How to fight poor email deliverability?
Email deliverability is a key asset for your customer service strategy. It's important because chat transcripts are sent over email, campaigns can be sent over email and also email conversations can be sent over Crisp. Because sometimes, your emails are not sent over the right inbox, there are some things you can do to improve email deliverability.
This guide is going to give you the best tips to improve emails deliverability through Crisp, using features available in Crisp and some other tips that are common knowledge about email deliverability.
At Crisp, we offer different tools that will let you improve your email deliverability. Among those, you can count on the ability to define a custom email domain and use your own custom email SMTP.
Quick tips: With a custom domain name, all your emails sent over Crisp will be branded with your own domain name. A dedicated IP will let you use your own IP to send your messages.
By default, your emails sent using Crisp will have the following architecture: company.on.crisp.email and you'll rely on Crisp IP's to deliver your messages the right way. Unfortunately, some of our IP's may have a bad reputation, which can lead to a low deliverability rate.
Setting up a Custom Email Domain
As mentioned, Crisp lets you set your own custom email domain. There are numerous benefits to take from custom email domain such as your reputation! Because you get to manage your own mailing reputation from your own domain name.
Another benefit would be to increase your brand identity by setting up your domain name inside emails coming from Crisp.
You can find the tutorial to set a custom email domain here.
Subscribe to a dedicated IP
When you use Crisp to send emails, some of them may get positive feedback (they get clicked) or negative feedback (they get marked as spam by users). This can affect your email deliverability.
By default, your Crisp emails, whether inbox message replies, transcript or campaigns, get sent via a pool of pre-heated, optimized IPs that Crisp operates.
To reward good users, we've built an email reputation tool that scores each domain and give them the ability to send messages using high quality IP. On the other side, spammers will get what they deserve... Low reputation.
If you wish to better control your reputation, you can subscribe to a dedicated IP that is available inside the plugin section. Once you're done, don't get to fast sending email, you have to heat your IPs.
Starting up with a new IP will generate some deliverability issue has your email are new. Just like a new domain name doesn't rank well for search results, new IP's doesn't get easily into the right inbox
Here are our tips to heat your new IP's:
Before warming up your IP's ✋🏼
Confirm that all email you send from the new IP is authenticated with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
Update your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record with the new IP.
Identify your engaged subscribers, which are those who open, click, and buy, in different period of time.
Clean up your list by removing malformed domains, unknown users, and unengaged subscribers.
If you're also changing your domains:
If you are using a new d= domain in the DKIM signature, add the new domain to the Yahoo! complaint feedback loop
Update the Whois record for each domain with the correct information. Do not use a domain privacy service.
Create an abuse@ and postmaster@ role account for each domain and ensure they are monitored.
Add the abuse@ and postmaster@ role accounts to abuse.net for each domain.
Create a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) record for each new domain and set the policy to monitor (p=none).
Warming up your IP's 🥳
Use these general guidelines to ensure your IP warming goes as smoothly as possible. The best way to start is to create a warm-up schedule based on your own sending practices and business needs.
Start with a low sending volume of 5,000 total subscribers across all mailbox providers.
Send to your most engaged subscribers first and gradually introduce other segments of your list with less engaged subscribers.
Double your sending volume every three to four days until you reach your maximum daily volume.
Don't force through volume just to hit the volume threshold for that day. For example, if you are sending to 10,000 subscribers on day five, but your send volume for that day is for 8,500 subscribers, don't bother coming up with another 1,500 subscribers to make up the difference. Allow for natural daily fluctuations and just cap the volume for the day.
Monitor your bounce logs for deliverability problems. Mailbox providers have different tolerances for increasing volume on a new IP.
If deliverability problems still occur, you can try these things:
Pause sending or reduce volumes to allow spam filters to adjust to the new IPs.
Stop sending to mailbox providers where policy blocks occur; then troubleshoot and fix the cause. Resume sending only after the issue has been fixed.
Make sure your complaint processing and bounce processes are working correctly.
If you did, hold your volumes at the current level for a few days, then start back up on the original warmup plan, and make sure to send to engaged subscribers right away.
