Email deliverability overview

Email deliverability refers to your brand’s ability to send emails directly to subscribers' inboxes as opposed to their spam folder. This depends on factors such as sender reputation, whether subscribers have opened previous emails, and your email authentication configuration.

Migrate your campaigns

Before you send emails with Attentive, you need to migrate your subscriber list and campaign email history from your current email service provider (ESP).

Attentive’s teams will work directly with your team to ensure a comprehensive and smooth migration following the steps outlined below:

1. Attentive will create a custom migration plan for your brand. This will be based on your current email list and previous email campaigns.
2. Your email sending IP address will be changed from your current ESP to Attentive.
3. Attentive will start sending emails to your subscribers from the new IP address, and ramp up speed and volume in a two-week period.

Segmenting reputation by subdomain

When you’re sending emails, the best practice is to reserve your root domain (e.g., example.com) for corporate or transactional communications. Use subdomains (e.g., support.example.com) for other types of communications, like campaign emails. This way, if your sender reputation score for campaign emails drops, the reputation of your root domain remains unaffected.

Here are a few example subdomains:

• example.com
  • corporate email, not sent via email service provider
  • can also be used for transactional email
• support.example.com: transactional email
• cart.example.com: triggered email
• shop.example.com: campaign email

Keep in mind that when using subdomains, you'll need to set up DNS records for each subdomain. This includes setting up and maintaining internal email infrastructure for each subdomain in addition to any setup needed for your ESP.

See Email settings for more information about setting up domains and subdomains.

Email provider algorithms

Email providers use sophisticated algorithms to protect their customers from spam. These algorithms fingerprint elements of your emails, including the sending domain and IP address. Although your brand has previously sent email campaigns to subscribers, the algorithms won’t recognize emails from your new IP address. Sending too many emails too quickly can damage your email reputation and send large numbers of your emails to spam folders.

Avoiding spam folders

To build a positive reputation with email providers, we'll need to send emails slowly at the beginning and, ideally, only to your highly engaged subscribers. This demonstrates to email provider algorithms that your subscribers want to hear from you.

To ensure the positive reputation, we'll manage your migration over a two-week period. During that time, we will send emails to your subscribers at a set schedule. This will vary based on the following factors:

• Email providers’ recommendations
• Size of your subscriber list
• How recently subscribers have engaged with your brand

You can choose the content of the emails during this schedule; however, we recommend sending evergreen content.

Selecting subscribers to engage with

During the ramp-up process, we recommend that you only send emails to subscribers with frequent and recent email engagement. Avoid sending emails to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your email content in the past six months. Those subscribers are more likely to mark your emails to spam. Attentive also has built-in, automated email hygiene processes that help clean your email subscriber list. See Keep your email subscriber list clean for more information.

Subscriber lifecycle

When subscribers no longer open emails from you, email providers recommend that your subscribers unsubscribe from your brand’s emails. Sometimes, they'll automatically filter to the spam folder if there’s little engagement.

To mitigate these situations, we recommend that you inform subscribers of the following information:

• Frequency at which you’ll send emails
• Types of emails that you’ll send
• Instructions on how to change their subscription settings or opt out of emails.

For best results, we recommend sending your subscribers one or two emails per week.

Email engagement

Email providers’ algorithms consider the level and type of subscribers’ engagement to determine your brand's sending reputation. Better sending reputations reduce the number of emails that are sent to your spam folder.

Positive engagement from your subscribers includes the following activities:

• Opening an email from you
• Clicking a link in an email you sent
• Replying to an email you sent
• Amount of time the subscriber spends reading the email
• Forwarding an email to someone else
• Marking your emails as "not spam"

Email delivery and engagement metrics to aim for

When engaging your subscribers, we recommend aiming for the following percentages:

	Excellent	Good	Fair	At-risk
Delivered	> 99%	97-98.9%	95%-96.9%	< 94.9%
Opens	> 25%	23%-24.9%	15%-22.9%	< 14.9%
Unique opens	> 24%	20%-23.9%	13%-19.9%	< 12.9%
Clicks	> 5%	4%-4.9%	3%-3.9%	< 2.9%
Unique clicks	> 4%	3%-3.9%	2%-2.9%	< 1.9%
Reported as spam	< .01%	.02%-.08%	.09%-.10%	> .11%
Bounced	< .30%	.31%-1%	1.1%-2%	> 2.1%
Blocked	< 1%	1.1%-2%	2.1%-3%	> 3.1%

However, keep in mind the following information:

• Clicked links are subjective: Not all subscribers will go to your store directly from the email. Some will navigate to your website manually.
• Unsubscribers are not all bad: Although you’re losing subscribers, this indicates that your emails are going to their inboxes, not spam folders. When the email provider notices that the subscriber hasn’t engaged, they’ll recommend unsubscribing, which has a positive effect on your sending reputation.

Authentication and branding

To ensure trust from your subscribers, apply your website branding to your email campaigns, and match your sending domain to your website domain. Sending emails with inconsistent style and domains negatively affect subscribers’ trust. Additionally, some email providers evaluate your website traffic and page rank as part of your reputation.

Terms to know

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): An authentication mechanism that tells mailbox providers which IP addresses are authorized to send emails on behalf of your brand.
• Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM): An authentication mechanism that ensures that your message was neither intercepted nor changed during delivery.
• Reverse Domain Name System (rDNS): A DNS query that looks up the domain name associated with an IP address.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC): A security posture that can help further protect both your subscribers and your brand. DMARC tells mailbox providers to reject an email or place it in the spam folder if it fails both SPF and DKIM authentication. Alternatively, DMARC can be used to force strict alignment, requiring that both SPF and DKIM authenticate to the From domain of the sender.
• IP Address: IP addresses are used to transmit email over the internet to mailbox providers. The reputation of an IP address is part of the algorithm mailbox providers use to accept or reject incoming email messages.
• Shared IP: A group of IP addresses shared by multiple senders. A shared IP address has a single reputation with mailbox providers, meaning that all of the senders using the same shared IP address have the same reputation.
• Dedicated IP: An IP address assigned to a single customer or business. The reputation of a dedicated IP address is based solely on the customers using it to send email.

SPF and DKIM

Although SPF and DKIM aren’t required, we recommend using both of them to mitigate the risk of being spoofed by malicious organizations. Major email providers, such as Google and Microsoft, encourage using SPF and DKIM to protect your brand.

When you migrate to Attentive, you'll receive DNS records that you must update with your domain registrar to properly configure SPF and DKIM authentication. Additionally, consider the following:

• If you use an Attentive shared IP pool, you can’t set your rDNS to your domain name. This is because that name is shared by multiple Attentive customers.
• Don’t use a no-reply email alias in your From email address.
• Use the same domain name in your From email as your website.
• If you need to segment your domain, use a subdomain, such as: offers.website.com.