I have gained experience working with Google Postmaster tools and I’m happy to share it with you.

How to get started?

Step-1: You will need the existing Google App or @gmail.com email, if you have it, go to Step-2, if you don’t – create it here.

Step-2: Log into your account and go to postmaster.google.com.

Step-3: Click on “+” icon to add your domain from which you are sending emails.

Step-4: You will be required to verify the ownership of your domain in one of two ways.
A – Adding TXT records in your domain DNS settings (similar to when you authenticate your domain with Mailigen).
B – Adding CNAME in your domain DNS settings.

Step-5: When given records in your domain DNS are added, click on verify.

Step-6: Finally click on your verified domain to see the results (if the tool shows “No data to display”, make sure that you are sending domain authenticated campaigns up to the order of hundreds).

How to understand each tool?

SpamRate – Shows the volume of spam complaints (abuse). Only emails authenticated by DKIM are eligible for spam complaint calculation. For the best email campaign results you should keep spam complaint rate below 0.1%

Example of High level domain reputation group spam rates (last 30 days).

IP reputation – Shows the reputation of IPs from which you send out emails. By clicking on a data point, you can display a sample of IP ranges from which your emails were sent.

Example of good engagement campaign sending IPs reputation (last 120 days).

Domain reputation – Shows the level of your domain reputation – critical factor in optimizing email campaign results.

Example of good engagement campaign sending group reputation (last 120 days).

Meaning of reputation levels and their effect on email campaign results:

Bad – a history of sending an enormously high volume of spam. Mail coming from this entity will almost always be rejected at SMTP or marked as spam.

Low – known to send a considerable volume of spam regularly. Mail from this sender will likely be marked as spam.

Medium/Fair – known to send good mail, but is prone to sending a low volume of spam intermittently. Most of the email from this entity will have a fair deliverability rate, except when there is a notable increase in spam levels.

High – has a good track record of a very low spam rate, and complies with Gmail’s sender guidelines. Mail will rarely be marked by the spam filter.

• Spam filtering is based on thousands of signals, and Domain & IP reputation are just two of them.
• If your domain reputation is lower than IP reputation, you should pay attention to email engagement and find out which part of your content is with low, bad deliverability in Google.

Feedback loop – Shows the volume of spam rate. You should keep spam rate below 0.5% to avoid Mailigen account suspension.

Example of campaign sending group that is enrolled in Google FBL where one sender got 0.7% spam rate for all his sendouts (last 7 days).

Authentication – Shows traffic that passed SPF, DKIM & DMARC, over all received traffic that attempted authentication.

Example of mailigen.com domain authenticated traffic rate (last 7days).

As an Email Delivery Expert, I recommend to use DMARC tools, like DMARCIAN , to monitor DMARC success rate & Email Fraud.

Encryption – Shows TLS encrypted traffic vs. all mail received from that domain (Mailigen sends out TLS encrypted emails).

Example of campaign sending domain group encrypted traffic rate (last 120 days).

Delivery errors – Shows rejected/temp-failed traffic vs all authenticated traffic coming from that domain, within a single graph.

Example of domain delivery error rate where the reason was – Dmarc policy of the sender domain (last 7 days).

Can I add other users who will be able to manage my domain reputation?

Yes, just click on manage users, then on “+” and add your domain manager @googlemail.com, @gmail.com or Google Apps email address!

When manager email is added, be sure to let them know. They will need to add your domain in their postmaster.google.com account!

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post Using Google Postmaster Tools to Monitor and Improve Your Email Campaign Results first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Using Google Postmaster Tools to Monitor and Improve Your Email Campaign Results appeared first on Sampi.co.

It all starts with reputation. Is your domain reputation good? Do you use a good email list? Does your email template have good content? Do you have a successful subject line and sender name? Do you send your email campaigns from a good Email Service Provider (ESP) like Mailigen? If yes, then most of your emails will be delivered, not bounced, and email deliverability in China will be good.

