Welcome to Adobe Campaign.
In this module, we will be looking at designing
emails for deliverability.
By the end of this module you will learn
how to apply deliverability best practices.
Email deliverability refers to a set of characteristics
that determine a messages ability to reach each destination
without bouncing or being marked as spam
and arriving in a short time with the expected quality
in terms of content and format.
Deliverability problems are generally linked to measures
of protection against spam implemented by both
internet service providers and mail server administrators.
To optimize the deliverability of your Adobe Campaign
emails we recommend following
these characteristics of good deliverability.
These characteristics fall into four main categories.
Content quality is how you as a marketer ensure
that the content you create is able to be delivered
successfully to your recipients.
Data quality refers to the origin of your recipients list
and the care you take to curate it.
Infrastructure refers to the setup and tools used
to manage deliverability.
And finally reputation, this is something more nuanced
that you can do yourself and ties in
with the first three characteristics,
meaning if you're successful in the first three
your reputation will be successful as well.
Once you properly understand these characteristics
you'll be able to form the foundation of a successful
email deliverability program.
Today, we will be going through the steps
to ensure great deliverability.
First let's look at infrastructure.
When beginning to send emails on a new platform,
we have no reputation because we have no history of use.
ISPs or internet service providers may become suspicious
if we send a large volume of emails.
We must have a strong team that manages a ramp up
of email deliveries to prevent the platform
from becoming an untrustworthy entity.
This is known as IP warming and it can be done
by progressively increasing the volume of emails
sent over time to avoid being marked as spam.
Generally speaking, it's better to send content
regularly in small batches
rather than in large campaigns sporadically.
Certain ISP's check the validity of a sender's address
before accepting messages.
A badly formed address may result in it being rejected
by the receiving server.
We can also fall back on third party tools
such as SpamAssassin.
SpamAssassin is a spam checking tool that can perform
analysis to determine the risk of our mail
being marked as spam.
Content quality is the next approach
for good deliverability.
In the email delivery editor, it is important to constantly
preview your content to catch any issues
before they become too large.
While creating the content we can use the preview tab
in the delivery editor to change the text personalization.
This allows us to view how certain recipients
will see this content.
The next step is to start sending proofs
to preview what emails will look like in a recipient's inbox
on multiple email clients.
Since we do not want our emails to look like spam
we can use SpamAssassin's anti-spam checker
provided for us in the preview tab.
This spam checker will highlight any risks in our emails
and flag them for review.
Poorly designed emails are likely to be marked as spam
in our user's email clients.
The more link opens up a window that provides us
with details of the analysis as well as a score.
If the score is larger than the maximum authorized score
it is more likely that our email will be marked as spam.
The analysis also provides tips to reduce the score.
Here we see a score of 2.2 has been assigned to the portion
of the email because it only contains HTML content.
To reduce this score it is best to provide text
in multiple formats in our email.
If we crop HTML, we must provide a text version
as well as some email clients only support text.
It is best practice to create both versions
when creating your content.
Another option is to use the HTML to text button
in the header menu.
This will convert our HTML content to plain text.
It may not translate perfectly
so we may have to manually correct it.
This is a great way to lower our spam score
as most spammers do not provide a text version.
In some instances minor HTML errors
can be perceived as spam.
We can run the HTML diagnostics tool which provides
some warnings and error messages.
We can manually correct these errors
or use the auto-correct HTML issues button.
If we use this option any changes made are permanent
and there is no undo button.
We can also use opt-out links and forms.
When a message is analyzed, a typology rule checks
whether or not an opt-out link has been included
and generates a warning if it's missing.
We always want to include these types of links
to provide the option to opt out or unsubscribe
if recipients are not interested in our content.
It's best practice to not get in the way of recipients
who want to opt out by requiring them
to fill out fields such as their email address.
The form should only have one validation button.
The implementation of opt-out links can be simplified
with the use of personalization blocks
containing the link in all emails.
Another way to improve deliverability
is to do quality control on the data
we have on our recipients.
Our initial marketing list of recipients
may come from multiple sources, such as promotional material
that requires a user signup or Facebook ads.
Lists may also be purchased through third parties.
It's important to know who's on these lists
and verify the data as some lists may contain recipients
who are not valid or are not a desirable target.
We'll want to employ best practices
for quarantining recipients thus reducing our error rates
and speeding up deliveries.
A high rate of embedded addresses is also interpreted
as a sign of spam.
We want to avoid being on any ISP denial lists.
We want to target active members as keeping them involved
will build our reputation.
To cleanse the data we want to remove profiles
that have missing or incomplete data
such as no email address or no contact number.
There should always be a mandatory minimum for how much data
is required for a profile to be deemed eligible for contact.
We must also remove duplicate email addresses.
Besides the benefit of not bogging down recipients
with lots of duplicate marketing emails
this can also cause a problem with unsubscription requests
not being honored.
If a recipient unsubscribes after receiving a message
the duplicate profile will still be eligible
for future messages.
We will also want to remove malformed email addresses.
This will help reduce unnecessary email bounce errors.
Adobe Campaign manages a list of quarantined addresses.
These addresses are excluded during delivery analysis
and are not targeted.
There are a few ways in which an address can end up
in quarantine including the address getting sent
automatically when a delivery is made and experiencing
hard or soft error.
Addresses will also be quarantined
when a customer opts out of an email.
We can also manually add email addresses
to the quarantine list such as so-called honeypot addresses.
These addresses are deliberately created to catch spammers.
If we send an email to one of these addresses
we may be marked as a spammer,
diminishing the reputation of our platform.
It is possible that we will have very little control
on the data available to us.
We can control our interactions with the customers
such as targeting recipients
who open our emails and click links.
We can also target current subscribers or anyone
who has made a recent purchase.
It's important to maintain a list of our active members
while also avoiding improper communication by making sure
our recipients subscribed intentionally.
This can be achieved by implementing a double opt-in
mechanism for post subscription confirmation.
This helps to ensure that our recipients subscribed
intentionally helping to confirm our active member list.