Are we safe? No, but we’re working on it!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.
User Acquisition NewsRe: Are we safe? No, but we’re working on it!Hi @amy_bullock ,
Thanks for sharing this insightful information about how metrics for (over)use of email exist and describing related potential challenges for JMP to communicate with our current or potential users based on these metrics.
I can attest that some of our user sites have informed us that JMP emails wind up in some form of (what sounds like) a composite 'spam' list they receive, reducing our ability to communicate about upcoming events - or even saying hello to inquire, say, how a trial is going.
Some follow-up questions I didn't see addressed above:
- what is JMP's current score on this metric you mention? I may have missed it in the metrics provide in the Confluence links, but all I found there were 0-10 scores.
- once JMP is allocated (or, if it already is, as we've experienced regularly) to a spam filter or 'naughty list' by an ISP or other software, are the steps you described above sufficient to be put back on the 'good' list?
- the focus of your comments seemed to be on what Hubspot sends out. What about Salesforce campaigns? Or Outlook emails? Is the score jmp.com domain specific? or is the score unique to each email/marketing source?
- in terms of non-Hubspot emails - specifically SF, as the primary CRM tool - are similar methods being deployed to allocate leads/contacts to 'inactive' groups to correspondingly not include them in email blasts to improve any "SF + jmp.com" score?
- You mention Hubspot is synching with SF info and cleaning these emails up for use in Hubspot - what about the other way around? (The Hubspot emails don't directly find themselves in SF, so the "account/customer outreach" picture seems to me even more opaque with the addition of this new tool, particularly also considering the ever-increasing volume of duplicate contacts/leads/accounts in SF today).
Thank you again for the article to bring attention to this matter and outlining some of the steps JMP is taking accordingly. This topic is a common one as we assess what component of our sales outreach is not on target. We'll never find an effect if the ghost in the machine is that the message never landed in the first place.
Re: Are we safe? No, but we’re working on it!Hi @christianstopp!
Thanks for your interest and questions. Please find my answers below.
- what is JMP's current score on this metric you mention? I may have missed it in the metrics provide in the Confluence links, but all I found there were 0-10 scores.
Yes, The 1-10 scale is the way in which HubSpot chooses to report data to us. There are various services available that can be purchased to monitor and report your score. HubSpot is a little more forgiving in what they signal as "ok". We'd still like to be at a 7 or above score.
- once JMP is allocated (or, if it already is, as we've experienced regularly) to a spam filter or 'naughty list' by an ISP or other software, are the steps you described above sufficient to be put back on the 'good' list?
When our emails are considered spam, the IP is recorded and more hits from the same IP will worsen the sender reputation. There are typically aging mechanisms in place, where if there are no hits for a specified amount of time, the reputation can improve. Also, if the recipient on an email manually releases an email from quarantine or marks you as a safe sender, this helps as well.
- the focus of your comments seemed to be on what HubSpot sends out. What about Salesforce campaigns? Or Outlook emails? Is the score jmp.com domain specific? or is the score unique to each email/marketing source?
Yes, the score we monitor in user aquisition is only for emails sent out through HubSpot.
- in terms of non-HubSpot emails - specifically SF, as the primary CRM tool - are similar methods being deployed to allocate leads/contacts to 'inactive' groups to correspondingly not include them in email blasts to improve any "SF + jmp.com" score?
This is a question for the Salesforce team; however, I do know that when an email addresses is reported as invalid or undeliverable it is marked accordingly in Salesforce.
- You mention HubSpot is synching with SF info and cleaning these emails up for use in HubSpot - what about the other way around? (The HubSpot emails don't directly find themselves in SF, so the "account/customer outreach" picture seems to me even more opaque with the addition of this new tool, particularly also considering the ever-increasing volume of duplicate contacts/leads/accounts in SF today).
The synch right now is one-way from Salesforce to HubSpot, and does not happen from HubSpot to Salesforce. All new email addresses come into Salesforce first.
Hope that helps clarify a little!
Thanks,A
Re: Are we safe? No, but we’re working on it!Hi @amy_bullock Thank you for your follow up information. I will continue to hope the efforts toward success with the Hubspot activities migrate to also make JMP's other outreach efforts more successful as well.