At the end it’s all about engagement or how your recipients interact with your emails, improving or impairing your reputation. If you use purchased or rented lists or lists that are not compliant with Can-Spam act of 2013 or other guidelines, like Bulk Sender guideline by Google, then your campaign recipients will impair your reputation and next time your delivery and deliverability rates will be lower.

Engagement metrics, that improve your email deliverability in China

1. Opens. Good open rate gives a signal that your emails are expected and wanted. If your average campaign Open rate drops below 7%, you should:
   •  Send more email campaigns to recipients who opened your emails, using Mailigen segments activity-based filter (e.g. if you have 4% OR, send twice as many mails to last 3 month opens).
     
   • Send re-activation email campaigns for last 5 month zero opens (before you send re-activation campaign, make sure that the subject line, sender name and content in template are engage-able and with good deliverability).
   • Try to send campaigns for smaller segments, like one campaign for women and another for men.
   • Use Mailigen Time Match function to send emails based on subscriber’s time zone.
2. This is not spam (TINS). If your reputation dropped and some emails started to fall in the junk, improve your email deliverability in China by convincing your Chinese recipients to mark your messages as not spam. It can be a difficult task to ask for TINS, but there are ways to do it:
   • If you have a good relationship with your subscribers, ask them, e.g. through email or phone, to check your campaigns and mark them as not spam if they appear somewhere in the junk.
   • Send a welcome message with attractive content, asking to mark your emails as not spam and important.
3. Reply. When your recipients reply to your emails, it improves your deliverability score. But keep in mind:
   • You should avoid sending email campaigns with noreply@ email addresses.
   • You should send email campaigns from an email that is active and being read.
   • If a subscriber replies to your email with a sentence like “unsubscribe me from your newsletter”, it may affect your deliverability score. Make sure that your unsubscribe link is easily visible.
4. Mark as important. You have probably seen icons like star & marker in Gmail.com or flag in Outlook.com. In China, popular email boxes like QQ have a similar function. When email receivers click on these icons, it improves your email deliverability score.
   
5. Add to address book. This was important years ago and it still is. When recipients add your email to their address book, they have whitelisted it. Whitelisted senders have a good deliverability.
6. Categorize emails. If recipients categorize your emails, it gives a signal that the emails are good and they want to receive them.
7. Email forwarding. It indicates that content you’re sending is relevant to your subscribers and your subscribers email users.

Engagement metrics, that impair your email deliverability in China

1. Abuses. If the email receiver marks your message as spam or moves it to the Spam folder, it negatively affects your deliverability score. To reduce abuse rate:
   • Make sure that Chinese email recipients received the content they wanted and subscribed for.
   • Add permission reminder merge tag above your HTML template to remind recipients how they subscribed and why they received your Chinese email campaign.
   • Add additional unsubscribe link above your HTML template content.
     Keep your abuse rate low in a range of 0.1%-0.5%, that will help to avoid suspension of your account. You can check your Abuse Complaints in campaign reports bounce statistic section.
2. Unsubscribes. Unsubscribes also impair your deliverability in situations where the email receiver didn’t use your email unsubscribe link (There is an unsubscribe link below email in Outlook or near the sender name and email address in Gmail or QQ. The recipients can also use these links to unsubscribe from your email list.).
   
3. Deleted unread. These are emails that were deleted without opening. To limit deleted unread emails, send email messages that are expected, relevant and delivered at the right time. Do not send too many emails. Try to figure out what kind of email content, subject line and sender name recipients would like. Try to engage subscribers presenting the goods that they like. If subscribers open your emails and stay connected, they are waiting for something great.

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post Email Marketing: Engagement Metrics And Email Deliverability in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Email Marketing: Engagement Metrics And Email Deliverability in China appeared first on Sampi.co.

In-time Email Delivery

There are several reasons why email delivery can be delayed.

