Are Your Emails Going to Bulk?

Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to go over some tactical recommendations for overcoming bulking. Being delivered to the bulk folder is a major concern because it means subscribers are not seeing their emails.

When it comes to deliverability, most people worry about getting blocked at a domain and getting a bunch of bounces. This is a serious problem, and is usually due to major reputation issues. However, a block is pretty easy to spot since your bounce rate will spike from 1% to 20% overnight. Bulking is more subtle, but no less impactful on the effectiveness of your email marketing.

The specific issue we're talking about here is when an ISP is sending the vast majority of your email to the bulk folder as a matter of policy; you've crossed some threshold of complaints or un-engagement. Before we get into why an ISP would do this, or how exactly you react, we must first determine the extent of the problem.

So how do you even know that you are sending your emails to the bulk folder? If you are diligently monitoring your bounce logs or send tracking information, you will see 99.9% deliverability, so you may think all is well. The problem, though is that yes, Yahoo is delivering your email, and they’re not sending back any bounces, but they are delivering to the spam folder. This does us no good since our subscribers are not likely to be regularly checking their spam folders for our mail.

ExactTarget’s Marketing Solutions Consultants are often called upon by our clients to put together a remediation plan to get back in the inbox. Here are some of the tactics that we use. Depending on the ISP where you’re having bulking issues, the plan might vary slightly. In future posts, I’ll address specific ISPs and filters.

In addition to seedlist monitoring services like Return Path and others, there are a few reports you can use in ExactTarget to monitor your tracking statistics. Other ESPs provide tracking data, so if you're not an ExactTarget customer yet, you should be able to get at least bounces, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes from your provider.

Tactics to Pinpoint Bulking

Use a service like Return Path Mailbox Monitor to do seedlist testing.
You can configure Return Path to notify you if your sends start bouncing or going to bulk. Our Marketing Solutions team can run a Return Path test for you as part of our service packages.

Here we see an example of Return Path results. This account is seeing a lot of bulking and blocking:
Create your own seedlist for major domains.
If a seedlist monitoring service is not in your budget, you can just set up accounts at the major ISPs and create your own seedlist. The main drawback here is that with engagement filtering becoming more common, your actions with those emails can cause the results to be skewed. For example, if you add your email to the safe senders list and regularly open or click the emails for that account, you’ll likely never go to bulk, even if the majority of your subscribers will. Conversely, I’ve had a client call in and say they’re going to bulk at Gmail because their CMO has subscribed via Gmail and is seeing the message in the Spam folder. Upon inspection of the tracking data, it turned out that he had never opened a message, so yes, Gmail will start sending to Spam after a while. But delivery was fine for everyone else.
Email Performance by Domain report (or Email Performance for All Domains)
This report will show you all the critical tracking data for each domain. If you see open rates that are way too low compared to similar ISPs, then you’re probably getting bulked. For example, if Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL are all showing 16% open rate and Yahoo is 1%, then you’re probably bulked at Yahoo. Confirm with a seedlist test.

Check your reputation
Look at www.senderscore.org
Just enter your IP address into the form and they will give you a reputation score. If your score is less than 90, you may have issues.

So now that you’ve uncovered your bulking problem, how do you fix it before your boss finds out? I’ll cover specific tactics in a follow up post, but here are the main points:

Determine the root cause. Too many spam complaints? Stale list? Is it content filtering or reputation filtering?
Consider a re-engagement campaign to clean up the list.
Segment subscribers by engagement.
Look at content and design issues.

Of course, you have to cover the basics: Is your email relevant? Do you have good permission? Are you sending content people want to get? For the purposes of this series, we’ll assume you have your house in order. Even great email programs with double opt-in and stellar content can run into the ditch for various reasons.

If you have any good stories about how you dug yourself out of a deliverability hole, or any good links to share, please post them in the comments.