by Katarzyna Garbaciak, Product Owner EmailLabs
Hi!
This text is my first post on Medium. Anything I‘m going to write here (as the name of my project reveals) will concern electronic mail. However, not just emails understood as newsletters or everything related to the design, layout but generally speaking — the appearance of messages. My series of articles will mainly focus on their technological side. In other words, what an email should be like ( whether it’s a transactional or marketing message) to achieve higher inbox placement and arrive on time.
Since successful deliverability depends on the messaging infrastructure, its setup, configuration, and authentication settings, I’m going to present a broader look at email than it’s usually known. With 2022 right around the corner, it’s time for a brief summary of what’s coming up next in the world of email deliverability and communication security. No matter if you’re a marketer, e-commerce manager, or IT folk — this post is for you.
You might say that email is a rather obsolete technology. But since Ray Tomlinson sent his first electronic message in 1971, a lot has changed. And a lot is still changing. Businesses started to use email at a massive scale to communicate with customers. According to Statista, in 2017 about 269 billion messages were sent and received daily, in 2022 it will reach 333.2 billion and this number keeps growing. The senders’ bulk activity resulted in appropriate changes on ISPs’ side who to separate legitimate messages from SPAM, created and began to develop more advanced antispam filters. The RFC documents have been updated with additional technical specifications and instructions about emails, sender authentication like SPF, DKIM, recently DMARC has appeared, we’ve learned about feedback loops and what spam traps are.
While in the first decade of the 21st century, anyone who set up a personal mailbox in a chosen email service could send messages without a problem and find them in the inbox. Today, sending an email does not mean delivering it to the subscriber. Along the way, many interesting processes take place, including parameter-based evaluation — with local ISPs the processes are simpler, sometimes even primitive, while with global ones, such as Google or Yahoo — multi-dimensional and self-learning. But I’ll leave it for now. Let’s move on to the latest trends.
A holistic approach to email deliverability
I’ve noticed a growing awareness among brands being mail senders. They no longer need to be told what deliverability is, that an email isn’t just a newsletter and the sent≠delivered. Why a holistic approach? Well, I can see a certain analogy with medicine — the increasing specialization usually causes many doctors to stop looking at the patient as a whole, a human being with all the processes he is undergoing. After all, the heart or kidneys aren’t working separately from the rest of the body, they coexist in harmony with the entire organism until an illness occurs and destroys this state. And yet often when we visit a specialist we get a diagnosis of “SAR#1 (Standard Administrator Response) commonly used in IT slang “weird, it works for me”. While dealing with complex illnesses, only the patient’s self-determination allows for a holistic approach. The same concerns email deliverability. A couple of years ago, IT was responsible for system messages, transactional emails, and Marketing Team for promotions as well as newsletters. But to achieve the effect, you have to work holistically: transactional emails sent from random SMTPs, which are also used for newsletters, won’t get delivered to the main inbox. With a 90% of IP reputation score, there’s no guarantee of good deliverability. So what if a tool like mail-tester or mailchecker.net gives our campaign a score of 98%when messages are being marked as SPAM? A great example of a holistic approach is the newly popular BIMI standard (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) by which a brand’s logo appears for all emails sent from a given domain, no matter if they are monitored by any e-commerce system or a marketer managing a CRM. I’ll take a closer look at the BIMI standard later in this article.
Building your own sending reputation
Last year was significant for this reason — we spoke to a record number of senders who have deliberately chosen to set up in-house mail servers specifically for their communications. Thus, after verifying their CRM solution sends messages from the same IP address as 100 (yes, and often 1000) and many other senders, they turned to us for advice on how to build your own email reputation. At times, they were assured by e-commerce or automation software providers their IP address is fixed and dedicated, which was not true. Fortunately, more and more senders know now how to check these things and simply won’t be fooled. While the number of senders is not the main issue here, the more neighbors sharing the same email infrastructure, the harder it is to control what each one of them is actually sending.
Getting your own IP may sometimes be very hard and at the same time involves additional costs, but when you think about the address and all the reputation that comes with it, you may get an advantage of full independence. We can, for example, send from a single IP independently to a marketing platform we’re currently using, that means to transfer our sender reputation to another tool; build something of our own which can be used wherever we are willing and able to ( if a chosen tool allows sends via external SMTP). There’s also a growing awareness of how well each type of communication performs from a different IP and from an address. By default, transactional messages do not take precedence over marketing ones. Now, if promotional emails are sent from the same IP address, all messages, including the most important ones, are likely to end up in the Offers tab. I believe the year 2022 will continue strengthening this trend.
Securing emails from a single domain, the BIMI standard
BIMI is a standard that allows to significantly reduces the possibility of domain impersonation. Just 2 years ago, DMARC was mentioned as basic protection against phishing. Currently, it is honored by all major mailbox providers, who award additional points for implementing strict DMARC policy, at the same time increasing the sender’s reputation. However DMARC won’t help, when a cybercriminal purchases a look-alike domain to impersonate legitimate brands. There’s a risk that recipients won’t notice e.g. an extra letter or special character in a domain name and will consider an email as genuine. Phishing activities are getting more sophisticated nowadays. A few years ago we used to say that a message sent by a criminal uses broken HTML, different font sizes and colors, etc. Today phishing emails mimic those sent by reputable brands, using their graphics and redirecting to similar fraudulent websites.