Those solutions are only available if you are using Crisp paid plans. If you're on Crisp Free plan, we've added some solutions at the end of the article
There are multiple reason that could lead to a lowered rate of email deliverability. The best way to fight problems with email deliverability is to prevent it from happening. Here are a few things you could start to prevent your domain to be marked as spammy.
If your emails are already seen as spammy, you can skip this section or simply take some notes to make it not happen again 💪🏼
Engagement is one of the most important sign that is used by webmails to detect if a campaign is good or not regarding the people that are receiving it. If your open rates or your click through rate (CTR) are decreasing, you should ask yourself why and try to modify some things.
More than engagement, there are some other signs you should look for. For example, spam rate or hard bounce rate that are key factors of reputations for your domain name.
It's also interesting to follow reputations marks assigned by third party tools such as SignalSpam, Outlook Postmaster or Postmaster tools from Google
Here are a few tools that could help you to fight poor email deliverability:
SpamHaus
SpamCop
DmarcInspector
Gmail Message Header
SenderScore
MailWarm
Last but not least: Free Postmaster tools
Some tools allows you to test your messages to understand what is good and bad. These are very helpful tools if you wish to improve your deliverability because you can test them "BEFORE" they're sent.
Even if the content of messages is not as important as it was before, those technics can be introduced again when changing your email templates or creating a new segment or simply when starting to send your email campaigns.
To be honest, being spammy means your content has little to no value. Do something!
Normally, a technical infrastructure shouldn't change on his own. But you know, sometimes, humans can be strange: an IP that disappears, a link that goes away, a SPF record that moves, an email that's not perfectly signed...
All those elements should be checked regularly, especially if you're sending high volume of emails.
As we provided some solutions for users that are using paid plans on Crisp, there are also solutions for free users. The most important one would be chat transcript.
Chat transcript can be seen as spammy because they are sent automatically at the end of every conversation.
What we advise here is to disable automated chat transcript and only send it "on demand", so you're optimizing user interactions.
This guide is going to give you the best tips to improve emails deliverability through Crisp, using features available in Crisp and some other tips that are common knowledge about email deliverability.
1. How to improve email deliverability? 🤔
At Crisp, we offer different tools that will let you improve your email deliverability. Among those, you can count on the ability to define a custom email domain and use your own custom email SMTP.
Quick tips: With a custom domain name, all your emails sent over Crisp will be branded with your own domain name. A dedicated IP will let you use your own IP to send your messages.
By default, your emails sent using Crisp will have the following architecture: company.on.crisp.email and you'll rely on Crisp IP's to deliver your messages the right way. Unfortunately, some of our IP's may have a bad reputation, which can lead to a low deliverability rate.
Setting up a Custom Email Domain
As mentioned, Crisp lets you set your own custom email domain. There are numerous benefits to take from custom email domain such as your reputation! Because you get to manage your own mailing reputation from your own domain name.
Another benefit would be to increase your brand identity by setting up your domain name inside emails coming from Crisp.
You can find the tutorial to set a custom email domain here.
Subscribe to a dedicated IP
When you use Crisp to send emails, some of them may get positive feedback (they get clicked) or negative feedback (they get marked as spam by users). This can affect your email deliverability.
By default, your Crisp emails, whether inbox message replies, transcript or campaigns, get sent via a pool of pre-heated, optimized IPs that Crisp operates.
To reward good users, we've built an email reputation tool that scores each domain and give them the ability to send messages using high quality IP. On the other side, spammers will get what they deserve... Low reputation.
If you wish to better control your reputation, you can subscribe to a dedicated IP that is available inside the plugin section. Once you're done, don't get to fast sending email, you have to heat your IPs.
How to heat new IPs to increase email delivery 🔥
Starting up with a new IP will generate some deliverability issue has your email are new. Just like a new domain name doesn't rank well for search results, new IP's doesn't get easily into the right inbox
Here are our tips to heat your new IP's:
Before warming up your IP's ✋🏼
Confirm that all email you send from the new IP is authenticated with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
Update your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record with the new IP.
