Name: Optimizing your email strategy for 2025
Uploaded: 2025-02-05T18:16:04.706Z
Duration: 1 h 40 s
Description: Optimizing your email strategy for 2025

Transcript for "Optimizing your email strategy for 2025": Good morning, everyone in the world. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, and good night. My name is Thomas t. Birkinier, the one, the only, the rest are imitators. Ladies and gentlemen, I am super happy to bring you today another Mailgun webinar, ladies and gentlemen. Super excited. I have two individuals today that have literally taught me the world of deliverability. I've been in email for almost eight years now, and these two folks have literally taught me everything I know. So I'm super grateful to have them here. Very excited. We are talking about optimizing your email strategy in 2025. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. It is 2025. I'm still getting used to that. I keep writing 2024, but I'm I'm getting better at writing 2025. So ladies and gentlemen, let's see really quick. Where is everyone in the world right now? Let's see in the chat. We see Atlanta, Georgia from India, Cologne, Germany, SoCal, Milwaukee. Good to see you. Good to see you. Alright. And let's get our two guests going here. Ladies and gentlemen, Nick Schafer, our senior manager, deliverability and compliance. Nick, how are you today? I'm doing good. Thanks for the intro. And I man, I've been on a lot of webinars with you, and I love your intros each and every time. So thanks thanks again for having me. Of course, Nick. Of course. And, ladies and gentlemen, Kate Neruzzi, our vice president of deliverability and product strategy. Kate, how are you doing today? Good to see you. Good to see you too as well. I would love to know what you have for breakfast because this I'm gonna have that tomorrow morning. Thank you so much for the kind intro. Super excited to be here. Nick and I have been collaborating for many, many years, maybe ten ten, fifteen years. And I have had the pleasure of knowing, Thomas Tibur since I joined Mailgun about seven years ago now. Yeah. Six. Yeah. Long time. And, yes, I have a a large cup of very hot green tea every morning, so that is what gets me going. So to to answer anyone's questions. Okay. Exactly. Exactly. Ladies and gentlemen, just to answer some real quick questions. Yes. So if you're asking about the replay, this replay will be available immediately after this webinar is done. You can either come back to this page, give it a refresh. It will take some time for it to kind of reprocess and get that going. So you can either come back to this page. Two, you can either go to youtube.com and go to our mail gun page. We'll also have the webinar uploaded, today as well so you can take a look. So just giving you house some housekeeping ideas. Also, for the q and a, please throw those questions in our q and a tab. It should be on the right hand side of the Goldcast platform. So make sure you throw those in there, and please upvote the ones that you want us to answer towards the end, and, we'll make sure we tackle those as much as we can. So, ladies and gentlemen, back to the topic that we were talking about, optimizing your email strategy in 2025. These are tips coming from our 2025 state of email delivery delivery report that just came out recently. We're super happy about it. I believe Casey was able to throw that in here earlier. Let me go ahead and see if I can pin that. Let me see. It was up here. Kinda go through all these amazing messages from all the people that are, in here with us today. And big shout out to go ahead. The chat is blowing up. I I do see a lot of people picking, picking a side of, Eagles or Chiefs for the big game, coming up. Oh, man. I wanted the Bills. I wanted the Bills, but that was that was painful. Oh, goodness. Also, a quick shout out to our, some of our our reps in here, our reps in the millions. Like, Casey thrown in some blog posts and stuff like that. Keep an eye out for that in the chat. Also, our support agents, Jesus and Amber, helping, answer some even more technical questions in the q and a, so big shout out to them. So, ladies and gentlemen, before we get going into this, I wanted to kinda get a feel for the room, our viewership y'all. How's everyone doing in this year of 2025 in your state of deliverability? So I'm gonna throw this poll out here in just a moment. And the question is, what are your deliverability challenges for the year? Are you feeling authentication issues, bouncing compliant rates, list hygiene quality, you know, general reputation issues, lack of expertise? Other? Go ahead and give us a vote. Just wanna get a a feel for the room, how to see how everyone's feeling. Yeah. I'll put it up here on the channel. Let's see. List hygiene quality. List hygiene quality and general reputation issues are are leading the way right now. Oh, bounce complaint rates. Okay. Me personally, I the the list hygiene data quality side is something that I I see some senders could, definitely use some improvement on from time to time. General reputation issues. Absolutely. And shout out to people that are saying there's no option for all. Yeah. We totally get it. That's that's why we're glad you're here. We're glad you're here with us. Okay. Okay. A lot of votes. Thanks everyone for participating. I'll leave that open for just a little bit longer. Let me go ahead and stop sharing that. But alright. Let's get into the meat and potatoes of this presentation. So really quick, I wanna go over the agenda, what we're gonna be talking about today. First and foremost, step number one, we're talking about deliverability versus delivery, why they both matter. Number two, top five reasons you are landing in the spam folder. Number three, security best practices to protect your brand and customers. And number four, the most important email metrics for 2025. Alright. Alright. Let's get moving, shall we? So first and foremost, delivery versus deliverability. Okay. So, Nick, Kate, what's the difference between delivery versus deliverability? And it's not just two letters marketers love, a and b. What do you think? I love this question, and I love continuing to talk about this question after all of these years. It's something that still comes up a lot. Yeah. I mean, deliver everyone everyone talks about deliverability. Right? It's something that, is is a hot topic each and every year. But sometimes I think senders forget about that first piece, the delivery piece. You know, your your first step is to get your messages delivered. Right? And and if you're not even getting a chance of getting that message in the inbox and you're you're failing already, deliverability obviously comes into play when we're talking about, okay, the message is delivered. It's handed off to the recipient, server. Where is it gonna be placed? Is it gonna be