A tale of how hard work (eventually) pays off

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

When we are in a court of law, we are hopefully paying regards to the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.”

Well… when it comes to servers responding to your sending domains and IPs, it is quite the opposite. You must prove your domain to be worthy of delivering to your recipients without an existing precedent… sometimes before you can effectively deliver at all.

Now that the campaigning cycle is coming to another end, this is a great opportunity to work toward preparing your domains and IPs for the most success when the cycle begins picking up again. I think the most important take-away here is: PREPARE your sending domain BEFORE YOU NEED to send with it.

I want to take a few minutes to review how pre-emptively preparing your sending domains can be beneficial to you in months to come.

It takes TIME to scale your domain up to your full sending volume. By getting an early start you are able to avoid rushing the warming process, which could cause you to have blocks and trouble with deliverability.

Even after you’ve scaled to full sending volume, it takes TIME for a server to trust you. Servers are constantly watching how their recipients are engaging with your emails & designated a reputation to your domain/IP based off that response. The only way to continuously improve your reputation, especially on Google and similar servers, is for your audience to be consistently positively engaging with your emails. This means the same users repeatedly engaging with your emails, so sending to only new recipients constantly is actually very poor practice.

And it takes TIME for your audience to recognize and engage with your content. This is a great opportunity to focus less on ads and asks, and more on branding and informational content. It can be extremely valuable to produce very non-controversial content that includes little to no ‘call to actions.’ This type of content generally performs much better in the eyes of the server so it can help you to build your reputation up a bit so you have a buffer when you do want to send more hard-hitting content.

Many of the questions I regularly receive are concerning how quickly we can fully scale a domain & the truth is… there are so many things at play when you are preparing a new domain/IP for sending that the best thing you can do is get a head start. There are very few issues I’ve seen not be able to solved with a little time and persistence.

For more information be sure to contact our team for training or insight and visit your Nucleus Resource Library!

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By Julia, Deliverability Expert

Have you ever been put in a situation where you were at an event with some of the most sensitive people in the

world & you are just trying to get through the night without offending anyone in your conversational

encounters?

Literally, I hope you haven’t. BUT figuratively… this is actually a pretty good representation of your situation when you are sending emails to recipients and their affiliated servers.

Not only are the servers sensitive, but they are also all sensitive to different topics. For example, Google may hate talking about people dying, while Verizon may hate the mention of “BIG Tech.” It gets tricky to avoid offending ALL the servers. If your recipient list contains recipients from all email servers, you do not have to avoid offending one server but rather ALL the servers. 

Unless you’re “on the inside” & working with a server, it would be impossible to know and identify all the possible spam triggers in your copy and subject lines. 

Before you panic, there are a couple of tricks we can use to prevent the overuse of triggering phrases and words.

1. Almost EVERY server hates the act of “overpromising”

a. Avoid phrases like “100% guarantee” or “We promise you WILL NOT regret this!”

2. Do not be afraid to try the “nicer route”

a. This means using wording or phrases that implies a nicer connotation

i. For example, “passed away” sounds way better than “died tragically”

ii. “Weaponization” sounds a bit worse than “armed” or maybe “fortified”

One major point to be aware of is that the servers do not go through and read every email; instead, they have features in place set to look for triggering phrases and words. All this means is that, with a bit of creativity, we can avoid the brunt of censorship within these servers.

When you are choosing your subject line & content for emails, be sure to keep these tips in mind. While we are against the idea of censoring the important information that you are sharing, our email servers do not always feel the same. It isn’t fair, but until it is in our control, we will continue to work toward fully canceling the cancel culture.Please join us in achieving this goal!

For more information regarding contact our team!

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INBOX PLACEMENT VS. DELIVERABILITY

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

I’m sure you’ve wondered, at one point or another, what we are really monitoring during our domain warming phases.

Well, I’ll tell you…

The two main things we are watching while determining how quickly or slowly we can increase our sending volume is:

1. Deliverability
2. Inbox Placement

I am sure you’ve heard both of these terms used by our email team; let’s discuss what they are, why they are important, & how we can be tracking them.

The WHAT

Deliverability implies to the rate at which your sends are getting through to the server

Inbox placement refers to where your email lands – whether it lands in spam, your promotional inbox (‘other,’ ‘promotions,’ etc.), or your primary inbox.

The WHY

Deliverability is a key player in your email ‘delivering;’ it simply means the rate at which a server is allowing your messages through to the recipient. This does not ensure where the email will land within the inbox, just that the server did not fully block the message.

Inbox placement is, arguably, even more important because it determines where the email lands within the inbox. Since many of us are not regularly looking through our junk mailboxes, I think we can all agree the email will reach the most recipients when it is visible in the general inbox.

The HOW

When it comes to tracking your success with deliverability, we are looking at our deliverability rate. The closer the deliverability rate is to 100%, the better!

In terms of our inbox placement, we will be monitoring our open rate. While it can be impossible to precisely measure our inbox placement, a higher open rate means that more people are likely seeing the email, meaning it is more likely to be landing in our recipients’ general inbox

The graphic above shows us a couple of different servers & their deliverability and open rate. It is a great example of how our deliverability & inbox placement can reflect on each server differently.

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

At Nucleus, we understand that it can be hard to put a schedule on hard-hitting news. But, did you know that utilizing consistency in your email practices can actually help to improve your sender reputation?

The WHY:

By remaining uniform in certain areas of your email sending, you allow yourself to become more recognizable to both the recipients & the server. This makes it much more likely for recipients to remain engaged in your email content.

The HOW:

Some ways we can apply this method are as follows: