Email best practices

Use the email best practices below to encourage a more positive user experience and a healthier sender reputation.

User engagement is of the biggest factors for ISPs when determining your sender reputation, which is critical for successful email delivery and inboxing. Positive engagement, such as opens and stars, can help improve your reputation, while negative engagement, like marking as spam, can hurt your sender reputation.

Compliance

Always comply with CAN-SPAM and CASL for marketing emails.

Targeting

• Before importing and targeting users in Leanplum, consider running them through an email validation service.
• Target users who have:
  • Opted-in to receive promotional type emails.
  • Engaged or opened an email in the last 6 months (or a length of time you determine). Users who are less engaged are more likely to engage negatively.
• Set user expectations during sign up by letting them know:
  • The type of promotions they’ll be receiving.
  • The frequency in which they will receive the emails.
• Avoid targeting users with addresses from affiliate vendors or were purchased. These users did not explicitly opt-in.
• Increase sending volume by ramping up gradually, using our warmup schedule when introducing a new segment.
• Target users who have not engaged in more than 6 months, once a quarter, or twice a year. Then permanently sunset this population. They may be negatively affecting your sending reputation and hindering your engaged population from receiving your campaigns.

Content

• Be sure to use your Leanplum requested sending domain.

• Target users with subject lines, preheaders, and content that are relevant to their segment.

• Include an unsubscribe link in all emails with marketing categories.

• Ensure content encourages positive vs. negative recipient engagement.

  Positive Engagement
  Moving from the Spam folder to the Inbox
  Opens
  Clicks
  Reply to
  Starring
  Foldering
  Labeling
  Getting added to the address book

  Negative Engagement

  • Marking as spam
  • Unsubscribing
  • Not opening
  • Auto filtering to the spam folder
  • Moving mail straight to trash
  • Mark as not important

Analytics

• Analyze engagement metrics 12 to 24 hours after each mailing and adjust targeting, content and mailings frequency for future sends if needed.

Sending Volume

Inbox Providers monitor your messages across a 30-day rolling period looking for anomalies such as sudden volume spikes, as well as long breaks without any mailings. If you want to keep a certain sending volume we recommend not going beyond 30 days without sending.

If you plan to increase your volume significantly, you need to warm up to the new expected volume. If it exceeds the amount recommended for the number of dedicated IPs you already have, please contact [email protected] for additional IPs. Review the recommended number of IPs as well as the IP warmup schedule.