The Nightmare Before Boxing Day (a poem)
"It's not what it looks like, officers, I swear! I wasn't sending spam, I just needed to share my deals with everyone! Ho ho holy night what have I done?!" [cue Santa sobbing into his beard] Poor Kris Kringle! 'Twas Monday morning and throughout the support queue, customers like Santa didn't know what to do. His "12 Days of Deals" campaign started off strong, with high open rates and clicks all week long. But on day 7, there arose such a clatter, he logged into his ESP to see what was the matter. The opens, they fell, while the spam complaints grew. What could be wrong? Only the deliverability team knew. I looked at his stats, and saw something amiss. He accidentally sent to his ENTIRE LIST! Not just subscribers or app users, oh no! He even included an old list from a trade show! Before we could stop it, the email was sent. The only thing left to do was see how Tuesday went. This one would do better, of that I was sure. Santa cleaned up his list, that was the cure! With careful targeting and engaging copy, the next campaigns fared better, though results were still choppy. It took him all month to recover inbox placement, and ol' Santa spent that time crying in the basement. "Next year will be better!", Saint Nicholas said, as he gave me a wink and patted my head. "I'll use double opt-in, I'll prune old contacts! I'll have a preference center, and maybe some snacks!" "Don't get carried away now, Mr. Claus!", I said. "Best practices are great, but subscribers don't need to be fed." We shared a laugh, and a cookie or two. Then he hopped in the sleigh, and away he flew. Let this be your lesson, while I have you here. Deliverability best practices are important all year! (Inspired by A Visit From St. Nicholas.)
We've created new blocks and templates for In-App Messages. Would love some feedback
Hi all In the drag&drop in-app editor, we created tools to enhance our own campaigns. The impact of this extension on our teams convinced us to release it as an extension to help other marketers achieve the same results. Video embedding (YouTube, Vimeo, and MP4), countdown timers, interactive scratch-to-reveal coupons, animated counters, auto-close messages, copy-to-clipboard coupon codes, an In-App Messages template library and import/export email templates are just a few of the features included in this extension. Each tool is crafted to help marketers create more dynamic, engaging content—no coding required! This extension is available in the Chrome extension store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hippo-power-tools-for-bra/klnaclpjbenicaapccooonooopnieekg Would love any feedback you have on this extension, including ideas for more features. Our goal is to make these useful tools for all Braze users.Video: Does DMARC prevent blocklistings?
Hey Bonfire! Some of you are probably familiar with our partner Valimail, the DMARC SaaS platform. Al Iverson, Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead at Valimail is a legend in the deliverability space and someone I admire greatly. His blog Spam Resource has thousands of entries about the intricacies of email deliverability and you should definitely subscribe to his newsletter! Last week, I was invited to participate in a short video about blocklistings, and whether DMARC can prevent them. Check it out! Happy Monday!
Link Alias Issues in Content Blocks
We have 16 different franchise brands that we market for individually. I have content blocks set up for all of our branded footers (multiple design options for each brand) that I use on every email. We were really excited to have content blocks so we could easily update standard footer elements and links without having to update it on all of our live emails for every brand (there are hundreds), but it seems that building all these content blocks will still not be useful for making universal updates bc if I change a link, I still have to go into every single email of every live canvas and campaign to retype the link alias name - a very tedious an unnecessary process that essentially defeats the purpose of the content blocks in the first place. Does anyone know if it's possible to specify the link alias name in the HTML of my content blocks (or even just in my HTML email templates) for the UI to recognize the alias name automatically so I won't have to manually name the same link in every email? I know that aliases are unique to each email, but this is not useful at all when we have standard links that are on all emails that I'm naming the same thing every time anyways. There has to be a better option than "all or nothing" on the link alias enablement bc we want to use it. But the benefits of the content blocks are being cancelled out by the link aliases. We put a lot of work into rebuilding all these templates/blocks for all of our brands when we migrated to Braze, so I really want to find a way to make it work.
Can't see IP reputation data
Hi! In my Braze email deliverability center dashboard, I can see data for my Google domain reputation, but no data is populating for our IP reputation. We send a very low volume of emails and I read that it could just be due to our IP not building a reputation yet, but curious if anyone else has this issue or if it's something I should be concerned about?
iOS 18.2 Redesign Mail App
With apple new update on categorizing, and enhancement to their email app in iOS 18.2 releasing in December. The new Mail comes with smart categories. The app will use on-device processing to sort the user’s emails into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Things like receipts and order confirmations will be sorted into Transactions, newsletters and social media notifications will get sorted into Updates, whereas ads and marketing will get sorted into Promotions. There’ll also be a tab with All Mail, where you can see everything in chronological order. What are some approaches and strategies we can take on as marketers for this iOS update?Disabling click tracking for deeplinks
Hi all! I need to send some emails with deeplinks to users and am planning to implement the workaround of disabling click tracking for those links specifically so the deeplinks actually open the app (we haven't have a chance to set up custom sub-link paths). Does anyone know if disabling click tracking through Sparkpost could have an impact on domain or IP reputation? E.g. if clicks aren't getting tracked via Sparkpost would that be a flag to Google Postmaster or do they have their own metrics to analyze that?one-click unsubscribe header impact on unique CTR?
Hi! How are y'all calculating meaningful CTR (unique clicks minus unsub) in Braze now that a click on the one-click unsubscribe header counts in the unsub count, but not as a unique click? Basically it's making our meaningful unique clicks look softer YoY given one-click unsub was implemented in early 2024. Appreciate any thoughts/guidance. TY!