placed in the spam folder? Is it gonna be placed in the inbox? That's where, you know, deliverability comes into play. Yes. You should absolutely focus on getting as many, messages delivered to the inbox. But, you know, if you if you miss out on reaming those logs, like, maybe, some bounces are occurring that you weren't aware of, it's really important to first make sure you get those messages delivered. I usually like to use this example because as Nick mentioned, after all of these years, we keep hearing this, especially with the marketers. When we are talking about how to improve their inbox rate, they keep saying, oh, but our deliverability rate is at 98%. It seems that we are landing at all the ISPs. And what is my next question always is that, how would you know that out of that 98%, all of your emails went to the inbox? So I refer to delivery versus deliverability, science versus art. By the science, I mean, the infrastructure, making sure that you have all authentications in place and doing all that using the right platform, like, right infrastructure to send email to the ISPs. So the first part is the emails need to be accepted. So if you're sending hundred emails and 99 per 99 of them is being accepted, the next question is where did they land? If they land in the inbox, it means it can't start your deliverability. If they land in the spam folder, that's a missed opportunity because most of the people don't check their spam folder. Even I I have a background. Half of my career, I work at an anti spam operations at at AOL and Verizon, and we that ISPs have that knowledge. Senders don't. And one of the things that they can do is to maybe use c testing, monitor their open rates. There are lots of things that we are going to cover during this, during this webinar, but I would like to think about delivery as a science, deliverability as the art, the art of getting into the inbox. That's the piece that a sender pours into the campaign. Is it relevant? Are we targeting the right audience? And if that lands into the inbox, that is going to be counting towards the success of a campaign. Yeah. And I I wanted to follow-up. Those are all really good points, Kate. But, like, the the, the report that Casey shared and Thomas just mentioned, like, let's let's really in 2026, like, let's try to drop this down because we're at 88%, I believe, looking at these numbers. There there's a key difference between them. Let's make sure we understand, those differences and, you know, set ourselves up for the the most success possible. And I actually saw a question come in, and and this is a perfect opportunity to to address it. We talked about, you know, where that messages goes, inbox, spam folder. There are other folders. Promotions folder. I know that's a hot one that comes up all the time. Promotions folder is the inbox. If your messages are going there and you don't want them to end up there, well, then relook at the message. Are you doing anything that could be identified as promotional? And and just take a a good hard look because that that main primary inbox is meant for direct person to person communication. So I know that's always something that comes up, but I I I wanted to answer it when I I just saw it. So Yeah. So true. So true. We see that so much these days. In the last few years, it's been like, okay. Yeah. What do I need to do to to not get in the the promo box? It's like, well, it's still the inbox, but, yes, establish and and evaluate. Are you doing something that is, you know, considered promotional? Maybe you need to work on your verbiage and subject lines from there. But, one little, one little statistic that we noticed from the, the state of email deliverability report, and it was, in total, nearly 88% of senders couldn't correctly identify what the delivery rate measures. So that was an interesting number that we have noticed. Any comments on that? Yeah. That that I I I would think that there is a large portion of the senders that they don't realize how important it is to land in the inbox, and the numbers of accepted is not a reflection. It is good to have a high accepted rate, not outright gets rejected. But what is not good and sadly not being monitored is the amount of emails going to the spam folder. And there are so many tools such as seed testing, that you can include in each and every campaign to see where are you landing. So that's one of the, tools that the the senders can use in order to measure, their spam complaint. Oh, and also monitoring the spam complaints, of course. Because if you have high spam complaints and you don't do anything about it, then you are increasing the chances of going to the inbox in future campaigns. Got it. Got it. Alright. Now moving on through here. Top five reasons you're landing in the spam folder. Alright. So from the top, portless collection and hygiene practices. You too. How are we feeling on these? This is this is my favorite one. Like, data is king in my mind, and you have to make sure that you are capturing really good information about your your potential customers. You know, obviously, you're you always wanna get consent permission to send, to your end users. One of the things, especially on the second point, keep invalid and high risk addresses off your list and check regularly, how you spam traps. This happens. I see it all the time. Bots are out there. They sign up on on forms that aren't protected. If you don't if you leave that stuff unchecked, you you could, be putting your the the data quality, of your list at at risk. It definitely happens. So anytime you can, you know, add something like, you know, validation on on top of those sign up forms, you're you're setting yourself up for for better success. Because the last thing you wanna do is, you know, spend all this time working on a campaign, building it out perfectly, you know, nailing the design, and then you're sending to a bunch of people that aren't going to, do anything with it because they didn't actually sign up. So really paying attention, to that piece is is really important. And, you know, engagement is something that comes into play. You can have a a large list, but, if those customers, those recipients aren't engaging with the list, you should you should think twice about sending them at the same frequency. You know, one of the one of the pieces of our validation services is engagement validation. It'll tell you, is this an engaging user or not? That's that's very valuable information that that you should be using, when you're just trying to kind of maintain the quality and hygiene of of the list that you're you're sending to. Then, yeah, test whatever you can with with your campaigns. Kate, what are your thoughts? I always say, bigger is not necessarily better, and that is definitely applies here because, a lot of marketers think that they'll the the better the