Identify your engaged subscribers, which are those who open, click, and buy, in different period of time.
Clean up your list by removing malformed domains, unknown users, and unengaged subscribers.
If you're also changing your domains:
If you are using a new d= domain in the DKIM signature, add the new domain to the Yahoo! complaint feedback loop
Update the Whois record for each domain with the correct information. Do not use a domain privacy service.
Create an abuse@ and postmaster@ role account for each domain and ensure they are monitored.
Add the abuse@ and postmaster@ role accounts to abuse.net for each domain.
Create a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) record for each new domain and set the policy to monitor (p=none).
Warming up your IP's 🥳
Use these general guidelines to ensure your IP warming goes as smoothly as possible. The best way to start is to create a warm-up schedule based on your own sending practices and business needs.
Start with a low sending volume of 5,000 total subscribers across all mailbox providers.
Send to your most engaged subscribers first and gradually introduce other segments of your list with less engaged subscribers.
Double your sending volume every three to four days until you reach your maximum daily volume.
Don't force through volume just to hit the volume threshold for that day. For example, if you are sending to 10,000 subscribers on day five, but your send volume for that day is for 8,500 subscribers, don't bother coming up with another 1,500 subscribers to make up the difference. Allow for natural daily fluctuations and just cap the volume for the day.
Monitor your bounce logs for deliverability problems. Mailbox providers have different tolerances for increasing volume on a new IP.
If deliverability problems still occur, you can try these things:
Pause sending or reduce volumes to allow spam filters to adjust to the new IPs.
Stop sending to mailbox providers where policy blocks occur; then troubleshoot and fix the cause. Resume sending only after the issue has been fixed.
Make sure your complaint processing and bounce processes are working correctly.
If you did, hold your volumes at the current level for a few days, then start back up on the original warmup plan, and make sure to send to engaged subscribers right away.
Those solutions are only available if you are using Crisp paid plans. If you're on Crisp Free plan, we've added some solutions at the end of the article
2. How to prevent my emails to go to the spam folder? 🧐
There are multiple reason that could lead to a lowered rate of email deliverability. The best way to fight problems with email deliverability is to prevent it from happening. Here are a few things you could start to prevent your domain to be marked as spammy.
If your emails are already seen as spammy, you can skip this section or simply take some notes to make it not happen again 💪🏼
You better watch out for low engagement rate
Engagement is one of the most important sign that is used by webmails to detect if a campaign is good or not regarding the people that are receiving it. If your open rates or your click through rate (CTR) are decreasing, you should ask yourself why and try to modify some things.
You're getting closer to the gap
More than engagement, there are some other signs you should look for. For example, spam rate or hard bounce rate that are key factors of reputations for your domain name.
It's also interesting to follow reputations marks assigned by third party tools such as SignalSpam, Outlook Postmaster or Postmaster tools from Google
Here are a few tools that could help you to fight poor email deliverability:
SpamHaus
SpamCop
DmarcInspector
Gmail Message Header
SenderScore
MailWarm
Last but not least: Free Postmaster tools
You might be spammy
Some tools allows you to test your messages to understand what is good and bad. These are very helpful tools if you wish to improve your deliverability because you can test them "BEFORE" they're sent.
Even if the content of messages is not as important as it was before, those technics can be introduced again when changing your email templates or creating a new segment or simply when starting to send your email campaigns.
To be honest, being spammy means your content has little to no value. Do something!
You made a technical mistake
Normally, a technical infrastructure shouldn't change on his own. But you know, sometimes, humans can be strange: an IP that disappears, a link that goes away, a SPF record that moves, an email that's not perfectly signed...
All those elements should be checked regularly, especially if you're sending high volume of emails.
3. What can I do to improve my email deliverability?
As we provided some solutions for users that are using paid plans on Crisp, there are also solutions for free users. The most important one would be chat transcript.
Chat transcript can be seen as spammy because they are sent automatically at the end of every conversation.
What we advise here is to disable automated chat transcript and only send it "on demand", so you're optimizing user interactions.
Updated on: 20/12/2023
Thank you!