We’re all familiar with credit scores and understand that their purpose is to help evaluate the likelihood that a borrower will repay a debt based on past activities. Similarly, companies that employ email marketing campaigns, receive a numerical score that's an indicator of their reputation as a responsible sender based on past email practices.
An email sender score is based on a scale from 0 to 100 where 100 is the best possible score, while 70 and under is less than ideal. When a new domain or tool is used to send marketing emails, Internet Service Providers begin to assign the organization a score which determines how mailbox providers receive and filter emails.
Why is this important to JMP? Reaching the inbox is crucial to email marketing success. Without a solid sender reputation, emails go to spam folders or even worse, are blocked entirely. A recent study indicates that 83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it’s due to a poor sender reputation.
In March of 2022, we began using a new marketing automation tool, HubSpot, to send our marketing emails. Because we transitioned from using an established sender with a good reputation (SAS' SDM) to HubSpot, we’ve taken many precautions to ensure that JMP keeps an acceptable score. The user acquisition team continues to implement new processes to address the factors that impact the deliverability of our marketing emails worldwide.
A few, but not all, of the factors influencing our sender reputation can include:
- Quality of contacts to whom you are sending messages
- Volume and frequency of emails sent
- Level of engagement by email recipient
- Quality of email content
- Number of spam complaints
- Number of opt-outs
Each ISP independently chooses which of these factors are most important, so we must do all we can to address as many factors as possible.
What are we doing to improve our safe sender score?
Removing unengaged contacts from email campaigns. Who is considered an "unengaged contact"? An unengaged contact is a non-user that has never opened a marketing email from JMP after 11 attempts or a non-user who has previously opened a marketing email but hasn’t opened the last 16. Obviously, the number of unengaged contacts is not static but at the time of this article 338,462 of 724,191 marketing contacts fall into an “unengaged contact” category globally. Instead of removing a contact automatically when they hit the prescribed threshold, we enroll them in a strategically crafted workflow in one last attempt to entice them. If there is no response, we notify them that we will remove them from our lists. *Note: Removing them does not mean we opt them out or remove them from HubSpot or Salesforce, it just means we don’t include them in our marketing offers until they show interest again via completing a form submission on our website.
Increasing measures for email authentication on HubSpot forms. With the adoption of HubSpot, we launched a data visualization campaign last summer to identify gaps in new systems and processes. We uncovered a lot of unknown challenges related to contact quality but most notably, we discovered we have a huge bot problem. We quickly pivoted to use a new validation tool that allows us to block bots from entering invalid email addresses on HubSpot registration forms. We were also able to capture some common domains to manually enter into HubSpot for blocking and continue to build the list. Some recurring offenders were @cloudmdrive.my.id, @bozz.co, @domain.com, @haboty.com, @driveplus.com and @spacehotline.com.
Increasing frequency of validity scans. UA has been working hand in hand with the Salesforce team in utilizing BriteVerify to scan and mark the validity of email addresses in Salesforce before they are synched over to HubSpot. The scan used to take place bi-annually, now it's monthly and we are looking at ways to automate validation instantaneously as soon as new email addresses come into our systems.
Standardizing quality checkpoints for all marketing emails. There is now a formal approval process in place for each email to be approved by a copywriter, designer and HubSpot administrator before each blast.
Interested in learning more about JMP’s email health? Check out of the User Acquisition site for Cyrionna's monthly email report, along with our team's other key dashboards and reports.