1. The email has faced greylisting, which means the email has been temporarily rejected because the sender does not recognize it. Usually it happens when a campaign for this user is sent for the first time or you haven’t sent campaigns in at least three months. When an email is greylisted, spam filters of the receiver’s server check for the sender’s IP address, sender domain and sender email. If the email is not accepted, it will be returned (in campaign statistics you will see it as soft bounce). Read more about how email bounces can affect deliverability.
2. The ISP has set restrictions on how many email messages the server can receive from one sender IP address per one hour or day.
3. The email has been blocked because it was sent from IP address or domain with a bad reputation.

If in the email content there is a link to the Internet resource with a bad reputation, for example, if the website is blacklisted, it will affect email delivery and email may not land in the inbox folder. There are several online services where you can check if your email domain is blacklisted. One of them is www.spam10.com. Keep in mind however, that the service has limited access to Chinese black lists. The most popular Chinese email blacklist service is this one: http://www.anti-spam.org.cn/

Sender IP Address Reputation

Your sender IP address reputation can be affected by several factors:

• the email campaign has been sent to a spam trap
• the email campaign with spam-like content has been sent to a large email list
• after receiving a campaign, many recipients have reported abuse
• the email campaign has been sent to a large amount of non-existing emails or hard bounces

There are several online services where you can check the sender reputation. One of the most popular is www.senderscore.org. This service, however, may not give you an adequate picture of sender’s reputation in China.

If a sender has a bad reputation, the email delivery rate will be low. Email can be blocked, returned or land in spam folder. If we haven’t received any negative information about your account, don’t worry – your campaigns are sent from IP addresses with a very good reputation.

Mailigen also offers IP addresses with an outstanding reputation or dedicated IP, which is a paid service. This service means you have a unique IP address used only by you. You will be able to take care of the reputation of this IP addresses by yourself or or allow the Mailigen email delivery professionals to do it. If you are interested in this service, please contact the Mailigen support team.

Abuse

If an email recipient marks your campaign as a spam, his email address will be automatically deleted from your list, and in the report section, he will be listed as abuse. If you ignore this and continue to send email campaigns to this address, your messages will automatically land in spam folder or will become blocked bounce. If a campaign receives too many complaints, it affects IP reputation, and as a result, emails from this IP address will be automatically moved into the spam folder even for those users who want to receive your email campaigns.

Because of large number of abuse, delivery may become slower, sending less emails per hour. As a result, emails can get stuck or IP address can even be blocke. This will cause no further email to be sent from you.

For example, Microsoft uses SmartScreen filter. If a large number of email recipients mark your message as spam, your messages will land in the spam folder as long as part of those recipients mark your messages ”this is not spam.”

If your abuse rate is 0.1% or 1 complaint in 1000 email recipients, then you should pay attention to email marketing best practices and try to improve your email content, remind people how they got on your email list or why they should continue to read your emails.

There are several types of abuse

1. If the campaign was sent to an old email list and recipients forgot when and where they signed up for your newsletters.
2. The campaign was sent to a single-opt-in email. It means people filled in your sign-up form but they didn’t confirm their email addresses. If you have a single-opt-in form in your webpage, we advise you to change it to a double-opt-in form in order to prevent situations when someone puts crooked emails in your subscription form.
3. People signed up for newsletters once a week but you send them every day.
4. Recipients think your campaign is spam-like.
5. Recipients have no interest in your campaign or they hoped for something different when subscribed to your newsletters.

Email campaigns must always contain an unsubscribe link, however, not all recipients use it to unsubscribe. Instead, disappointed recipients mark message as spam because it’s easier and faster than looking for the unsubscribe link. Anti-spam experts recommend not clicking on any link included in an email message because that will indicate that the email address is active and spammers will continue to send messages.

To reduce the abuse rate, Mailigen recommends:

• seek to improve your email design and content to grow interest in your campaign
• put an unsubscribe link both on the top and on the bottom of email
• put a permission reminder in email content, so recipients can see when, where and how they subscribed for yours newsletters

If you want to find out more about email delivery or want to improve your delivery results, contact Mailigen team and we will help you!

