Email Deliverability AMA Live!

Hi friends! I'm excited to be joined by @Goot and @LindseySilver for today's Sleighing Deliverability: An AMA on Holiday Email Deliverability. I'll let Goot and Lindsey introduce themselves in thread so you all can get to know a little bit more about what they do at Braze 😀

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Sleighing deliverability: An AMA on holiday email deliverability

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Goot

So excited to be here, can't wait to answer anything and everything!

LindseySilver

Hi All! I am a Senior Creative Strategist from the 427° Innovation Lab at Braze. I'm based in NYC and have been at Braze almost 4 years. Fun fact - I was a part of our Customer Success Team for 2 years before switching to the lab. Excited to be here today 🎁

Goot

Oh also hi, I'm Alison! I work on the Deliverability Services team and have been at Braze about 5.5 years, loving it the whole time. I'm obsessed with deliverability and turn everything into an email analogy, even in my off hours. Thanks for stopping by!

trang

Hi,

I am a marketing capability manager from Hilton. What are the best practices for holiday deliverbilities?

MaggieBrennan

Welcome @trang

Goot

Hey Trang!

During the holidays, best practices are even more important! For email deliverability, that includes:

getting explicit consent to send emails
sending valuable content
authenticating all mail streams with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
making it easy to unsubscribe and manage preferences
maintaining a healthy list, with minimal bounces
sending at a predictable cadence and volume

During the holidays, you may be increasing volume--luckily we just posted a larger response about that, here!

What are your specific concerns about holiday sends? @LindseySilver and I would love to help!

trang

Thank you!
Aside from best practice, is there a certain time/day and tips during the holiday that you can advise us to send any communications out to customers that would get the most engagement and potentially dodging overloading customers' mailbox with other brand?

Goot

I tend to look at this through the lens of customer relationships rather than technical solutions. If users want your emails, it really doesn't matter whether yours show up at the same time as other brands--if they want to hear from you, they'll be excited whenever they check their email and see your brand name. You can try to send at a less-obvious time of day in the hopes that you're not competing with others (like at :07 or :48 after the hour rather than :00 or :30), but email is ultimately an asynchronous method of communication, and recipients can check it constantly, once a day, or even less! The most important thing is that recipients sincerely want to receive your messages, ideally more than they want to see the other things in their inbox. 🙂

kellyhogan

Hi experts! As senders increase volume and frequency as we get closer to Black Friday, is there any mailbox provider specific preparation they should consider?

daphne

Happy to be here!

LindseySilver

Although we're talking a lot about email today I'd also encourage you to think about a cross-channel strategy There is the Intelligent Channel filter to send the message via the “best” channel for that user (The Intelligent Channel computes the engagement rate for each user for each of the three channels by taking the ratio of message interactions (opens or clicks) to the number of messages received over the last six months of activity.)

Goot

Hey Kelly! This is a great question, and one senders may not have considered already!

Definitely pay attention to the provider breakdown of your list before increasing volumes. Gmail tends to be less sensitive to volume changes, whereas Microsoft domains react strongly to growing traffic, often by blocking messages from being delivered. If you've suffered any deliverability declines during the year, now is not the time to go full-throttle!

Deliverability damage can take weeks or months to mitigate, resulting in the loss of engagement and income as many buyers still seek offers well into the new year. To help control volumes, check out the Braze platform’s rate-limiting and frequency-capping features. We generally recommend that you not exceed double the prior day's volumes when ramping to higher volumes.

Check out one of our past blog posts about holiday sending, too!

daphne

I'm Daphné - I am the lead lifecycle marketing person at UpLift (a mental health organization). Since we are entering the holiday season, I'm curious how we can continue to maintain engagement when we’re sending so much around the holidays.

Goot

Hey Daphné!

Thank you for being here!

Engagement is really about delivering value to your users, so keep them at the forefront of your marketing plans. Of course, everyone understands intrinsically that there will be more email during the holiday season, but that’s not a justification to send low-effort messages! This is the time of year that you need to do whatever it takes to stand out, whether that’s eye-catching subject lines, entertaining content, or unbelievable discounts. Email isn’t like a billboard or commercial–you’re not paying for airtime, you’re earning it through subscriber interaction. If your messages feel like the same ol’ ads you send all year, you’ll need to get more creative or suffer the spam folder consequences.

Since the holidays can be stressful, you may want to use that to inform your sending schedule, like by sending reminders of your services on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the day after (if you have American users). With the election adding friction to some familial relationships, I imagine UpLift is going to be pretty active in the coming weeks! Don't add to users' growing to-do lists; think of how you can make their lives easier. Keep in mind that sometimes, that may mean sending less and letting folks have space.

cfriedman

Hi! Thank you for doing this AMA. My name is Chanel and I'm a Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Avid Technology.

What's the best way to monitor your email deliverability in real time during the holiday season and what are the red flags to look out for that show email deliverability may be at risk? Thanks!

Goot

Hey Chanel! Thanks for joining us!

One of the challenges with email is that it's not necessarily a real time medium. It wasn't designed to be an instant messaging channel, and delivery can take time. Mailbox providers are dealing with a ton of concurrent traffic and realistically can't deliver all the mail they receive at one time, so you should anticipate some delays, especially if you're increasing volume/frequency, dealing with an existing reputation, or sending to less-viable audiences than usual.

Caveats aside, the best places to look are your analytics like email channel engagement, the Deliverability Center, and campaign performance. If deliveries stagnate below 98%, if bounces exceed 2%, or complaints are over 0.01%, it's time to pause and recalibrate. Similarly, a decrease in IP or domain reputation Google Postmaster Tools or Microsoft SNDS are signals that you're not reaching the right addresses, or those addresses aren't fond of what you're sending. You don't have to stop or change your plans completely, but you should be aware that continued sending without making changes can have detrimental effects on your sender reputation.

Of course, if you have Braze's Deliverability Services, we'd keep an eye on that for you and reach out if there's reason to be concerned!