In July 2021 Google announced the end of testing and joined other providers in supporting BIMI. Since then, more businesses have implemented the standard for their sending domains. BIMI works for all types of communication, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using a domain for transactional or marketing messaging. If you want to find out how an authenticated sender looks like in GMAIL inbox check out emails from Allegro, CNN, Booking.com, or Vogue.com.
BIMI allows the brand logo, registered with the patent office, to appear on the inbox listing and in the email itself. However, to receive this award it is necessary to meet several requirements, both technical, such as the implementation of enforced DMARC (quarantine or reject policy), and legal, as the right to use the logo by a given company/brand must be confirmed by a notary public. So as you can see it’s the highest level of sender authentication. Just as SSL has an impact on web positioning, it’s being said that BIMI will become one of the main criteria for email classification — and as a result — successful delivery. While many say adding a logo in the inbox increases email conversions by up to 39% (according to Red SIFT & Entrust in the US and UK — 2021), it’s still worth checking this out on your own.
Increased user data privacy
Data privacy is becoming a prominent trend in email communications. In Fall 2021, Apple introduced a new privacy rule with iOS15 to prevent senders from tracking openings of Apple Mail users. What’s more, it will no longer be possible to link users’ IP addresses when they, for example, open a message to any other online activity.
As a result, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which until now have been dominant among marketers when it comes to analyzing subscribers’ behavior and segmenting email databases, will lose their value. By separately logging emails sent through Apple Mail proxy servers, it’s possible to prepare partial statistics and evaluate openings based on users of other mail systems. But it may not last long, since it is rather expected that other ISPs, who follow the leader, will restrict access to opening data shortly as well. All for the sake of users.
The bottom line is that Open Rate may have been a perfect metric, but we’ve learned to analyze it to the point where it has allowed us to determine quite clearly our audience’s needs. Now without access to openings, senders have to rely on clicks and deeper analytics to figure out whether users are active and interested in receiving emails from us. But maybe that’s not a bad thing… and brands, seeking alternatives, will gravitate towards deeper, multi-dimensional metrics, which could result e.g. in improved A/B testing.
Dynamic content, AMP, and GIFs
By the term “dynamic content” I would like to smuggle in a few trends: AMP and dynamic components like GIFs. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which allows embedding dynamic elements in your message, letting you accomplish your goal within the email without sending a customer to a slow-loading landing page or app; Animated GIF, on the other hand, could help to prompt a C2A click and instantly jump to the next web site.
It looks attractive and interesting, however, not many senders use these options. For some reasons; one of them is the lack of technical skills, how to implement these solutions, how to test them effectively. What impact do they have on email deliverability? Surely if implemented wisely, not exaggerated, they support conversion.
Is it worth it? The answer is one of many specialists’ favorite sayings — it depends. Yes, it depends on why we want to implement these solutions, what we expect to achieve, and what kind of mailbox providers we have in our contact base. AMP technology seems to be perfect for hotel or apartment booking platforms, for solutions generating product reviews, etc., that is, for suppliers who struggle to engage customers or subscribers to perform certain actions, as in AMP email users can submit information without leaving the inbox, no need to go further and provide more data. Meanwhile, GIFs are useful for emphasizing C2A, at least this scenario is worth testing. GIF files are heavy, so it makes sense to start with a smaller element. Let’s also remember that not everyone likes flashing images… better not to overdo it.
Who supports dynamic forms? Currently, only Gmail, Mail.ru, and Yahoo email clients can receive AMP emails, but, likely, many other inbox providers will soon expand support for this technology. GIF images are not supported by all ISPs either.
Dark mode
What actually is dark mode and why am I mentioning it? Dark mode changes the default color scheme, i.e. the background is black instead of (by default) white in the dark theme and the letters are bright, white instead of (traditionally) black. Although dark mode may seem to have nothing to do with email deliverability, it’s worth keeping in mind that many email clients don’t automatically adjust email elements to this theme and if we, as senders, won’t take care of it, the email visual effect may not be satisfactory (which can harm conversions). Checking emails in several email services won’t be enough. As a result, a properly coded email template is displayed correctly in the light mode, while a user with a dark theme on will see a white spot instead of an image, causing discomfort and a negative feeling about the message and sender. Using gray fonts and images with transparent backgrounds is just the way to go.
More and more users choose to use browsers in dark mode. Firstly because of battery saving, secondly because it brings some relief to tired eyes. Not sure how much time you guys spend in front of your phone screens, but I think everyone knows you can suffer from eye discomfort when you overdo it: eyestrain, dry eye, etc. Dark mode helps to mitigate the harmful effects of internet surfing for too long. When the largest mailbox providers such as Gmail and Outlook have decided to introduce a dark theme to their email apps, it was only a matter of time before email communications had to adapt to this change.
Using dark mode is a growing trend which is another factor marketers need to consider while designing and optimizing emails to display them correctly in the recipient’s inbox. So be sure to test your messages in a dark theme as well.
Thank you for your attention. Last but not least, a special invitation to participate in the discussion. Let us know in the comments below, what do you think about email communication trends? Is your brand considering sending from a dedicated infrastructure, or perhaps implementing AMP or BIMI? The more of us — engaged ones — who express our views — the more inspiration we might all take.
