Re-adding subscribers after reputation repair

A comment came in on Engagement and Deliverability and I thought it was a good question and deserved a discussion.

Good article. My question about Gmail engagement is how would I reach someone who has not been opening my emails? Say I want to do a re-engagement campaign. If I temporarily suppress a contact from my list for a period of time and only send to my engaged contacts, will that contact potentially get an email in the future if my reputation improves? Or is the contact essentially lost to the spam folder abyss if their emails start going there for engagement reasons?

The short answer is that yes, you can add in contacts after repairing reputation and expect them to get the mail in the inbox. There are some caveats, though.

Part of any reputation repair process is letting some of your recipients go for good. I know some folks think they can simply repair reputation and then go back to mailing the same as they did before. But that’s not how reputation works. Unless there is one precipitating incident – like a phishing page on your domain or one mailing that is clearly something unintended reputation reflects all the mail that you’re sending. If you get to a place where you have to repair reputation, then you need to make some changes to your data.

Let old subscribers who are unengaged for long periods of time go. 24 months is pretty safe, you can be more aggressive, like 12 or 18 months, but I wouldn’t advise being less aggressive.

Next trickle folks back into your active mailings slowly. Don’t take your full 2 year database and mail it. That’s the way to destroy all your hard work on reputation repair. Instead, start adding recent engagers in batches. There are different ways to structure the batches. For instance, you can increase your list by 10% a week, adding in old addresses. You may find that there is a point where you see a reputation change – like you’re adding addresses from 18 months ago and Gmail reputation falls or FBL emails increase. This is a sign to slow down, stop or change tactics.

Whatever you do, monitoring is key. Your own internal metrics – FBL numbers, Google postmaster tools, probe accounts (yours and commercially available ones), opens, clicks, bounces – will tell let you monitor how delivery is going. You can make adjustments on the fly. Try things like slowing down the addition of addresses or move the new addresses into a re-engagement stream rather than your main mail stream. Decisions are driven by data. Collect everything you can get.

Overall, the population of recipients you choose for reputation repair isn’t the only population of recipients you will ever be able to contact. Unless a recipient actually marked you as spam, you will be able to reach their inbox.

Related Posts

Updating the filtering model

One thing I really like about going to conferences is they’re often one of the few times I get to sit and think about the bigger email picture. Hearing other people talk about their marketing experiences, their email experiences, and their blocking experiences usually triggers big picture style thoughts.
Earlier this week I was at Activate18, hosted by Iterable. The sessions I attended were interesting and insightful. Of course, I went to the deliverability session. While listening to the presentation, I realized my previous model of email filtering needed to be updated.

Read More

Public reputation data

IP based reputation is a measure of the quality of the mail coming from a particular IP address. Because of how reputation data is collected and evaluated it is difficult for third parties to provide a reputation score for a particular IP address. The data has to be collected in real time, or as close to real time as possible. Reputation is also very specific to the source of the data. I have seen cases where a client has a high reputation at one ISP and a low reputation at another.
All this means is that there are a limited number of public sources of reputation data. Some ISPs provide ways that senders can check reputation at that ISP. But if a sender wants to check a broader reputation across multiple ISPs where can they go?
There are multiple public sources of data that I use to check reputation of client IP addresses.
Blocklists provide negative reputation data for IP addresses and domain names. There are a wide range of blocklists with differing listing criteria and different levels of trust in the industry. Generally the more widely used a list the more accurate and relevant it is. Generally I check the Spamhaus lists and URIBL/SURBL when investigating a client. I find these lists are good sources for discovering real issues or problems.
For an overall view into the reputation of an IP address, both positive and negative, I check with senderbase.org provided by Ironport and senderscore.org provided by ReturnPath.
All reputation sources have limitations. The primary limitation is they are only as good as their source data, and their source data is kept confidential. Another major limitation is reputation sources are only as good as the reputation of the maintainer. If the maintainer doesn’t behave with integrity then there is no reason for me to trust their data.
I use a number of criteria to evaluate reputation providers.

Read More

Insight into Gmail filtering

Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was.
Let’s take a look at what Gmail said.

Read More