Managing 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. To make this as easy as possible, Bloomreach Engagement offers multiple functionalities that will help you maintain the most critical parts.

Watch the below video which will guide you through some of the in-app email deliverability features.

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Understanding deliverability

Before trying to improve your email health, it is important to understand the theory behind it and all the variables that influence it. A great introduction to this topic is our article Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability which explains the topic of deliverability in depth.

Once you understand the theory of managing deliverability, it is good to start with small steps that bring results quickly. We have covered over 15 different tips and activities you can take in our article Email Deliverability Tips.

Automating 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 Engagement offers multiple features that will help you in this area.

Health of your email list

As a first step, it is necessary to understand the current health of your email list. Because you need to take a different approach to engaged subscribers than to those who have not been opening your emails for a while, this will establish the audiences you use for various campaigns going forward. We have a standardized and simple way of segmenting your email list that will give you valuable insight into the health of your email list and the audience size of users you can target on a frequent basis - as it is different from your total opted-in audience.

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 Engagement, which will automatically exclude certain subscribers from receiving emails. The filter is pre-defined based on the recommendations of our email experts, which is excluding customers who have not engaged for more than 180 days and those who recently soft-bounced. You can of course 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 make sure you never send an email to a certain inbox or recipient provider - avoiding spam traps, invalid inboxes, bad actors, etc.

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List hygiene filter vs Suppression lists

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 cadency of emails per segment for every email campaign where you apply it. We have 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 do not need to set this up, it works out of the box.

Throttling 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 customer limit node, which sets a hard limit on the volume - e.g. 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 e.g. 60 minutes.

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Bloomreach Engagement 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.