suppression rule.

Deliverability Best Practices