On the web there are a number of articles, more or less recent, that talk about good emailing practices that are supposed to influence the email deliverabilityailings and newsletters.
For example: the ratio of text to imageThe list of spam words, the use of emojis in the subject line, acronyms such as "%, €", the weight of emails ... are all practices that would play on the delivery (or not) of emails in inbox.
Spammers' techniques have evolved over the years, as have spam filters. What was good or bad practice yesterday, is it still good or bad today? In 2023, what practices really wake up spam filters? What are the specificities of the different ISPs and webmails? Are there any precautions to take depending on the country of the recipients?
During a live session on May 12th, Marion Duchatelet tried to demystify all this by asking Anne-Sophie Marshdeliverability consultant at Iterable (American marketing campaign management tool). Below is what was said during this first discussion. But, in 45 minutes, we didn't have time to address all the issues. That's why we've plannedé another live to continue demystifying this subject.
Can shortcut links be included in emails? Is it really necessary to send a TEXT AND HTML version? Is it really necessary to ensure the same volume and frequency of mailings every week? Is it really true that ISPs/webmails remember HTML code? Do you have to be Return Path certified or similar to deliver correctly? Is it really necessary to fill in SPF, DKIM and DMARC signatures? Is it necessary to fill in the List-unsubscribe on routing tools? Is it possible to have a different deliverability rate from one sending platform to another?
Live: Délivrabilité, tuons les fausses bonnes pratiques (Episode 2))
When: Thursday, June 15 at 11 a.m.
Where: on Youtube Live and LinkedIn Live
Add the live to your agenda
The recording of episode 1 is available in replay
Please watch in low definition!
The text transcription of the live
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
The question that comes up most often is: is there a famous list of spam words?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
This list of spamwords is a bit like the unicorn of the deliverability world that comes up regularly. In fact, at the beginning, in the 2000s, anti-spam filters were much more basic. The content of the emails, including the words used in the emails, had much more weight in the filtering. But now the filtering techniques have become much more complex. Spam filters are adapting to the techniques of spammers who are always looking for new ways to get into inboxes. So it's a bit of a cat and mouse game. And the good practices of the 2000's have not clearly disappeared, but a lot of other layers have been added and it has become much more complex. Today, if you look at the major ISPs and webmails (so Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft: which usually make up at least half of the bases), they're going to put a lot more emphasis on how their users interact with a brand's emails over time.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So they don't care about spamwords?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
That's it, minus the spam words per se. But if you use words in your email that generate few opens and more complaints, it's going to impact the deliverability on the major ISPs. Because they look at whether their users interact, whether they open the emails, whether they read them, whether they complain, whether they delete the emails without opening them. So effectively, if you use words that are a little bit spammy that don't generate a lot of interaction, it's going to impact deliverability.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So it's rather the overall content of the email that generates few interactions rather than a specific spamword, at least for the main ISPs/webmails?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yeah, that's it. After that, the smaller ISPs or corporate domains use techniques that are a little less complex. With them, certain word associations can be a little more problematic. You will have corporate domains that will still use very precise filters on certain words. In general, it's the word combinations that will make you go into the spam box.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So if I summarize, with American webmails (Microsoft, Gmail, Yahoo) it is rather the openings, the clicks that will be analyzed. So, to the participant's question, which is " can we put "free" in an object if we have an average 40% opening rate?" We can answer him that the word "free" will not put him in spam. On the other hand, there are many local ISPs (in France, for example, we have orange.fr or laposte.net) that will not analyze behaviors because they simply can't legally. In France, we don't have the right to track behavior once the email has arrived in the mailbox, unlike American webmails which can check if the email is deleted before being read, if it is opened, if it is clicked. So local ISPs are going to focus a little bit more on word associations. And these word associations are not so much a fixed list of spam words. It's more like groups of words that evolve over time and over time. During the Covid for example, we had a lot of campaigns sent to lists of inactive emails using the words "covid", and well the ISPs/webmails adapted and added "Covid" or an association of words including Covid-19 in the spamwords. Am I about right?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, the word itself is not necessarily going to be a problem. But if it is used in spam campaigns, it will increase the risk. And if you're already a sender that doesn't have a great reputation and doesn't have great best practices, it's going to tip you over the edge. But, if you have campaigns that generate a great engagement rate, adding a word like "Covid" or "free" won't be a problem.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
