Manage email health

Maintaining email health and good deliverability is a continuous challenge for any email marketer. For all of the advances in technology, email is still one of the most important channels, which is why managing email health is so important.

This guide covers the multiple features that Bloomreach offers to help you maintain the most critical parts. Watch the video below to learn about some of the in-app email deliverability features.

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Sign up for the Mini Masterclass. Decrease spam landing, tackle deliverability challenges and find much more with bite-sized videos available for free in the Engagement Mini Masterclass. For even more tips read our blog

Understand deliverability

Before trying to improve your email health, it is important to understand the theory behind it and all the variables that influence it.

Once you understand the theory of managing deliverability, it is good to start with small steps that bring results quickly. Email deliverability tips article covers more than 15 different activities you can act on right away.

Automate your email health management

With the volume of activities that you can focus on in terms of deliverability, the best thing to do is to start automating email health management. Bloomreach offers multiple features that will help you in this area.

Health of email list

As a first step, it is necessary to understand the current health of your email list. Engaged subscribers need a different approach than those who haven't opened an email in months.

Assessing your list health gives you a clear picture of your sendable audience — which is often different from your total opted-in base — and helps you build the right segments for each campaign type.

Email list hygiene filter

As most of the best practices recommend targeting only active subscribers, you can set a project-wide Email list hygiene filter in Bloomreach to automatically exclude certain subscribers from receiving emails.

The filter is predefined based on recommendations from our email experts, excluding customers who haven't engaged for more than 180 days and those who recently soft-bounced. Customize the filter based on your own observations or best practices.

Suppression lists

Email suppression lists are also a project-wide filter that can be used to disable sending to certain email addresses or domains.

There are two types of suppression lists - a global one, which our experts set based on known bad/typo domains, and a custom one, which you can edit yourself. This feature will ensure you never send an email to a specific inbox or recipient provider, avoiding spam traps, invalid inboxes, bad actors, and more.

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The key difference between list hygiene filters and suppression lists is that suppression lists exclude specific customers based on their email domain or address, while list hygiene filters exclude customers based on their behavior.

Frequency policy

Frequency policies enables you to automatically manage the frequency at which individual customers receive your marketing emails. Your most active subscribers should receive every email, but what about customers who only open an email once a quarter?

Frequency policies manage the cadence of emails per segment for every email campaign where you apply them. Bloomreach has pre-built a Smart newsletter policy based on our experience, but you can also define your own segments and rules.

List unsubscribe

This is a feature that more and more email clients, such as Gmail, are supporting. List unsubscribe adds a simple button in the navigation of the email inbox that allows the end customer to unsubscribe from your emails.

The benefit of this is that it reduces spam complaints from your subscribers - these reduce your email reputation, but unsubscribes don’t! You don't need to set this up; it works out of the box.

Throttle the throughput

There are situations where you need to limit the number of emails sent in a specified time frame. There are two ways to do this - either by using a customer limit node, which sets a hard limit on the volume, for example, only 500 subscribers receive an email in total, or in various time periods.

Another approach is dynamic time throttling - this is useful if you need to limit your hourly throughput, as is required with certain providers during warm-up or at peak season. You can use the dynamic wait node and a random number generator to spread the campaign send over, for example, 60 minutes.

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Bloomreach also offers AI-driven send distribution based on optimal time for each customer. You can focus on either when do the customers open the email, or when do they click.