Email Best Practices

Best Practices for sending Emails

The Sender Reputation is an individual metric at each email provider and is not something that they publish or give access to. You can gauge your sender reputation by looking at things like open rates or bounces, but there is no way to get access to it directly. The better your sender rate, the more likely you are to end up in an inbox rather than a folder or the trash can.

Clean Your Lists

Consider using conditional formatting in excel to look for typos like ‘gmal.com’ or ‘yahooo.com’, as well as bogus email addresses like test@test.com when you purchase email lists. Additionally, consider a service like Debounce or Zerobounce that can help remove spam trap addresses that may have snuck onto your list. Removing these before you import your list and begin your campaign can make sure you’re sending to the people you want to reach and help keep your sender reputation up.

Enforce Opt-In

It’s important to get affirmative consent from users on lists you purchase before you begin to send them high volumes of traffic. Every time someone deletes your email unread or worse, reports it as spam, your reputation suffers. By checking to make sure a contact wants your content, you can avoid someone marking all your mail as unwanted. This is as simple as adding a field on the Contact object called opted in, and sending a welcome email to new list members with a Form Assembly form that checks that box if a user consents to mail. Then, filter your report on that value. This way you’re only sending repeat messages to people who want what you’re offering.

Attachments

As an email best practice, we do not recommend adding attachments to mass emails. Attachments greatly increase the chance of being marked as spam, as well as decrease the chance of a recipient opening the email message. As a result, we do not offer this functionality in our product.

Instead, you can upload your documents to your server or other services such as Dropbox and use links to the files within your email. This also allows you to track who downloads the file with email tracking on.

Consistent Send Volume

If you are sending 100 messages a day six days a week, and 10k on the seventh beproviders will generally consider that spammy behavior. Consider breaking your reports up to distribute your send volume throughout the week or month. The more consistent your volume on a day to day basis, the better your sender reputation will be.

Send at Appropriate Times

The longer an email sits in an inbox without being opened, the more likely your sender reputation is to be dinged, even if it is eventually opened and interacted with. As such, try to send as much mail as you can during business hours in a recipient’s local time zone. Consider breaking up your reports based on time zones, which can be derived from state or country info, so that you’re not sending mail to recipients in the middle of the night.

Target For Engagement

One of the best things you can do is send more mail to people who are highly engaged, and less (or no) mail to those who aren’t actively engaged with your content. Right now you can do that based on who has viewed or clicked an email based on EBM data, but that’s challenging due to the small timeframe users have access to due to storage needs.

Best Practices for Email Campaigns

Centralize your Email Campaign creation with a specific team (such as the Marketing Department or the Admissions Office) to maintain a consistent voice/look and to ensure that emails are not being sent multiple times or conflicting.
Add your initials to Email Campaigns. This can be a useful naming convention to organize Email Campaigns.
When using workflows to send emails, build an additional action to create a closed task to track that the email was sent. This is useful for end-users to help keep track of triggered emails.
Marketing (or time-based) emails should be sent via a campaign, while transactional (or trigger-based) emails should be sent via workflows or processes. Marketing emails sent via workflow could violate CAN-SPAM since trigger-based emails will send regardless if the Email Opt-Out checkbox is TRUE on the contact record. Transactional emails (i.e., confirmation of application submission) can be sent regardless of the Email Opt-Out checkbox being TRUE, so these types of trigger-based emails should NOT be sent as part of a marketing campaign.
If you are using the old email builder, then you can use the steps outlined in June '18 Email Upgrade to migrate email templates. However, consider rethinking how you deploy email campaigns since new functionality, such as condition sets within the new campaign builder can help you construct dynamic content to reduce the number of email campaigns needing to be created. Each condition set can be used to deploy a different email, which results in needing to build fewer email campaigns.
If an end user is manually sending out the same emails multiple times based on reportable criteria, then talk to a CRM administrator to see if this is an email that can be automated via Workflow or Campaign. This can be part of a periodic (annual, semesterly, per recruitment cycle) audit designed to make business processes more efficient.
When defining Broadcast Frequency, broadcasts should be scheduled at a maximum of once daily for any given campaign.
Campaigns should run for a limited amount of time and should not exceed one calendar year; this allows for more discrete data when comparing activity.
When changing the Campaign Schedule/frequency of broadcasts, be sure to delete future broadcasts from the previous schedule.
Campaigns will be placed on Hold if the number of Contacts changes drastically from the time it was scheduled to the time it was sent.

Best Practices for Conditional Content

Conditional content appears as its own paragraph in your template, so be sure to have enough text so that configuration makes sense - a single sentence shouldn't be the only thing in your content block.
You can make any content conditional (text, images, buttons, etc.), but you can't change the block's layout. In other words, one set may have a picture of a microscope and text about Biology, and another an image of a globe and text about History, but both blocks will be in the two-column configuration.
You can't embed videos into the widget, so instead, take a screencap and insert the image of that screencap. Then, link that image to the desired video.
Your default condition shouldn't have any conditions - it exists only to ensure that all recipients have some content in the message.