Microsoft deliverability

Hey Lori-Merchan

When you say Complain rate are you referring to users contacting you as they did receive an email or using another measure?

My first thoughts as a Braze user who works for Microsoft:
- If they are landing in inboxes and you are getting complaints, get an example of how they are rendering as Outlook can render like a hot mess, especially if you have no 'if mso' in your email code. Braze is pretty good at adding it if you use the drag and drop editor
- Outlook will also by default block all images, even from engaged senders if your domain is not approved internally such as an @Microsoft address, so if the email is reliant on images only, it may appear as nothing.
- If the emails are not landing at all be sure to check your subject and body copy as we tighten up the junk filter here on the daily, and if you are an external sender and look even 0.0001% fishy, you may not even land in the inbox. We get so many spam messages, marketing campaigns and random emails on the daily, it can sometimes be hard to crack through if you are not internal.

Happy to try and work this out. 

Hi David,

Thank you for your answer. 

It's kind of a mystery tbh. We use the drag-and-drop editor (will double-check for 'if mso' thanks for that tip) and our emails are quite light on the image/text front, we use benchmarks for ratios, fingerprinting...etc, so we are running dry on what else can it be.
Complaints used to come as SRDs (Microsoft's most accurate way to measure complaints) but all of a sudden they just changed to "Overall Complaint Rate". The interesting bit is that we are currently warming a brand new IP with a minimum rate (still early days on the warm-up) this is being done with transactional emails and highly engaged users, but still, the complaint rate is coming back as 1 in every 2 emails are counted as a complaint, this is statistically unlikely and never seen it before.

We also have customers mentioning to us that they have marked our email s as not spam several times and Microsoft keeps delivering to the spam folder. I have been running this test myself for the last 6 months and I have marked the at least 50 times as not spam and they still land on spam. 

Are there anyonther tips you can share on how could this happen or if there is any documentation that Microsoft shares on how to increase deliverability on the more technical deeper side (not the typical deliverability rules as engaged, subject lines, etc etc) 

In advance thanks for your help

I bet Goot has some thoughts on this! 

Hey Lori-Merchan! Thanks for the tag, MaggieBrennan!

While I certainly can't purport to know more than a person who actually works at Microsoft (omg hi DavidO! How cool!), I would start by digging into your spam complaints. Complaints are the people who got your email in the inbox and clicked the "spam" button, so they're extremely damaging to your reputation but also very revealing! I like to perform spam complaint audits in which I put myself in the recipients' shoes and try to think about why they may have reported the mail as spam. Some common reasons are:

• The recipient did not sign up. Maybe someone else entered their email address accidentally or on purpose. Perhaps your signup form is collecting invalid addresses and needs to be secured with a captcha and/or honeypot.  Maybe they did give you their address but did not want emails from you, and there was no way to opt out of messaging prior to receiving some. Asking people if they want your emails, allowing them to say no and still interact with your app/site/product, and double opt-in will solve the vast majority of deliverability problems!
• The branding/content is different from what would be expected based on the signup method. Is your "from" name correct and obviously you? Is the subject line relevant to the recipient? Is the entire look/feel of the message consistent and easily recognizable?
• The unsubscribe link is missing, hard to find, or broken. People will report mail as spam when they can't opt out because it's the only option and it's available 100% of the time.

You can segment out a portion of complaint reporters and review their engagement history while taking the signup method and list hygiene processes into consideration. If someone is reporting mail as spam quickly after signing up, then it sounds like they're not really signing up, they're just giving an email address because it's required. If people engage for a while but eventually report mail as spam, then it may be difficult to opt out or the opt-out mechanism is unclear in some way. It is also possible that the content or cadence has changed, resulting in mail that is no longer relevant, or sent too often. If you perform a similar exercise with all types of outcomes (bounces, unsubscribes, conversions), you should get a better idea of what's working and what's not, or what types of recipients respond best to which style/frequency of messaging.

Hope that helps!