Four best practices to ensure your email correspondences to constituents make it to their inboxes by maintaining compliance with deliverability requirements.
Email providers are constantly making changes to protect their users from spam messages. Just this year, Google and Yahoo! started requiring bulk email senders to offer an option to unsubscribe from email lists with one click. That applies to any group that sends 5,000 or more emails a day. These kinds of changes can complicate the process for senders, but it’s a necessary step as nefarious actors are also evolving and becoming more sophisticated. But there is good news for legitimate email senders like you; there are several best practices and standards that can make sure your email is not mistakenly blocked or flagged as spam.
Warm It Up
One of the simplest and most important steps in establishing your IP address as a trusted source of email correspondence is “warming it up.” It’s the process of gradually increasing the volume of mail sent on a predetermined schedule. It helps you maintain and grow your IP address’ reputation over time to gain trust, allowing you to send out a mass email campaign to a much larger distribution list down the road.
Honor Opt-Outs
Ideally, opt-outs of your outreach list would be few and far between, but it is critical to honor any opt-out requests to retain status as a trusted sender. Honoring an individual’s decision to no longer receive your emails is also an important part of maintaining trust with the public. Gaining and maintaining that trust can even lead to getting someone to opt back in sometime in the future.
Through IQ, opt-outs are easily handled. There’s no need to remove any contacts from your database. Instead, it’s a simple process to exclude people flagged as opt-outs when creating your next piece of outreach.
Use Surveys
IQ can also be used to create surveys that automate the process of managing opt-outs. A simple one-click button within a newsletter allows users to change their email preferences. Surveys can also help users manage other email preferences with your office, including to opt-in to other forms of communication. If you have different types of outreach like multiple types of newsletters, different content themes from different writers, or SMS, IQ surveys can be used to prompt people to opt-in to the other outreach options they are interested in receiving.
Leverage IQ
IQ can be leveraged to manage non-deliverables that you may come across as your outreach strategy evolves. Email delivery to non-deliverable addresses is another major characteristic security organizations look for when identifying possible spammers. Through IQ, you can easily see when the email you send has been delivered to an inactive inbox and then remove that email from your system.
Each of these best practices can be executed within the IQ system, without the need for outside reputation management programs, making the process of protecting your “safe sender” status seamless and efficient.
Pro tip: If you’re still unsure of how to guarantee your office is a “safe sender,” get in touch with an IQ consultant. Our team of experts can help set up and configure your DNS, SPF, and DKIM to authenticate email coming out of IQ.