We received a question from one of our blog readers who said " I'm programming a campaign to promote a band at a music festival. The band is called Viagra Boys. All the emails where their name is mentioned are going to spam. What should I do?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
This is a good question. Before assuming that it is exactly this word that is the problem, we should already do an analysis to see if there are other elements that could impact deliverability and also understand the ISPs that are impacted. In my opinion, it should not be a problem on the most important domains on a BtoC basis. There may be a smaller domain somewhere that decides to block all emails that use the word "Viagra" but it shouldn't be the majority of the base. If it's impacting major ISPs, there must be other issues with the sender. What can be interesting to solve content issues is to test the email block by block. For example, you start routing your email with just a text version without a link, then with basic HTML content, and you add element by element until you see when it starts to be a problem. But you really have to know your base beforehand, estimate the risks, how much time you want to spend to solve a problem when in the end it may not impact the majority of your audience.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
We have another question: " can the size of the subject line of the email make it go to spam?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
It's impossible to say that there is no risk because some filters can add this criterion to the mores at any time. Instead, you have to use your common sense and ask yourself this question: if my object is too long, will it get the opening? In general, it is said that short objects are more punchy.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So it's not because your object is long that it will end up as spam? But if the object generates few interactions then in the end less interactions = spam ?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yeah, on most mailboxes, that's actually going to be it.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Other question: is there a famous text-image ratio to respect?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Again, this is a matter of common sense. There's no ratio per se. However, you have to think about how, again, users are going to interact with the emails. If you have a lot of images or images don't show up by default, users aren't really going to interact with the email. If the call to action (button) doesn't show because it's in an image, that can cause problems because there will be little interaction. Users are looking more and more at their emails on mobile, if the images take longer to load, there will be less interactions too. After that, if you send your campaign to smaller ISPs, some still use filters like SpamAssassin who will give more importance to the ratio. So again, it's a matter of knowing your base well. But, in any case, adding more text is always a good thing.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Yes, doing 100 % image on some ISPs, it may not please and therefore make the emails go to spam. But in reality, it's because of the missing interactions that, in the end, it will end up in spam.
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Exactly. Over time, if you're doing 100% image, you're getting fewer interactions, you're training the ISP algorithms to understand that your branded emails generate few interactions, so they're going to put them in spam.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
We have another question: Do we know the name of the spam filters on the different ISPs?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
The major ISPs have a lot of money and they own their filters. They don't really use third party companies to manage it, they have the means to develop their own system. So those are really out there. The smaller ones tend to use third-party companies to help them with their filtering. And sometimes they'll use more than one and in different ways. If the filter says that the content looks spammy, ultimately it's the ISP that decides what to do with that information. French ISPs all use Vade. There are many who use Cloudmark.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So once again, the main ISPs, which have their own filter, are the Americans. So here, we are more concerned with the opening, the click, which will influence the deliverability. And for the local ISPs that use SpamAssassin, Vadesecure and Cloudmark, we're going to be more on complaints and database quality, right?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
The Americans will also take into account the quality of the data. If you route your campaigns to inactives or invalid addresses spamtraps (trap addresses), it will really impact your reputation. But Vade and Cloudmark really have different systems, they analyze a little bit more the content of the emails. And SpamAssassin is a little bit more basic. So it's really more content-related rules.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
We have a question from Geoffrey: " with ios15, how will ISP behavioral analysis evolve?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
So I guess we're talking about AMPP (Apple Mail Privacy Protection). It's true that with AMMP, the opening rates are not very reliable anymore. This is an interesting question. In reality, the open rates were never actually very reliable in the first place even before Apple introduced this change. But I still watch them very closely to monitor trends in open rates by ISP. If there is one that is very low compared to the overall campaign average, logically you have a spamming problem on that ISP.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Um... for me Geoffrey's question is more like: Will the behavioral filtering of ISPs evolve? Like, will they stop taking into account the opening criterion because it is no longer reliable?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