longer, bigger list is always better. They have it is always a battle between deliverability people and marketing people in order to convince them to target the most engaged. Because they are gonna say, oh, we I have a million email addresses in my database. If I only look at the engaged, that would only be 200 k. So if I don't send email to those 800 k, that's the lost revenue, that is exactly the problem. Because those 800 k inactive users or unengaged users are the ones that pulling down the reputation of the IP and the domain or the subdomains in the, within the ISP's algorithms. And one thing that I wanna make sure that, people who switch platforms keep in mind is to make sure you take your suppression list with you. Because if people complained and they didn't wanna hear from you or they bounce at some point and you have that stored in your suppression list, when you start, when you move to a new platform, you should not be just starting from the like, from zero. You should have that. Otherwise, the warming up your IPs and your new domains is not going to be as successful. There are tools in the market that you can run, in order to see or did they did they score the the quality of the list? So for example, at Mailgun, I think they have verification tool that when you run a list, let's say, of a million email addresses, given we are sending to billions of customers every day, we have visibility into whether or not an email address is engaged. So there are two parts. One part is whether or not the email is formatted properly. Does it have the at sign? Does it have so that's an easy part. The the challenging part is to to know whether or not this is a good email. It could be a trap. If there is no engagement, it could very, very possibly be a trap email address. And all of these ISPs, they have a trap network. If you hit a certain number of traps, they are going to either spam folder your future traffic or block the IP outright. So it depends on Microsoft SNDs is the only platform that shows the the trap hits. Other ISPs, they do not yet. They may do that in future. I heard I think, AOL and Yahoo may go that way. But, the best the best person to to to determine whether or not the emails are valid or not is the sender. If you organically collect your emails from the people who would like to hear from you, not buying a list, not renting a list, none of those has played. They don't even work short time anymore. So my recommendation is definitely focus on the quality of your list. If you have an old list, for example, I have one customer that says, oh, we have a a billion email addresses in our database. We are only using 200,000,000. And they they ran out of the email verification, tool, and they found out about, like, half of that list has not had any opens or clicks in twelve months. So, data is king as Nick mentioned, but a good quality data, not like the longer list is not going to help your revenue. So Yeah. I think one more call out that I didn't mention out. I don't think you did either because I I get it. Like, you know, we we said it. Right? Less is more. But that's hard for marketing people to stomach. Like, you have built this this large list. What we're saying is not that you can't send to the less engaged users. It's just determining frequencies. Everyone is different. We all are, you know, creatures of habit. Maybe someone really loves getting those messages. Yes. Absolutely. Send those messages, to those users all day every day if that's what they want. But it's just about segmenting and bucketing those. Sunset policies are something I think all centers should should incorporate. You know, and it it's all it one shoe doesn't fit everyone. You know, it it it's based off of how often you send, what is your frequency as a sender, what do your customers expect. So there's not one, like, bulletproof say, you know, user hasn't engaged in, six months. Like, you need to remove them or send to them less. It it doesn't work across the spectrum because there are just so many variables that come into play. Yeah. Nick Nick touched on the very good point as sunset policies. I would really go with ninety days engagement. I used to say twelve months, and now I have lowered my window to literally, like, ninety days. If someone is not opening or clicking, put them in a different bucket as Nick mentioned. Another thing that I wanna mention before we move on to the next topic is a lot of customers by law, whatever that law is, which is very annoying, they are required to send a privacy policy emails across all the emails that they have ever had in their system. And they come to me and they say, hey. We know half of these emails are inactive. We know that they are not even good, but we are required by law to send a privacy policy updates. What should we do? My recommendation is set up a few IPs, maybe two or four IPs for these kind of exercises that you do once a year, and create a different subdomain. So make sure they are not in any way or shape mixed in with your daily transactional emails. Have a different IPs set for these one off campaigns that actually, those are not a bad exercise. If you look at the bounce rate, you probably should be updating your suppression list. They are actually another way of validating whether or not emails are active. So I highly recommend the privacy policy emails are not being sent even if required by law, not from the same exact IPs that you daily use. Love it. Tons of good takeaways from there, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. Nick used to tell me all the time, you know, use the data right, but use it, you know, correctly. And even sunset policies, use those tons of times, tons of so lots of good stuff there. Lots of good stuff. And from Kate too as well. Please take that suppression list with you wherever you go if you're transferring different platforms. That stuff is gonna follow you, so please remember that. Alright. Moving down the line here. Okay. So authentication policies. Oh, our favorite three, SPF, DECOM, and DMARC. Kate, Nick, how are you feeling about these? I I think that SPF and DMARC, everyone should be doing already. So, I really would like to talk about DMARC here. I don't know Kate's Kate's opinion on this, but, like, that's where that's where everything's going. Obviously, you know, Yahoo announcements, things of that nature, DMARC policies are required. Everyone got it set up. Not everyone. I mean, you can look at the report numbers right there. It's it's definitely there's more adoption. Things are going in the right direction. But my point here is that we we shouldn't stop at, you know, p equals none. I know that was the requirements that that came down. So everyone sending over x amount of volume needs to have this DMARC policy in place, but none is okay. And and whenever I say none, it's a policy within, the DMARC