Deliverability of Emails

The deliverability of email is mainly dependent of two factors:

1. Quality of address lists
2. Quality of email content

If either one of those factors is not up to par this will result in email bounces and/or complaints. Apart from a lower response rate this could even prevent you from being able to send out emails. This is determined by the Email Service Provider (ESP).

Email Bounce and Complaint thresholds

To facilitate your goal of reaching your desired audience Survalyzer works with the highly trusted ESP AWS. This means the following thresholds are in place.

Bounce Rate (hard bounces)

• Your bounce rate should remain below 5%. If your bounce rate exceeds 5% you will receive a warning.
• If your bounce rate exceeds 8% the ability to send emails will be disabled.

Complaint rate

• Your complaint rate should remain below 0.1%. If your complaint rate exceeds 0.1% you will receive a warning.
• If your complaint rate exceeds 0.4% the ability to send emails will be disabled.

Guidelines & best practices

To comply to industry standards and increase the chances of a successful response rate you should follow these guidelines:

1. Only use trusted data sources obtained through recent (double) opt-in for email distributions.
2. The email should contain a reminder why the recipient is receiving the message: “You signed up to get mail from [your organization] on [date]”
3. Invite only a (small) part of the address list first, then check whether the bounce & spam complaint are below the thresholds. Then proceed with inviting a larger number of respondents.
4. Messages should contain consistent branding. Your sending domain should align with the logos, links and textual descriptions in the email you send. See the AWS messaging and Targeting blog here.
5. You should only invite respondents who have signed up and specifically requested to receive email from you. Mail sent to recipients that have not explicitly requested it can be classified by mailbox providers and anti-spam organizations as unwanted sending.
6. If you’re sending email on behalf of a partner, be sure to clearly identify that the email is coming from the domain where the recipient signed up to receive email. If the email is not clearly branded and identifiable as being from the entity that the recipient signed up to get email from, recipients are likely to ignore your mail or mark it as spam.
7. Be careful with the frequency and time interval of invitations (high frequency/short time interval or low frequency / long time interval can trigger recipients to mark your invitations as spam).
8. Use positive subject lines.
9. Specify why the recipient receives the email.
10. Use a familiar sender name, “From” or “Reply-to” email address.
11. Do not use a noreply email address.
12. Make sure the link to the survey is working and do not use link shorteners.
13. Do not use CAPS LOCK, a red font, or a lot of exclamation marks (!)
14. Use a tools such as Blogiestools to scan the content of your message for ‘spam trigger words’ and replace highlighted words.
15. Send a test email using Mail Tester to determine the quality of the email.

Support

With Survalyzer NG customers receive responsive mail templates which follow best practices and implement GDPR requirements. With this step Survalyzer takes over the responsibility to provide solid templates which are tested and hardened. This will help you reduce the spam content to a great extent, especially when combined with the best practices mentioned above.

Survalyzer wants to support customers in the best way possible. Therefore, we established a cooperation with Neverbounce, the market leader for panel cleaning. In cooperation with Neverbounce, Survalyzer provides a full service to clean panels. In case you want an offer you simply have to send to us the panel name and we’ll get back to you.

Fair use policy

We have a fair use policy in place depending on your license type. Every license type is allowed to send at least 10.000 emails per month.

Survalyzer is entitled to block email sending when our scan detects abusive or low quality sending behavior (spam).

Please reach out to your account manager in case you want to know more about the fair use policy of your account.

Contact

If you are uncertain about what you should do, please get in touch with us. We are here to help you!