In order to maximize your deliverability and maintain compliance when sending email through our system, it is critical that you familiarize yourself with international spam laws, our rules of use, and list best practices. Below are some tips to assist you in maintaining a good list.

Sign-up process

The first thing to look at when building and maintaining your list is how your subscribers get onto it in the first place. Whether you have your own subscription form or one that is built in our system, 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.

Permission

As part of our Anti-Spam 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 messages from your organization. This means any third-party (purchased, leased, email appended) list cannot be used if the recipients did not directly opt in.

Unsubscribes

Having an unsubscribe mechanism is not only the law, it is necessary in maintaining a good list, deterring spam complaints, and providing you with priceless information on how your organization is being perceived. We allow you to set up custom unsubscribe forms to capture reasons why recipients are unsubscribing, which allows you to easily adjust your content and audience for better overall deliverability. If you send email through multiple platforms, make sure all unsubscribes, opt-outs, or other suppression types are being carried over.

Integrated Preference Management

If you send out different types of messages (newsletters, webinars, marketing), your subscribers should have the ability to opt-out of certain types of communications. This can help lessen the amount of unsubscribe requests and spam complaints which keeps your audience engaged and improves overall deliverability. We provide a preference-management form that can be customized to your needs.

Bounce management

We have an industry standard in place to suppress repeated bouncers. However, waiting until they are suppressed is too late. It is important that you look at your sent report metrics to find potential list issues before causing further damage to your sender reputation; this may mean unsubscribing hard bouncers from your list.

Email types

It is important to periodically look through your email list for invalid email addresses (e.g., noemail@somedomain.com, test@test.com, and other non-existent email addresses). Also, look for "role" addresses (like admin@, info@, etc) which are not tied to a specific individual and can cause deliverability issues. Also, see if you have any .mil or .gov addresses on your list which means they will most likely see just the text version of your messages.

Engagement

We strongly encourage sending only to recipients who are actively engaged in receiving messages from your organization. Many email providers and spam filters have adjusted (or may be in the process of adjusting) their approach on how they filter email messages and look more closely at user engagement. If recipients are not actively and recently engaged by opening, clicking, replying, marking the message, this can drag down your list and harm your overall deliverability.

Stale lists

If there is a particular list or audience that you have not sent to in more than 3 months, you may want to consider not sending at all or come up with a plan to send more often. Think about why you are not sending to this list, why the frequency is so low, etc. It could be that these were opt-ins wanting to receive specific types of messages (maybe a yearly conference) which are sent only a few times a year. Sending to contacts who have not received a mailing from you in the past 3 months can be very risky and may cause a lot of bounces and spam trap hits. If you are not sending often enough, you don't have an indication if someone has changed addresses or made any other changes that would prevent mail from your organization being received.

Keep in mind...

Higher Logic reserves the right to suspend/cancel an account if sending to subscribers without their consent.