“Before Black Friday 2018, everything was fine. And then… 2 months of sleepless nights, looking for solutions and testing hypotheses.” Email Marketer told us how to save a mailing list with a million subscribers, which ended up in spam for technical reasons.
Hi, I'm Vanya, DreamTeam email marketer. I’ll tell you how, after Black Friday, I got a mailing list with a millionth base from spam.
It all started with this:
Screenshot from Google Postmaster. Since the end of November, the reputation of IP has collapsed and all letters began to fall into spam
The same thing happened with domain reputation
I’ll tell you why all this happened and how we solved the problem.
Introduction about the company
is an international gaming platform. Hundreds of thousands of gamers find partners for teams here (for example, in CS:GO or Apex Legends), develop their gaming skills and earn money on eSports.
- Geography: world. To be more precise: Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, CIS.
- Base: ≈ 1 subscribers.
- Field: cybersport.
- For mailings, we use 3 services, 4 IP addresses, 2 main domains and 2 subdomains.
Why so many services and IP addresses
All services and domains are needed for different purposes:
- We use one mailing service for content and trigger emails. We send via 2 subdomains and a common IP address.
- The second service is used for transactional and service letters. We send via a separate domain and a dedicated IP address.
- We use the third service for mailing about cryptocurrency to a warm base. Email provider filters don't like this topic very much and often send cryptocurrency emails to spam. But everything is in order with our mailing lists: the base was collected through the subscription form, and in letters there is an opportunity to unsubscribe. A separate service and IP address are needed for safety net.
Newsletter types
We send 4 types of mailings:
- Content mailings about games. For example, platform updates and news from the world of eSports
- Trigger emails. Trigger example: the user has not logged into the platform for a month, we send him an email with a reminder about us.
- Transactional emails: payments, order statuses, etc.
- Content emails about cryptocurrencies. Reports on what work we have done, where and what publications about our cryptocurrency were.
Sample letter
In November 2018, we fell into spam on all fronts
First content and trigger subdomains and IP
We spent Black Friday aggressively: we sent 7 mailings to the entire database. We sent an offer to buy our premium subscription at a big discount. Everywhere the same sentence, but in different words. Plus, they said how much time was left until the end of the action.
The subdomain and IP were warmed up - their reputation did not suffer much:
There was a high reputation, it became average. Not critical
Immediately after Black Friday, I decided to connect a new series of triggers. We used a shared IP with a subdomain for content mailings.
In the mailing service (I must say right away, not UniSender), subscribers were in different lists. Within each of these lists, you can create segments (for example, by country of residence). I selected the desired segment and added it to the automation. But due to a technical failure, all the contacts from the list got there. We sent 20 times more emails than we should have.
I contacted tech support and the issue was resolved. But the letters have already gone, and this is reflected in the reputation:
Domain and IP reputation dropped to very low
The technical support of the service just solved the problem. What happened was not explained.
Cryptocurrency emails were next in spam
I'll start right away with a screenshot of the IP reputation:
The reputation of mailing lists and cryptocurrency dropped to very low at the end of November
Reputation deteriorated on December 1st. But everything is simple here - we bought 2 dedicated IP addresses and, as it turned out, our mailing service did not warm them up (or warmed them up poorly).
Service and transactional emails were the last to fall.
In mid-December, Google simply decided that our domain was spamming a lot. This is noticeable in the sharp decline in open rates:
The open rate of service and transactional emails fell by more than 2 times
And yet, the reputation of the domain and IP was at an excellent level.
Mailings got into spam despite the excellent reputation of the domain and IP
How did you decide and how much time did you spend on it?
Let's go from simple to complex.
Transactional and service emails
Didn't do anything. Seriously, just waiting. As a result, after 2 weeks, the open rates leveled off and everything became good again. Written off on the "quirks" of Google.
Cryptocurrency newsletters
They warmed up a new IP address, sending letters only to a warm audience. As a result, already the second mailing from the new IP-address gave a high open rate.
Results in UniSender. Already the second mailing from the new IP gave 41% of opens
The warm audience in our case is investors. They invested their money in our project, so they are happy to read our reports in letters.
How they warmed up IP. I increased the number of emails sent by 10% daily, starting from 2000. This method is described in detail in my on the UniSender blog. In short, I will highlight 3 ways to warm up: safe and slow, fast and risky, and medium in speed and risk. This method is safe.
Triggers and content mailings
Here they wanted to connect a specialist, and buy a new IP address with a new subdomain, but ...
The solution turned out to be simple - it was necessary to warm up the old subdomains and IP address. I had a hypothesis that it might work, and it did. We warmed up subdomains and IP in the same safe way.
As a result, we took all users who opened at least 1 of the Black Friday emails and conducted 2 content mailings. The first newsletter left the subdomain for content, the other one left the subdomain for triggers.
After these 2 mailings, we got a high reputation for subdomains and IP addresses. We reached the previous volumes and continued sending out.
Through warming up, the reputation of IP gradually improved
The same thing happened with domain reputation
This is what happens if you send too many letters to the database. But even this seemingly hopeless situation was resolved.
From this whole situation, I made 3 conclusions.
Test triggers. Before launching new automatic triggers (for example, segmentation by country, as in my example), it was necessary to test the number of people to whom they would be sent. To do this, it was necessary to add the parameter “wait 1 day (maybe a little less)” in automation, see how many people get into automation, and then either connect letters or report a bug.
Send only from a warm IP. You should always check whether the purchased IP address from the provider is really warmed up. If not, warm it up yourself. More about it и .
Gmail is sometimes naughty. Maybe just lower the reputation of your domain and IP below the plinth. If you know for sure that you are not a spammer (your emails have decent open rates) and if even with a falling reputation your subscribers continue to read your emails, then just wait a couple of weeks and your reputation will be restored. But during this period it is better not to increase the volume of mailings.
Source: habr.com