From what I've heard from American ISPs, what they take into account is mainly email opening and email reading time. What you have to understand is that these ISPs have access to tons and tons of data. To give you an example, a Gmail will analyze thousands of different elements in their filtering algorithms. They're going to be able to see exactly if people are spending more time reading an email from this brand versus that brand. But for us, as marketers, it leaves us a little bit more in the dark about how to manage inactives, etc.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Really? I really thought that these ISPs took into account clicks and now you are saying that it is more the opening and reading time?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, this is what they have communicated in the past. Afterwards, they never give exactly their recipe. But in fact, they were talking more about open rates, read time and especially spam complaints. Spam complaints are really something that has a very, very important impact on reputation and deliverability.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
A question from Sébastien: " When you get blacklisted, what should you do?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
There are a lot of blacklists that exist in the Internet world. Some have a very, very big impact. We are talking about SpamHasus and to a lesser extent, we will have other blacklists like SpamCop or others. On the other hand, there are hundreds of blacklists that frankly have no impact on the deliverability of emails because they are not really used by the mailbox providers. So you need to know the name of the blacklist and see if it has an impact on deliverability. I see it more as a signal that you're on spamtraps, so your data is not of good quality. And that's why you got blacklisted on those little blacklists. So it's already a small signal. And you have to correct it before it impacts bigger blacklists. If they are big blacklists, they usually have sites where you can ask to be removed. But you have to have the problem fixed before you ask. You really have to explain to them why it happened and what you did to fix the problem. In general, if you're blacklisted, it's because you have database hygiene problems, you've routed to spamtraps or email addresses that don't open, that don't click, it's because you don't clean your database enough from inactive addresses.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Sébastien, asks us: " for welcome pack items, are the rules the same? Do you have any advice?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes. Normally welcome emails are emails that generate even more interaction since the recipients have just shown an interest in the brand. So normally they should be emails that work well. The other advantage is that these emails are automated so they are routed every day on similar volumes. There's not really any specific advice, just make sure that the first welcome email arrives fairly quickly after filling out the form, so strike while the iron is hot.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
I have the impression that the question behind it was rather: " when it's a welcome email, are there any tips or precautions to take so that it arrives in the main box rather than the promo box? Aren't there groups of words like "newsletter confirmation", "customer number" or "purchase number" that will influence the placement in the main box?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Indeed, if a transactional email arrives in the promo box, it is problematic. On the other hand, if a newsletter or a promotional email arrives in the promotional box, it is perfectly normal and there is nothing to be done to ensure that these massively sent emails arrive in the main box. For the transactional email that should arrive in the main box, you should really try to cut all the commercial content of the email to remain as basic as possible: make more texts, less links and cut everything that can be promotional.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Ravana has a question: " Does the reputation of the root domain (main domain) impact the reputation of the subdomains and vice versa?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
So to some degree, yes, because they're connected. So if the root domain or if a subdomain is going to do something really bad, it can actually impact the rest. Subdomains allow you to isolate different types of emails. ISPs prefer that we isolate to better realize the types of emails that are sent. For example: news.domain will be the newsletter, info.domain will be the notification emails, etc.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
It's related, but having sub-domains, does it still protect?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, that's it, it's a little bit isolating.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Ok. A question from Sebastien: "after how many blocks SpamHaus blocks us for life or for a long time?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
SpamHaus is the biggest blacklist in the world and it's really the only blacklist that will have a big impact on the deliverability of emails because it is used by a lot of ISPs. To be blocked by SpamHaus, you have to have already done something pretty bad. In general it's that you have routed on spamtraps. And if you are routing on spamtraps, it means that you have really bad practices at the base. You need to review your acquisition strategy. Maybe the first time, if you go to them and you say, "Look, I made a mistake, I'm explaining to you that I understood, I did these steps to try to solve the problem, please delist me." They'll say OK. But if it's repeated a few times, after a while they're not going to give you that favor anymore. You really have to take the appropriate steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
