You Ask, I Answer: Fixing GMail Email Marketing Deliverability?

In today's episode, Janet asks what newsletter service, like A Web or Active Campaign, MailChimp, whatever, has the best deliverability within Gmail. I'm having some nasty delivery issues. So here's the thing. It's not a question of the service with a reason. Like if you're using some sketchy like dollar a month service, then yeah, it's probably that service.

But as long as you're using a company that's that's minimally reputable, like a MailChimp, an active campaign, an A Web or uh a Mautic, uh Paradot, whatever. Um it's much more a question of your configuration within that service and within your DNS, your domain name service. That's where you're gonna see massive deliverability uh advantages or challenges, particularly within Gmail, because Gmail does things slightly differently than every other ESP out there. Um however, they Google has, as they do, provided tools for all of us marketers to be able to assess the health of our Gmail instance and understand how is our marketing reaching Gmail users. It's a service called Gmail Postmaster Tools.

So let's take a very quick tour of the brings up here. Alright, so what we have with Postmaster Tools is once you sign up, you get to it and and you register your domains, which you have to do, the domains that you're sending email from, you have this little console here. I'm gonna click on to mine, the Christopher S Pen one, and I'm gonna set my look back here to the last 90 days. And what you'll see is you'll get some uh detail about all the things that are happening with your email list. So in this case, uh for when I'm sending Gmail users, I get a a point zero a 0.1 to 0.2% reporting on spam rate, which is good.

Uh anything under 5% is good. Anything under 1% is really good, uh, and and anything under half percent is really, really good. So you want to keep that nice and low. Uh anything that i i for a lot of uh um email service providers like Amazon, for example, you get uh dinged if your per if your deliverability if your spam rates go above I think one percent for more than a certain number of messages. You'll get a drop-down menu here that shows you all the different health metrics of your um email marketing.

So spam rate is tells you the quality of your list. Like if people are hitting the spam button, your list quality is not very good, or um you imported a whole bunch of stuff and and uh you shouldn't have. IP reputation is the reputation of the the service you're sending from. And so this you always want to be medium or high. If it's uh bad or low, then you should talk to your email service provider about like a dedicated IP that's fresh, that is only yours.

Uh run or run your own server or something like that, but you're sending from a bad box, essentially. Uh that's something that you know the reputable service w uh does matter. The domain reputation is your sending domain, your reputation as a domain. So uh again, you want this high or medium uh through over time. This is uh a lot of this is controlled by you.

So what you're sending from your domain. So I send from like newsletter at ChristopherSPen.com. That's my domain. Um I also send uh autoresponder emails, like if you fill out a form on my website, you get an email from that. One of the keys to domain reputation is making sure that your de your your domain is configured properly and you've got you know MX records in your DNS and things.

There's there's some fairly technical stuff on email deliverability. You want to make sure this in place uh on your domain to ensure that essentially you are who you say you are and you're sending good stuff the feedback loop is uh the spam rate uh essentially people saying uh not only say flagging you a spam but then how well do you address it how well do you honor unsubscribes um so we have here uh uh zero percent so essentially you want this always to be zero percent the feedback loop spam rate you want to be zero percent because it means as people unsubscribe you are honoring their unsubscribe if people unsubscribe and hit unsubscribe again and again and again that's going to show up in your feedback loop and essentially say you are a non-complying uh sender and that's really really bad you're gonna get your butt kicked for that authentication is one where um I discovered I have some issues of my own that I fixed last night um you have three different authentication methods for email uh D DCM SPF and DMARC uh DCAM is domain key identification SPF is sender policy framework and DMARC is do I can't remember what DMARC stands for. All three of these essentially are DNS records that you put into either your your hosting DNS or if you use a service like Cloudflare you you do it there. And this encrypts your email and certifies that email that you're sending out is from you and and and it's not somebody posing as you it's not somebody sending fake email because I mean you can anyone can put in a fake email into a a spam bot um but if you don't have these authentication records they can be just as legitimate as you are. By having those records in place, uh, you can make sure that your only you can send from your IP addresses, your email services, and things like that.

Uh, every major email service provider, like an Amazon Amazon SES, like a MailChimp, like uh a Modic or Pardon, has the ability for you to configure those records, but you have to do it yourself in your own DNS too. There's two halves of matching that you have to sign up in the service for those things, and then you have to do it in your DNS for those things as well. And those two things combined essentially say, I am who I say am and I'm sending stuff that's from me. Um and and this will tell you uh your success rate. You want your success rate to be as close as to 100% as possible.

You can see in this case, uh my SPF records were misconfigured. I had to go back in last night and fix them because I don't know, when I moved to Cloudflower, I copied and pasted incorrectly. And so hopefully in the next uh next report from uh uh Google will say yes, your SPF authentication is fixed. Encryption, uh essentially is you want to make sure that you're you're using uh TLS on your mail server. This is again something that mostly your um uh provider will be handling for you.

So this is not something you would need to worry about or set up. And then delivery errors. You want your error rate to be nice and low. Uh this is essentially uh traffic that you're sending that gets rejected. So if you bought a crappy list, you bought a list from somewhere that you shouldn't have, you're gonna have a lot of delivery errors.

You want that to be super, super low, uh, as close to zero percent as possible. So the big things that you have control over, you have control over your domain reputation. Make sure everything is configured to be sending as you you have control over your feedback loop. Honor those unsubscribes immediately. Uh never send an email to somebody who has unsubscribed after they've unsubscribed.

Um or they've hit the spam button. You will just get hammered. Configure your authentication. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If you're not how sure how to do that, go buy drinks for your IT department.

Uh, if they're not sure how to do that, then you need to bring in a consultant to talk uh to walk through the process of setting up all three types of encryption. You uh and you your authentication, you need to have it in place to be doing email marketing well. Uh set up your encryption uh and those delivery errors, don't buy lists, right? Do not buy lists because what happens is you create delivery errors that impacts all of your other reputation uh and and things just go downhill. So that's Postmaster Tools, and you may have to watch that again because it went really fast on purpose.

There's a lot in here, but this Google tells you exactly what's going on uh with your email marketing so that you can fix it. And you'll see it takes about seven days for data to appear in here. So it's not a media, so make sure that you're checking back. I recommend checking monthly. Just stop in, check, make sure that you know nothing's gone wrong.

Um, especially if you if there's been a DNS uh change, you want to check a lot after any major IT change. If you move a website, if you move an email service, if you change your hosting, you want to be checking every day for like 14 days to make sure that things are stable in here. That's how you use Postmaster tools. And again, there's configuration in the products you use, the SaaS software, there's configuration in your DNS that you or your team must do. Your provider can't do it for you.

Um, but that's that's how to get started. Great question, important question, super important if you're doing email marketing. You must have all this stuff right. As always, please leave a c uh comments in the comments below, subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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