record, basically telling mailbox providers what to do if, DMARC fails. I can see it coming down the road. I'm not gonna give any dates because no one knows any dates, but just, I don't know, be if you if you have some time, take a look at, you know, those DeepMark reports that you should be getting and and do the needful in terms of getting yourself set up to move to, you know, that next step, whether it's, p equals quarantine or a p equals reject policy. That is something that everyone should be focusing on. It's cool to see the adoption. I'm glad that, you know, Yahoo and Google came out, with that, because it's something that, you know, there hasn't been a lot of adoption over the years. Now it's it's it's going in the right direction, so it's good to see. But SPF and DECOM, like I said, we we all got that set up. I mean, you should be you should be good on that. One note on that, though, is things happen. DNS records may get updated without you knowing. Just make sure you're monitoring logs, errors. There's third party tools that you can use to make sure that, you're not you know, have something misconfigured and messages being deferred or or rate limited. Yeah. So I I just wanna touch on, like because DMARC may sound very scary to the marketers. So I'm gonna just go very simplify the the three authentication protocols that we have on the screen here. So the SPF is basically your it it's it validates the IP address that this is the email is being sent from. Let's say if it is from Groupon, that IP is indeed coming from the traffic is coming from Groupon. DKIM, is an authentication method for for confirming the domain that is the traffic is being sent. DMARC is a policy. It is an authentication policy, but it's mainly designed in a way to tell the ISPs what to do with a piece of email if it fails SPF or DKIM. So imagine if SPF and DKIM are here, they work hand to hand. And by the way, I think most of the platform these days are automatically signing with SPF and DKIM. I know it for a fact that any in piece of email that leaves the mail gone platform is authenticated with both SPF and DKIM. So if we have SPF here, we have DKIM here, SPF for the IP, DKIM for the domain, DMARC comes and sits on top and looks at both. So, basically, DMARC is the power a sender has in order to define what an ISP needs to do in order if one of the this protocol fails, if SPF fails or Deakin fails. So if I am a sender, I have the opportunity of applying three policies to the DMARC. The first policy is p equal to none, meaning only send me the report if I fail DMARC, if I fail DKIMRIS The second policy is p equal to quarantine, Meaning, if I fail one of the authentication policies, if my traffic is failing, we are telling the ISPs to put it into the quarantine, quarantine the traffic, spam folder rate. The third policy, which is my favorite, and I know it is Nick's favorite as well because we always talk about this and we are always thinking about even having the the t shirt that says p equals to reject. The reject policy is the most effective policy because you are telling the ISPs, if I fail authentications method, SPF or DKIM, reject my traffic. Don't even put it in the spam folder. Imagine if you are a financial organization and that email goes to the spam folder and you see it there and you might click. So it doesn't even matter if you're a financial organization, any organization. If you are a victim of a, like, a, like, a phishing attack, your customers are gonna leave you. So it's extremely important. When you have SPF and D became configured, make sure you have a policy of a DMARC record. Start with p equal nine only for a week or month in order to get used to the, like, ins and outs on the reports, move to quarantine, and to reject within ninety days. That's all for me. Just get there to p equals reject. That's the goal. Yeah. Just get there. Find a way. Speaking of finding a way, ladies and gentlemen, if you are a user of Mailgun, I just wanna give you a little, heads up. We've got a cool little, implementation that's gonna be helping you out pretty soon for DMARC. And, yes, this is for Mailgun users, but that's all I can say. So keep an eye out in your blog, our blog post at mailgun.com, and, you'll see a little announcement about that pretty soon. So just a little heads up. Just a little teaser. But okay. Moving down the line here on authentication policies. Okay. Three, broken email design. Oh, and my favorite article, RFC eighty fifty eight. Nick and Kate, what do you got for us? You wanna go first on this one, Kate? Sure. So this this was one of the requirements that came from the Yahoo Google announcements, but, honestly, it was around. It has been having an unsubscribe button has been a good practice or the best practice for many, many years. I always am fascinated to see when Yahoo announcement, Google announcement came in, and everybody was like, oh, we have to Google. What is this? I see. No. You were supposed to do this all the time. This is nothing new. The easy unsubscribe is the best practice. I was actually looking at Mac, the the cosmetic company that they had sent me an email. Number one, I don't remember I ever signed for their, emails. But the another thing that was very confusing to me was when I tried to unsubscribe, it didn't it took me to a website and asked me to create an account. I never even had an account. So, basically, your unsubscribe should be one click. You shouldn't take people to the website. You shouldn't be, I mean, asking them questions or say, hey. You wanna leave this? You wanna no. One and done. If people find it difficult to unsubscribe, you know what they do? They report a spam. Then you then they report a spam, then your reputation is gonna go down. So, Nick, you wanna add anything to them on one click on I actually I actually mentioned something on this this earlier when I was talking about something unrelated, but it apparently is all related. You don't wanna waste your time building the perfect email that you think, you know, checks all the boxes. You spend a lot of time designing it, and then you forget, like, little things, like, you know, RFC eighty fifty eight. Like, you forget to do that. You forget to test, your emails across, like, different browsers, and, you forget to test inbox placement. Like, these things, like, you you can do all of the the good work, but all of it could be for nothing if if there's something broken in the email and and you didn't catch it before you actually sent that out, to your end users. So it's really important to do that, you know, final check before you're about to, you know, send out your campaigns. Make sure everything looks good, everything's displaying properly. And, yeah, run some inbox placement tests to make sure that your reputation is where it needs to to go. Because if you if you're sending out, you know, a