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post What Affects Email Delivery in China? Part 2 first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post What Affects Email Delivery in China? Part 2 appeared first on Sampi.co.

All the most well-known email marketing platforms in the West, such as MailChimp or ConstantContact, haven’t adapted their platforms for Chinese market and, as a result, email deliverability with those platforms remains quite low in the Mainland.

Mailigen, on the other hand, has already established its foothold in the market by not only launching a fully localized version of its emailing platform for local users but also by optimizing email deliverability in China.

As a delivery manager, I’m often asked about how to avoid email delivery mistakes. So, I’ve gathered some information to help you to improve your email campaign delivery results. I hope this answers most of the questions.

Spam Filters

As you may know, spam filters are installed on email servers of companies, Internet and email service providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, FastMail, Mail.ru , which in case of China would be 163.com, QQ.com, 126.com etc., in order to be protected against unsolicited bulk messages. With these filters in place, there are several factors indicating whether your message will land in the inbox or spam folder:

• large images in email
• large attachments
• incorrect links
• long subject line
• spam words in subject line
• spam words in email content
• forms and scripts in email content
• bad reputation of email sender
• emails form this sender have not been opened for a long time

Read through this blog post for more information on spam filters.

Anti-spam Policy

Spam regulations are different in each country; most email service providers (ESPs) follow CanSpam rules and internal terms of use of each service. However, in 2006, China has adopted somewhat stricter in penalties, although somewhat loosely enforced legislation called “Regulations On Internet Email Services”.

It is important to note that Mailigen’s Chinese platform follows both North American act as well as Chinese regulation.

When sending out bulk email, recipients must know they have opted into your list to receive those newsletters. Every email must contain the sender name, company name, address and unsubscribe link.

Remember, email marketing is based on permission. If you want your emails to be delivered, you have to receive permission from each contact on your list. Otherwise your company brand may suffer because of a dissatisfied recipient.

Spam Traps

Spam traps are email addresses that are made for the sole purpose of identifying spammers. There are two types of spam traps.

1. Spam trap emails made by anti-spam organizations

In order to catch spammers, anti-spam organizations set up emails that can be found on the Internet—for example, in different websites, forums, blogs. Spam trap emails are inserted in the HTML code so they are not visible for usual Internet surfers. Setting up spam traps is necessary to find those users who gather email addresses using scrapers or bots. If an anti-spam organization finds out that a message is sent to the spam trap email address, it will automatically block the sender IP address, sender domain, sender email, and sender email domain.

Using EDM platforms for illegal activities is a notorious problem in China and Mailigen has to take measures to quickly disable accounts that violate the terms.

If the Mailigen team detects that a user has sent an email campaign to a spam trap, this user account will be blocked, and in some cases, if Mailigen has financial losses, compensation will be demanded from the abuser.

2. Spam trap emails made by ISPs

Some ISPs, like Hotmail, turn old email addresses not used for a long time into spam traps. For example, if you send a newsletter to the email address that has not been used for 6 months, in the campaign report, you will see this email address is non-existent and it is hard bounce. But if you send a newsletter after a year, in the report you will see that email address is existing because the ISP system had automatically transformed this email into spam trap email.

If the email campaign is sent to a lot of spam trap emails, ISPs can block sender IP address, sender domains, sender email, sender email domain, as well as damage sender reputation.

According to our Mailigen Anti-Spam Policy, you cannot use email lists older than 6 months without sending a permission reminder, because during this period of time people can forget they have signed up to your list, and old email addresses may turn into inactive email addresses. So, if your list contains email addresses older than 6 months, it can have a negative impact on your email delivery.

Stay tuned for the second part coming up shortly.

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.

The post What Affects Email Delivery in China? Part 1 first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post What Affects Email Delivery in China? Part 1 appeared first on Sampi.co.