So there is no set number of times?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
No, it's really managed by human people.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
If you give 100 balls, it passes? How many euros do you have to give to be delisted?laughs)
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
You laugh, but there are small blacklists that ask for money to remove but you can't trust them. The big blacklisters, what they want is to protect users from real spam and malicious emails. So if you are blacklisted by them, it means that you really need to review your acquisition strategy and your basic hygiene.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Okay. We have a question from Golden Gemini: "does the implementation of BIMI have an impact on deliverability?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
BIMI is a system that allows brands that have implemented DMARC at the "p=quarantine" or "p=reject" level to have their logo displayed in the inbox of some ISPs. Today, the main ISPs participate in BIMI, notably Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail and also other ISPs in France and abroad. It's a bit of a carrot that the industry has found to motivate brands to implement DMARC. So yes, it's pretty good. I don't think there are a lot of stats that have been done on the impact yet. But I guess if the logo appears in the inbox, it gives users a little bit more confidence that it's really the real brand that's writing to them and that it's not phishing. This can only be very positive for interactions. In addition, Gmail announced last week that for brands that have implemented BIMI, they are adding a little green checkmark when the email is opened to show that it's a verified brand, etc. So all of that, it can have more of a super positive impact."
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
It costs a lot of money, doesn't it?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
No, it doesn't. I mean it depends on the size of your company and your marketing budget. But it's about 1?000 $ per logo per year to set up the VMC (so Verified Mark Certificate). So for most medium/large companies, in the end, it's not that big a deal. But first you have to have DMARC in place at a sufficient level to be able to implement BIMI.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
And setting up DMARC is a pain?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
It depends a little bit on the complexity of the email channel in the company. To have it in place on your main domain, you really need to have a good list of all the sources that send emails from that domain. For example, you're going to have a system that sales people use to send emails, you're going to have a system for marketing emails, a system for transactional emails. You have to make sure that all of these sources are properly listed and authenticated. For large companies, that can be a very complex thing.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Question from Geoffrey: "will other ISPs also implement similar protocols to authenticate senders?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
It's always a little hard to know what the ISPs are going to do or not do. At the industry level, they want to improve DMARC mostly. They are also working a lot on ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) which is the mechanism that allows authentication not to break even when emails are forwarded. So I think there's work being done in the industry on that. It would be for Microsoft to do BIMI as well, it's the biggest ISP that is missing for BIMI.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Question by Pierre: "Does the sender's name have an impact on deliverability? Should we give the impression to the customer, who is not fooled, that the email is not automatic? Does writing "FNAC" or "Sébastien de chez FNAC" have an impact on deliverability?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
It's not the name itself that will have an impact but rather how the recipients react. Do they open more "Sebastian from FNAC" emails or more "FNAC" emails? It's pretty cool to use the one that will generate more opens. However, you have to test it on the long term to see if it's not just a fad and if people won't end up getting bored. I think you had a question about emojis. There's a pretty interesting article that appeared not long ago on Alan Iverson's blog called SpamResource (which is a very good reference if you want to learn about deliverability) which said that you should not add emojis in the sender's name, because it is really something that will impact the deliverability, especially at Gmail which does not like it.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Oh yeah?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, in fact, because there are spammers who use emojis and special characters to try to reproduce well-known brand names with emojis. So the sender name, you have to write it in text, but you don't have to add characters.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Okay, but that's fine for the sender's wording? But not necessarily for the subject?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Not for the subject, for the sender's wording.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
To answer Pierre's question, when you're a company that sends at least one or two emails a week, writing "Sébastien from Fnac" is a bad idea. The other day, I was giving a lecture to students and we were talking about this very thing. We came to talk about the famous "Vianney from Back Market" and he's not very appreciated. It gets boring after a while. So why not humanize the sender, but only for customer service emails or anything related to a subscription for example.