large campaign to all of the customers that want your traffic, but, you know, something happened and your messages are are getting to the going to the spam folder, then, like, what's the point? You just missed that opportunity. So check it before you do those, you know, live live, since. Yeah. It's it's a really important piece that I think could be easily overlooked. Yes. And and, unsubscribe policies too, especially, like, I see an email in my inbox and I wanna unsubscribe from them. I should be able to just click and be gone from the list right away. And then all of a sudden you get an email in your inbox, Oh, are you sure you wanna unsubscribe to y'all? Don't do that. Don't do that. To to Kate's point to Kate's point, like, senders need to understand this. If it's not easy to unsubscribe, they will complain. And the reason why you should care about that is that is, like, the number one negative signal that mailbox providers are looking for to make informed decisions on what they should do with traffic from a sender. You do not want complaints at all. Yeah. Yeah. So make sure they can It's not yeah. Because it's not that people don't have any other option. Like, report this time is right there, and it's done in a second. So yeah. It's are you sure? Yes. I'm sure. I don't want this anymore. And people change their mind. You might as well signed up for something, you know. I used to shop in the app, and I love to hear from them. And then I don't. And then they should honor. I mean, you know, people change their mind. Exactly. And that's why we talk about a ninety day sunset policy, ladies and gentlemen. Ninety days. Ninety days. Six days. Exactly. A ten day. Exactly. Alright. Moving down the line here. Up next, poor setting practices, and this is involving the the CCPA, GDPR, and CAN SPAM Act. Nick, Kate, how are we feeling? Yeah. You wanna make sure you're following all regulations, depending on what you're sending. That that is kind of, like, one of those those those first checklist that you should make sure you're you're following. But just in general, like, sending practices, I think we've probably all read, if not most of us have read, you know, all of the articles and information whether it's on, you know, the Malgon blog or elsewhere. There's a lot of articles. There's a lot of information on email sending best practices. You need to be making sure that you're you're monitoring this stuff. Like, what what are you doing, to ensure your your traffic is getting to the people that want to receive them? You know, regularly monitor, complaints and reputation KPIs, in Google Postmaster tools, Microsoft SNDS. You'll see that listed there. Segmenting and personalized. We've actually touched on it, quite a bit already, in this webinar. It's so important. It is really important. You should not treat everyone the same. All of your end users have have different habits. They enjoy different things. They don't all wanna get bombarded by emails. Although there may be a select group of, you know, recipients that do really want to see those messages, like, every day, but not everyone, you know, kinda fits into that. So yeah. Be mindful of it's in frequency. Yeah. I think it is very, valuable if you can provide a preference, preference, set and free so people can say, hey. I would like to hear once a week or every day or once a month. If people can can tell you as a brand if there is a place that they can go and modify their frequency or expectations, that would be really beneficial for for your brand. Another thing I wanted to touch on yeah. And then as far as, like, being being mindful about the frequency, you can have different buckets for, let's say, most engaged users based on their like, if they're opening clicking or not just open, open and click on your your, e campaigns, they can be placed in the active bucket, then you can have a middle bucket. Those are the people who with with opens, like, let's say, once a month, and the third bucket zero to ninety days. And your fourth bucket basically should be something that you rarely you can do reengagement campaigns for the people who have not been engaged with your brand over ninety days, but do not do it as we mentioned from the same IPs. You have to have a separate IP and domain for for those kind of reengagement or some whatever, privacy policy traffics. And, so, yeah, different behavior. You need to treat an email address as a person. Imagine how intrusive it could be if someone doesn't wanna hear from you and you keep knocking at their door every single day. You don't wanna be annoying. So that's very important to respect the inbox and treat it as a person. %. And you both always taught me to, like, always engage with people that want to have your email or to receive your email. Because like you said, that's a person on the on the other end of that computer screen or or phone or whatever, but it's like you're in you're invading people's privacies at the end of the day. But one thing we were we were noticing in the report is, you know, we found seventy percent of senders, survey are not using Google PostMaster tools or any other, mailbox provider services like Microsoft SNDS or Yahoo Sender Hub. So, ladies and gentlemen, you've got a ton of tools out there to help you, you know, with your sending practices no matter what. So check them out. Use them. Utilize them. We utilize them every day here at Mailgun and and Mailjet. So, yeah, check those out. Yeah. That's a that's a huge miss. Whenever I was reading the report, that one kinda struck me as, oh, man. That's sad because that is it's it's golden information that that you can be using to, you know, further improve your your campaigns. Yes. You can look at all of the metrics, you know, opens, clicks, whatever you have internally. You can look at that, but you wanna see how you're being perceived. What does Google tell you? What does Google tell you? It's it's it might be different than what your your data is telling you. So check all of the outlets you have. Absolutely. I can't be agree more. I mean, actually, this number was very worrisome when I looked at it. Knowing 70% of the senders do not use, Google Postmaster or SNDS, That's a very, very high number, and it's not difficult. Like, these like, Google Postmaster dashboard is very, very easy to read. So don't assume, oh, I'm a marketer. I'm not technical. You don't even need to be technical to looking at any of these dashboards. It shows, like, Google color codes their reputation. Like, if you are in red, it's bad, then there is an orange, and then there's a green. You can see the time frames. Oh, I was green, and then there is a dip here in February. Then you can go take that data, what campaigns you did that caused the dip, and people probably reported the spam or they didn't open or whatever. So use those. Those are free platforms. Google, by average, over 65% of the traffic on the Internet is now Google or Google hosted domains. So Google alone can give you they also can can report on authentication. Mhmm. Google shows you if you're passing on SPF team. So there is not it's not just reputation. There's a ton of good information at, through these Google Postmaster, s n Microsoft SNDS, and Yahoo Center Hub. All of these, my my favorite one is GPT, Google PostMaster, not chat GPT. This is something else. Love it. Love it. Alright. Okay. Moving on. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, last last note on that. Yeah. Someone was saying in there, I've never heard of Google Postmaster tools. Yes. Google it. Check it out. Use these tools. They're great. Okay. Moving on, shall we? Alright. Bad architecture. Oh, lordy lordy. Dedicated IP versus shared IP. One of the questions I used to get all the time, kinda going through, and and and answering questions for our our viewerships and stuff like that. Nick, Kate, how do we feel about those? You know, you say that's your favorite question. I like to follow it up with my favorite question or response in the email industry, and it it is it depends, because that is how we answer. I don't like to, but 90% of the questions. It really depends. There's so many variables at play. Should you use a dedicated IP, or should you use a a shared IP? It it's a it's a good question that everyone wants to know. But it it it's based off of needs. Maybe you don't send a lot of traffic and you can't, you know, build the reputation of of your own dedicated IP. That's fine. That's what kinda shared IPs are for. The problem is that if you're if you are sending enough volume and you're using a shared IP, you're exposing yourself to risk that is is not your own. You could be impacted by other senders on the shared, IP. At at Melvin, we try to make sure our customers are doing the right thing, but sometimes, you know, bad traffic gets out, and it could impact, you know, that traffic on a shared IP. Segmenting is is another really important piece. Like, you should not be sending your transactional messages on the same stream or same IP as, your marketing messages. You know? People wanna reset their password, but say you had a marketing campaign that didn't do too well, and your reputation drops, now people can't reset their passwords. What what are they gonna do then? They don't. Most people do not go check their spam folder. That's just a reality of of how you know, we talked about a second ago. Respect the people's inbox. Like, that that's their that's their place, and a lot of stuff that gets put into the spam folder is stuff they don't wanna see, and they know that. So, yeah, make sure you you do all kinds of segmentation. You can look at it right here. This is all three different types of segmentation. I think Kate mentioned subdomain, segmentation earlier in the webinar. Separate those streams as much as possible to isolate reputation. There's there's a lot of a lot of good things that you can do there, and if you're putting it all on on the same pipeline, so to speak, it could cause problems. Segmentation is is very important. Yeah. I wanna touch on, two items based on next response. The dedicated versus shared IP, we we we hear that all the time. We have customers that they come and on day one day one to send from the shared pools. They said, oh, we're gonna use the Walmart piece. Something that they are not realizing is at the minimum Google. Google is very, very strong looking at the domain reputation. So the IP reputation has a lower in importance within the Google world. They and the reason for that is we have run out of IP space. There's no more v four IPs. A lot of senders are utilizing shared IPs whether it's whether they are small or big, it is extremely important. If if you are not sending enough and you are on any shared pools of the provider, make sure you are segmenting based on the subdomain. So for example, transactional.domain.com, marketing 1 Domain Com, marketing 1 is your most engaged, marketing2.domain.com. And, another thing, like, I I know that at Mailgun, actually, Nextium has built a very sophisticated, algorithm for our shared pools. We have, I think, over 12 different shared pools. And when you enter, you are basically given the benefit of a doubt. You are in the middle. Based on your behavior, if you have low bounce rate, low spam complaints, you kind of move up into the pool. So you go and sit with better people with better reputation. If you are not doing best practices and you have a high bounce rate, complaint rate, then you get downgraded to the to the different pools. So shared pools are not necessarily a bad thing. Not the reason that if you have low traffic and you want the dedicated IP in order to protect yourself, it takes forever to build reputation on a cold IP if you're you don't have enough traffic. I have a customer who sends 20,000,000 emails per IP address every day. Not every month, every day. So it doesn't mean so the question I get from support and and our our customers all the time, what is the minimum, number of emails? What is the minimum traffic that justifies the dedicated IP? And as Nick says, there is no golden number. I I'm not gonna say, oh, if you are sending over 200 k or if you're sending over 2,000,000 emails, you need a dedicated IP. Really, if you are and by high volume, I would say if you are sending over 200 k, if you are looking for a number, I would say 200 k a day would justify a dedicated IP. But you don't need more IPs per hundred k. You can scale on two IPs all the way. You are at 2,000,000 or 20,000,000, basically. So, yeah, that's the part I wanted to touch on before we move to the next. Yeah. And, yes. Some some from the stats that we're able to find from the state of deliverability report, yes. It was around 50% of high volume senders, hundred k and above, do separate promo and transactional, email traffic. However, among all senders, 50% say they do not, and more than 12% are unsure. So yep. Yep. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm glad 50% are, but those other 50% yeah. Don't don't mix the traffic. It's not not a great idea. Please don't. Please. Not a good idea. You're not gonna have a good time. Alright. Moving down the line. Oh, we've only got so much time here, ladies and gentlemen. So let's go ahead and make sure we cover all the points. Let me see here. Oh, my little lag. Give me just a moment, ladies and gentlemen. For some reason, my slide deck has just stopped working. But, okay. Here. Can do here. There we go. Yeah. If we so as we mentioned at the beginning of this, the webinar, we did touch briefly on the Yahoo Google announcement. So what I would love to close this webinar with is also the same announcement that came in. The reason for that announcement is not to make the sender's life difficult, to enforce them to go through learning about DMARC, implementing DMARC. If you don't know it, go to the third parties and so forth. This is about email security. This is about keeping the ecosystem, the email ecosystem, free of spammers and phishers. So this is actually working in all the senders and marketers benefit because it prevents these phishing. If you have a proper authentication, s 50 DKIM, I hope everyone on this, on this webinar is doing those two. If you are not, please email me, kate@mailgun.com, and I would love to chat with you and understand why you are not signing with SPF and DKIM. But the DMARC piece is probably the most important thing to focus in to this year. If you don't have a DMARC policy yet, make it a priority in Q1 to have moved again. P equals to none, p equals to quarantine, p equals to reject. Make it a priority. We we don't know when ISPs are going to enforce it. You may wake up tomorrow morning and Google and Yahoo say, hey. We are expecting equal reject if you're sending more than 5,000 emails a day. So now you have time. Make it a priority. There is some work. If you don't have a technical team on your end, there are a ton of ton of, vendors out there that they can help you with, DMARC implementation, RedSafe, Demartian. There there are a few that comes to mind that they are doing a great job in that regards. Nick, you wanna Yeah. Real quickly, because I know we have one more slide to get through and then q and a. I spend a lot of my time on the anti abuse side of the house these days, and security is very important to me. We offer some really, nice features. One being, you know, two FA, and and SAML. If you, have those capabilities, make sure you you get that, enabled. It it will go a long way in helping just secure your your account. And the other piece, passwords. Passwords and API key security is very important to me these days. You know, just speaking of, passwords in general, passwords should never be easy. They need to be complex. You shouldn't know what your password is. Use a password manager as an example. But the second bullet point here, API keys are never to be shared. What we've seen, bad actors are are targeting, you know, our customers, other customers at at other ESPs, because of, you know, API keys being leaked through, you know, web configurations. This stuff happens. Bad actors are you know, they're on the hunt. We're on the hunt as well. But just make sure you're doing, your part, making sure you're not exposing, credentials anywhere in your in your quote, to to make sure that abuse doesn't happen on your account because it will happen, if if you are, unfortunately, you know, exposed to this. So, yeah, do your part, and we'll help from from our side, to make sure your account is secure. I can move on to the next slide. Okay. This is going to be our last slide, winning metrics for 2025. We almost touch on all of these things throughout the whole time. So, I mean, you can see that the number one is Google post master tool. You know, a lot of people are not using, unfortunately. Please sign up. It's free. It has so much value. But and it also another thing I love about Google Postmaster is, like, there are lots of articles there, like, oh, how I can improve this. Then it takes you to another part of Google, and then they they have done a great job explaining it. Comcast also has a very, very good Postmaster, page with the explanation of best practices and so forth. Okay. Nick, you wanna take the next one? Yeah. Click CTR over opens. I saw a lot of chatter earlier, in the chat regarding bot bots and how they impact opens. The it's true. Opens aren't as great as they used to be. They are still valuable, though. You still need to track them. Melgen, does a a good job of, you know, filtering out those those bot opens. But look at other metrics. Look at that clicks more closely. Look at what those users are doing whenever they're clicking through, your emails. Really follow that, to make informed decisions on on following follow-up campaigns. And the last piece, bounce rate. I I I spoke on it briefly. You can get caught up in the whole delivery versus deliverability thing, but also just look at, you know, our messages failing for any particular reason. There could be deferrals that are happening. There could be, you know, messages that are blocked erroneously. That happens. But the the key is just looking at your bounce logs, looking through, failures, what's causing them. Sometimes it can be a a a small thing that just needs to be fixed, and you you can get that taken care of. But, like, if you're not looking at those those bounce logs, you you could be missing, really important information. Exactly. Exactly. Sounds good. Sounds good. Ladies and gentlemen, these are some great stats to track in 2025 and also some great security best practices. We got a few minutes for some q and a right now, so let's go and, take a look here, shall we? Alright. Let me go ahead and pull this down so we can take a look at some of these questions. Ladies and gentlemen, please, upvote the questions that you really wanna answer the most because we only got so much time here. So let me go ahead and take a look at some of these. Okay. Okay. Matthew wanted to know we use here, I'll throw this up here. Matthew wanted to know, we use a registration tool whose emails are compliant, but they fail SPF alignment due to return path. Any thoughts on how I can proceed? Let's see. Let me just reread it. Registration tool emails are DCOM compliant, but they fail SPF alignment due to the return path. Yeah. I would just look at how those I I'm not familiar with the the registration tool, but, you know, the return path the return path is what the SPF record is based off of. So whatever domain is being used in that return path, that's what the receiving servers are doing that SPF lookup on to make sure those IPs are allowed. So I would just dig into there, see if you can, ask whoever you're you're working with on this, registration tool. Got it. Alright. Go ahead and pull that one down. Alright. Moving on here. Let's see what else has got a ton of up votes. Oh, this one, I've I've wow. Okay. So, Allison wanted to know, how do you handle bounced emails who are bouncing due to mailboxes being out of storage? Oh. I was I was just looking at this one, and I was gonna I was gonna post this one as well. It's a great question, and, I'm not gonna say it depends on this one, but it it kinda depends. We we do a lot of analysis. My team does a lot of analysis on on bounces, and handling those bounces is is really important. It dictates what you as senders do. What we have found is that, you know, we might get an error message that says your your mailbox is full, data storage, whatever. Some mailbox providers actually want you to, stop sending them, messages right away, but it it's