Preface
This document helps you migrate your email sending to the SAP Emarsys Customer Experience platform. I help you understand what to expect, provide background information, explain common pitfalls, and give you information and practical tips on how to make the move quickly and successfully.
The Basics
The largest ISPs and email providers make a profit from advertising, not email. As such, their goal is to keep users on the page as long as possible by providing a great experience, which means two things:
- Protecting their users from unwanted email.
- Ensuring the most engaging emails reach the inbox.
Spam (unsolicited messages sent in bulk) comprises up to 47% of all email sent across the world (Sep. 2020). As a result, mailbox providers create complex filters to prevent spam from reaching their users; and they are successful as spam is reduced to 47% in 2020 from 69% in 2012. However, inbox filtering exists not just to filter out spam, but also to identify emails that will be opened and read.
“Deliverability” is the measure of how successful your emails are at navigating these hurdles, reaching your subscribers’ inboxes, and getting them to engage with your content.
However, when switching email providers you cannot take your current sender reputation with you, so you need to build it up again. You need to prove to mailbox providers that the emails from your brand’s new platform are genuine and should be trusted.
To an ISP, this change looks exactly like you are being spoofed, so they will check and scrutinize your email more than ever. Think about it this way: Your common identifiers such as sender (sub)domain, IP, and other infrastructure points are changing and this is alarming to the email providers, antispam filtering & ISPs.
To combat this you need to build a new reputation with them in a way that does not hurt your Business as Usual, while reassuring ISPs that your brand has not been the victim of a phishing attack or some other sort of abuse.
SAP Emarsys, as a sender, has a reputation with the ISPs and mail providers which is currently one of the top in the industry as it fulfills strict technical and compliance requirements. This reputation helps any brand sending with infrastructure.
Luckily for you, when you send with our platform, we:
- Provide access to state-of-the-art sending infrastructure.
- Guide you through the onboarding process through online resources.
- Provide access to monitoring tools to keep track of your email success, so you can build on it.
- Provide Client Success support to help develop and deliver the best results, in case that is needed.
What influences deliverability?
Three major email factors help your inbox placement:
- Using a trusted and secure infrastructure
This includes correctly configuring your sender domain, DNS and ‘from address’, sending IPs, and the links and image paths in your emails. - Establishing an excellent sender reputation
Your past email campaigns are used as an indicator of future results. - Engaging with your recipients
It’s not only about the email content and contact data, but things like actual recipient responses to your email campaigns are used in real-time to filter incoming campaigns and to update your sender reputation.
To-Do steps while switching marketing platform
- Use and configure a new sender (sub)domain for sending, when possible
- You should exclude importing any bounced and invalid contacts
- Clean up your contact list before importing it to the new system. Ideally,
- Add an engagement/activity field to your contacts, so it can be used later when choosing audiences
- Send content relevant to your contacts, which will help build up their engagement
- Send to your most active subscribers first
- Do not change your sending frequency
And remember!
When changing an ESP, you are also changing several of the methods that both contacts and email providers use to recognize you (e.g. IP address, sender domain, infrastructure records, etc.)
Thus, it is expected that you will notice a decrease in open rates as your reputation and tracking elements are also reset. Do not worry as it will grow again and then improve. And if you have any doubts we are always here to help!