Since the start of the health crisis, we’ve all received tons of emails from companies talking about Covid-19, telecommuting, the slowdown in business activity, etc.
This massive volume of email sends has particularly saturated the messaging networks of internet service providers such as Orange, SFR, or La Poste.
The difference between ISPs and email clients
Indeed, you should not confuse email clients, whose primary mission is to provide access to a mailbox such as Yahoo or Gmail, with internet service providers (ISPs) such as Orange, whose primary mission is to provide access to the internet. Then comes the ability to provide access to online messaging.
The major difference between ISPs and email clients is therefore the amount of emails that a receiving server can receive.
For an email client like Gmail, it can receive an enormous number of emails at the same time. As a result, mass email sends to these inboxes will be less likely to be put into spam folders (of course, as long as you follow best practices for emailing.)
On the other hand, an ISP is much less inclined to receive such a huge volume of emails all at once.
Typically, it’s important to have a healthy database, but also to know your database in order to determine whether you have many ISP addresses.
If that’s the case, you’ll need to set up warm-up phases, which consist of sending emails to a small number of contacts and then increasing gradually, in order to accustom ISPs’ receiving servers to your IP address and your domain name to optimize the deliverability of your email sends.
This is even more true during the Covid-19 period because servers are overloaded. Thousands of companies are sending massive volumes of emails at the same time. On May 23, it was La Poste’s servers that went down due to the excessively high number of email sends.
Beware of the trap!
It’s important to maintain your relationship with your prospects and/or customers. But avoid making unnecessary mass email sends. This affects the reputation of your domain name.
Segment your database
To optimize the deliverability of your emails, sort your database. This will allow you to identify which of your contacts are active and which are inactive. Sometimes it can be worth re-engaging inactive contacts. But during this crisis period, it’s better for the moment to focus only on your active contacts. We consider contacts to be inactive if they haven’t opened emails in more than 6 months. You can also take into account contacts who have visited your website in the last 6 months, if your email marketing or marketing automation tool provides this information. This also allows you to remove NPAI addresses. The more up-to-date and active your database is, the better your deliverability will be.
Once your database is sorted, for sending your marketing emails (newsletter, marketing automation campaigns, etc.), you need to segment it so you can send the right message to the right person and, if possible, be as effective as possible at the right time and through the right channel (email, SMS, push notification, etc.)
By segmenting your database properly, you will inevitably improve the deliverability of your sends, and in addition you will be more relevant to your contacts.
Because it’s important not to forget that deliverability is not affected only by the quality of the database, but also by the behavior of contacts.
Indeed, if your open rates are very low, your reputation will be negatively impacted over the course of your sends. And conversely, the higher your email campaign open rates are, the better your deliverability. That’s why segmentation plays a very important role.
