Bulk Mailing Guidelines

About

One of the best marketing techniques for small and big scale businesses are the emails. Creating beautiful content in the form of newsletters and sending them to people worldwide is considered the cheapest and the best way of advertising a product. There is one industry which rely mostly on emails for marketing i.e the digital marketing industry.

Why use ESP ( E-mail Service Provider ) ?

Since sending newsletters through your own regular email client( Gmail, yahoo, or @yourdomain.com) to a extremely large amount of addresses could possibly get your IP address flagged as spam and even get blacklisted from your ISP. Which in case of a digital marketing company,is a huge problem. This means they’re going to need an Email Service Provider- a company or service that allows you to market your product through emails and also to track the results.

Maintain IP Address Reputation

Email providers use several programs to monitor the behavior and assess the risk potential of every IP address delivering messages to their network.  The factors these programs take into account in order to evaluate sender reputation based on which your IP gets blacklisted:

• Quality of contacts to whom that IP address is sending messages
• Level of engagement recipients show for emails from that IP address
• Sending volume trends
  • If your IP address id new, you need to warm up by gradually increasing sending volume. Immediately sending thousands of E-mails can effect you IP reputation.
    
• Quality of content contained in the emails being sent by that IP address
• Don’t use third party mailing list, it should be organic.
• Follow G-mails Bulk mailing best practices
• Keep check of your IP reputation score with various online tools.

G-mail Classification

Lets understand how G-mail classifies incoming mails :

• INBOX

  • Further sub-categorized:
    • Primary
    • Social
    • Promotions
    • Updates
    • Forums

• SPAM

How to avoid E-mail Spamming?

There are some Guidelines that need to be followed in order for your Bulk mails to reach in the right category and avoid your E-mails from getting into spam.

Reference: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126

• Use of Postmaster tools :
  • If you are sending E-mails to G-mail addresses, it will help you know how your domain/IP is being treated by your ISP.  It shows if users mark your emails as spam, if you are following G-mail’s best practices and if emails are sent securely or not.
• Making sure Bulk mails are getting classified correctly:
  • Sending emails consistently from the same address for each mail category (Transactions, announcements, promotions etc.)

• Authenticate your mail:
  • Send from same IP Address
  • Keep valid reverse DNS records your IP address that point to your domain
  • Choose the same address in the ‘From:’ header for every bulk message
  • Update SPF records, Sign messages with DKIM and publish a DMARC policy

• Automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple times.
• Occasionally send confirmation messages to users.
• Include each mailing list recipients are signed up for, and give them the option to unsubscribe from any they’re no longer interested in.
• Track your mails which are getting forwarded.
• Design your Newsletter or E-mail carefully
  • Example:
    • Include options to subscribe and unsubscribe. *avoid auto subscribing
    • Don’t use words like “Free”, “Sales” unnecessarily
    • Avoid using UPPERCASE for any words whether its in your subject line or body – those are flags for spamming

SPF ( Sender Policy Framework )

An SPF record is a TXT record that is part of a domain’s DNS zone file. It helps fighting spam.
The TXT record specifies a list of authorized host names/IP addresses that mail can originate from for a given domain name.

Reference: http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax

Requirements:

Your domain must be using (mt) name servers:

Example:

• NS1.MEDIATEMPLE.NET
• NS2.MEDIATEMPLE.NET

INSTRUCTIONS:

• login to cPanel
• select Authentication from the email menu.
• Scroll down to the SPF section and click Enable.
• Scroll to the bottom and apply your new settings by clicking Update.

Example SPF record:

• “v=spf1 a mx ip4:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -all”