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, it's really testing to see what works.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Yes, but when you say test, you have to test on the long term. If you test once "Sebastian at Fnac", you are almost sure to have a better open rate or click rate. But in the long term, it can be annoying and end up being boring. Or you have to test over a long period of time.
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, absolutely. You really need to integrate testing into your routing strategy.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
We have a question from Sebastien who asks: "what are the tools to recommend for cleaning its base?"
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
That's an interesting question. There are actually quite a few companies that specialize in basic cleaning. The beaba is to make sure that your routing platform handles bounces well. When you receive an error that tells you that this email address is invalid, you must of course delete it immediately and not re-route it. This is a hard bounce. After that, there are many other types of bounces that we call soft bounces. For example: the inbox is full, the domain is not set up, the domain is not set to receive emails, etc.. These addresses, if over time they are still categorized as soft bounces, they should be deactivated. So you have to set up these mechanisms already if it's not done automatically by your routing platform. Then the other thing, which is really super important these days, is to absolutely secure those online registration forms that. It's really super important because we have a lot of attacks from bots that use unsecured forms to inject lots of bad addresses into the databases. So there is a real issue here.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Apart from setting up a big recaptcha what can you do?
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
So there is the recaptcha technique indeed, and there is another technique called the honeypot fieldThis means putting an extra checkbox in your form that is invisible to the naked eye. The bots, when they access your form, will automatically check this checkbox. But a human won't see it and won't check the box. So if that additional checkbox has been checked, you know it was generated by a bot. You can clear the address. That's a very good technique to use. It's a second technique to prevent bad addresses from entering your database. Then, you have to try to put a validation when someone tries to enter their email address: for example "Yahoo" with three "o", you have to be able to tell them right away that they made a mistake so that this bad email address does not enter the database. This is very important. There are solutions like "Kickbox that allow for basic batch validations. I have examples of clients who have really improved their delivery rate thanks to a big database cleanup. This is especially true for old email addresses. But, beware of companies that promise to remove all spam from your list because it's not possible. So if they promise you that, it's not very legit.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Okay. Jonathan tells us to stop here, even if there are still many questions. We'll do another live if you agree, Anne-Sophie.
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Yes, there are still a lot of subjects to be dealt with.
Marion Duchatelet, Badsender
Thanks a lot Anne-Sophie, it's a pleasure to welcome you. Our next live is on June 1?? to talk about the Mediapart's emailing carbon footprint. Thanks to everyone for your participation and your questions. Have a nice day!
Anne-Sophie Marsh, Iterable
Goodbye.
The participants
Anne-Sophie Marsh Anne-Sophie is currently a deliverability consultant at Iterable in England. Previously, she held the same position for 7 years at Epsilon. Before that, she held operational positions in email campaign management on the advertiser side at CeWe Color in Germany and Aubers in France. And like many email marketers who started their career in the 2000s, she was an account manager at Emailvision.
Linkedin link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annesophiemarsh/
Marion Duchatelet : She advises Badsender's clients in their emailing strategy and in the choice of their tools. She organizes master template design workshops for LePatron email builder. She writes articles, hosts lives and the podcast "Sobriety & Marketing...possible?", does training with Badsender but not only that, she jumps on all good ideas to make sure they become reality. She never gives up, never! She wants to understand everything, EVERYTHING!
Linkedin link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marionbajeux/