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

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Janet asks, “what newsletter service; aweber, activecampaign, mailchimp, whatever, has the best deliverabilty within gmail? I’m having some nasty delivery issues.”

So here’s the thing – it’s not a question of service (as long as the service is minimally reputable) – it’s a question of your configuration within that service and within your DNS. Watch the video for a full explanation of GMail’s Postmaster Tools and how to use them to diagnose deliverability issues.

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

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In today’s episode, Janet asks what newsletter service like a Weber Active Campaign, MailChimp, whatever, has the best deliver ability within Gmail, I’m having some nasty delivery issues.

So here’s the thing, it’s not a question of the service, within reason, I’ll give you using some sketchy on dollar a month service, then yeah, it’s probably that service.

But as long as you’re using a couple minutes, that’s minimally reputable, like a MailChimp and Active Campaign and a Weber a melodic par dot, whatever.

It’s much more question of your configuration within that service.

And within your DNS, your domain name service, that’s where you’re going to see massive deliver ability, advantages or challenges, particularly within Gmail, because Gmail does things slightly differently than every other ESP out there.

However, this, Google has, as they do provide 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 that’s service called Gmail postmaster tools.

So let’s take a very quick to what that brings up here.

Alright, so what we have with postmaster tools is, once you sign up, you get to and you register your domains, which have to do the domains that you’re sending email from, you have this little console here, I’m going to click on to mine, the Christopher Penn one.

And I’m going to set my look back here to the last 90 days.

And what you’ll see is, you’ll get some detail about all the things that are happening with your email list.

So in this case, for when I’m sending Gmail users, I get a point 00 point one 0.2% reporting on spam, right, which is good, anything under 5% is good, anything under 1% really good.

And anything of a half percent really, really good.

So you want to keep that nice and low.

Anything that is for a lot of email service providers, like Amazon, for example.

You get dinged, if your if your delivery bill, if your spam rates go above, I think 1% 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 email marketing.

So spam rate is tells you the quality real lyst.

Like if people are hitting the spam button, your list quality is not very good, or you imported a whole bunch of stuff and you shouldn’t have IP reputation is the reputation of the service you’re sending from.

And so this you always want to be medium or high.

If it’s bad or low, then you should talk to your email service provider about like a dedicated IP that’s fresh, that is only yours, run or run your own server or something like that, but you’re sending from a bad box, essentially, that’s something that you know, the reputable service does matter.

The domain reputation is your sending domain your reputation as a domain.

So again, you want this higher medium through over time.

This is a lot of this is controlled by you.

So what you’re sending from your domain so I send from like newsletter at Christopher penn.com.

That’s my domain.

I also send autoresponder emails like a fill out a form on my website, you got an email from that one of the keys to domain reputation is making sure that your your your domain is configured properly.

And you’ve got you know, MX records in your DNS and things, fairly technical stuff on email delivery ability, you want to make sure that is in place on your domain to ensure that essentially you are who you say you are, and you’re sending good stuff.

The feedback loop is the spam rate.

Essentially people saying not only set flagging a spam, then how well do you address it? How well do you honor unsubscribed.

So we have here else? 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 sender.

And that’s really, really bad, you’re going to get your butt kicked for that.

authentication is one where I discovered I have some issues of my own that I fixed last night, you have three different authentication methods for email DDKMSPFND, Mark, de gamma domain, key identification, SPF is Sender Policy Framework and D Mark is don’t I can’t remember what the mark stands for all three of these, essentially, our DNS records that you put into either your your hosting DNS, or if you use a service like cloud flow, 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 spam bot.

But if you don’t have these authentication records, they can be just as legitimate as you are.

By having those records in place, you can make sure that you’re the only you can send from your IP addresses your email services and things like that.

Every major email service provider like an Amazon, Amazon SES, like a MailChimp like a medic or part of that has the ability for you to configure those records.

But you have to do it yourself in your own DNS to this two halves and matching, but 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 I am, and I’m sending stuff that’s from me.

And and this will tell you your success rate you want your success rate to be as closest to 100% as possible.

You can see in this case, my SPF records were Miss configured, I had to go back in last night and fix them because I don’t know I when I moved to cloud Ville I copied and pasted incorrectly.

And so hopefully in the next next report from Google will say yes, your SPF authentication is fixed.

encryption, essentially, is you want to make sure that you’re using TLS on your mail server, this is again, some that mostly your provider will be handling for you.

So this is not something you need to worry about a setup.

And then delivery errors, you want your error rate to be nice and low.

This is essentially 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 going to have a lot of delivery errors, you want that to be super, super low, 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 on subscribes immediately.

never send a an email to somebody who has unsubscribe after they’ve unsubscribed or they hit the spam button, you will just get hammered.

and configure your authentication, SPF DKMND.

Mark, if you’re not sure how to do that, go buy drinks for your IT department.

If they’re not sure how to do that, then you need to bring in a consultant to talk to Joe to walk through the process of setting up all three types of encryption and you and you are authentication, you need to have it in place to be doing email marketing well, set of your encryption.

And those delivery areas.

Don’t buy lists, right? Do not buy lists.

Because what happens is you create delivery errors that impacts all of your other reputation.

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 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 immediate.

So make sure that you’re checking back in.

I recommend checking monthly, just stop in check, make sure that nothing’s gone wrong.

Especially if if there’s been a DNS 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, this configuration in the product to use the SAS software, this configuration your DNS that you or your team must do your provider can’t do it for you.

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 your comments in the comments below.

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