not the same. There there's little small variables in in each of the error messages that can occur. So we take it a case by case basis, honestly. We look at, codes, along with the the syntax of the bounce message, and then we, will kind of, classify that bounce accordingly. That's how we handle it. But if you're trying to do this yourself, I would really look at, you know, patterns and and trends. Sometimes, you know, maybe you might see that that bounce message one day and then it's gone the next day. But just give context on how we handle it. Yeah. I would recommend if you if you want to define a policy, I would give it three tries and then remove it from future mailing editors. One time, it could be a net network error. It's actually, these days, is there even a mailbox full thing happening at major ISPs? I haven't seen that error with with definitely not with Google. I believe Gmail is unlimited. But if you are seeing that error, give it two more tries. At the third time, if you're seeing it, definitely remove that email from your future mailing. Because what happens with these, like, forgotten mailboxes, like, I have, like, I don't know, 25 different mailboxes because I do a lot of testing. Some of them I haven't even logged in. Recently, I started getting emails from Google. You haven't logged into this account for two two years. So they give me thirty days to log in. Otherwise, they will give it back, make it available for someone else to grab it. So my recommendation is give it three times and then out due to if it is a mailbox full. Got it. Got it. Okay. Let me see here. I'm reading through some of these questions. There's some good ones, Thomas. Do we just click on Yeah. There? Does does answer pop it up? Okay. Yeah. Just click on, yeah, just click on share and, if let's see. What's one which one you got here? I wanna see Nate. This oh, no. I can't. I was looking at the one that says, isn't there a risk in segmenting by subdomains? If you see that Oh my god. I was looking at the same exact There you go. I like that one. Found it from Ryan. There we go. Yeah. Good one from Ryan. Kate, I wanna I wanna I wanna hear your thoughts on this one first. I have an opinion on it, as well, but yeah. Since we both want this one. Google and, AOL, Yahoo, they are very, very strong on sub domain reputation. I'm not sure about Microsoft. Probably they are, but, I'm % sure about Google. There is zero risk in segmenting based on sub domain. Google looks at the sub domain reputation first. If they don't find the sub domain, then they fall back to the organizational domain. So definitely segment your traffic. If you have, like, different promotional, like, it is quarterly promotional, maybe go to promotionalforthedomain.com. Segments the the traffic based on frequency, based on the nature of the traffic, that you are sending, and there is zero, zero risk. I haven't read the whole thing. I just read the first. But, Nick, you add anything else, and then I I'm I'm gonna Yeah. So I I I would be much in line with what you just said in terms of, like, segment, segment, segment. Like, that's always kind of what what I I think in in these situations. There might be another part of this question. At least I'm interpreting it. It might be around frequency, because he mentioned, quarterly. So if it is something that's infrequent, that is something you wanna keep an eye on because if you only send it, you know, each quarter, there there's that three month period in between sends. So you do wanna try to get some traffic going, you know, from time to time if you can still use that. You don't want domains to sit for for too long. That is a little bit of a concern. I don't know, what your thoughts are on that, Kate. Yeah. Have some traffic. It doesn't have to be and and whatever that frequency is, if you spike once a week on Tuesdays, that's okay. That is what the ISPs are going to get used to. They are expecting you a spike. But if you spike all over the place, then maybe that's that is not a good practice. But definitely segment based on subdomain and, keep the frequency going on. Don't go to zero traffic as much as you can. Send something, like, once a week, and then on your on your quarterly spikes, you feel you should be fine. Love it. Love it. That was a good one. Thank you, Ryan, for that question. Ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have today, unfortunately, because Nick's gotta get to lunch and Kate's gotta start her day, ladies and gentlemen. I have a really cool announcement. I know you wanted to get a lot of deliverability takeaways today and stuff like that, but I am happy to announce. If you are a fan of our show, Email Academy from Mailjet, flash news right here, ladies and gentlemen. Myself, Thomas, Tiberk Narayan, and my counterpart in deliverability, Neli Hayes, are actually creating a show. It's gonna be the Deliverability Academy presented by Megan. So that is coming very, very soon. So we wanna give you yes. Yes. You're gonna see people like Kate. You're gonna see people like Nick, and tons of other people within our organization that preach deliverability. We wanna make everyone a better sender. That is our biggest goal over here at, ladies and gentlemen, at Milligan. So super excited about that. Keep an eye out on our blog, megan.com/blog, and, keep an eye on your emails and stuff like that. We will be announcing that very soon. So very excited about that. But ladies and gentlemen, Kate Norese and Nick Schafer. Kate, where can people follow along with you if you got anything going on in the email world? They can anyone who has a question, you are more than welcome to email me at kate@mailgun.com. My Twitter, DMs are also open. You can find me on Twitter, or email me directly, kate@mailgun.com, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Love it. Nick, how about you? I would say go check out LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. That's probably my preferred channel. You can probably try to find me on on Twitter. I don't use it as much as I used to, or I guess it's called x now. But, yeah, LinkedIn. Find me. Send a message. Love to chat on there. Love it, ladies and gentlemen. Love it. Love it. Also too, season six of Email's Not Dead, our podcast, which is featuring tons of, deliverability and email marketing folks, is coming out very soon. Make sure you follow along here. I'm gonna drop a link for y'all in there. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much to our wonderful speakers today. They are always bringing us the best takeaways, so I'm always super grateful for them. And these two individuals have taught me the most in my email deliverability career, so I'm very thankful for them. But ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause, and we'll, hope to see you soon. Alright? Thank you all. Alright. Take care, everyone. Bye.