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Jenny Lassi

By: Jenny Lassi on August 29th, 2014

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Email Holiday Season Starts Now - Prepare Now to Optimize Inbox Delivery

mailto:demo@example.com?Subject=HighRoad Solutions - interesting article

holiday-inbox-hubspot

It’s back to school time! Do you know what else? It’s also the time of year that ISPs will begin to make their inbox algorithms more restrictive in anticipation for increasing email volume for the holidays.

Now we at HighRoad understand that in the association space, you aren’t out there marketing products that Auntie Jeannie may enjoy as a holiday gift. We do know from the aggregated statistics from all of our association partners/clients that there could be a dip in deliverability if back to school time means your association starts to ramp up email volume at the same time ISPs are making it more difficult to reach inboxes.

So what if your Membership campaigns require you to ramp up your volume to drive Membership goals at the same time ISPs are getting more restrictive? It means during this time, you must mind your P’s and Q’s and:

  • Send emails to known good/valid email addresses. If you are not sure if the emails are valid and if it’s been longer than 6-months that you’ve sent an email to the address, we highly suggest using an Email Validation Service. Sending to older email address will mean you will have a higher bounce rate or worse yet, sending to a recycled spam trap.
  • Only send emails to engaged subscribers that regularly receive your emails and open/click through to them. We know you want to send as many emails possible for Membership campaigns but casting the widest net does not mean higher engagement. It actually means higher bounces and lower engagement. You will need to either come to terms with excluding non-engaged subscribers and a smaller list, changing your Membership campaign drive to after the holidays or accept the fact that you email reputation will take a dip if you proceed without changing the way you normally launch emails during this time.

Not convinced? Here are statistics aggregated for our Industry Benchmark study available to our clients in the HighRoad Support Portal:

Quarter Delivered Bounced Invalid
Q1 97.36 2.64 0.45
Q2 97.35 2.57 0.39
Q3 98.19 1.9 0.36
Q4 96.91 2.85 0.46



Notice Q4 trends in delivery. These statistics are from large senders, using DKIM/SenderID and DMARC authentication and adhering to best practices. Your metrics may vary depending on your list hygiene, use of authentication and sending frequency. Complaints registered against the emails will also lower your Sender Score/Email Reputation that will extend into Q1 of the following year.

If your organization has a bit more lenient view of what a good email address is then attend our Holiday Inbox Basics webinar at Noon EDT on September 24th, 2014 to learn more about what you can do to reach the Inbox.

To Register for Upcoming Webinars or Access On-Demand Materials:

For future ease, just remember: www.highroadu.com. Login with your email address and the super secret password of: just4u. Once you register for a webinar, it will appear in "My Products" and you can easily access the product for the live event and any replays of the event that U wish to watch.

Want to get a head start and suppress non-engaged subscribers now? Take the following steps and we’ll see you on September 24th!

Create Your Exclusion Segment:

  1. Go to Subscribers>Custom Search
  2. Click on Behavior/Activity on the left and drag over Opens (Volume over time) to search criteria bar and select "Have not opened at least 1 email in the past 90 days"
  3. Click on Subscriber History on the left and drag over Date Joined to search criteria bar and select "Is beyond 90 days in the past"
  4. Hit submit
  5. Under Bulk Search Actions, you can create a Dynamic Segment with the results and name the static segment something that makes sense to you (example: Non-Engaged Subscribers - 90 days)