Email Deliverability AMA Live!

Welcome trang

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!

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!

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!

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.

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. 🙂