Email marketing has always been one of the most reliable revenue channels for businesses. But that’s only true if your messages reach your audience’s inboxes. Over the years but in the last year especially, inbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo have become far more sensitive to engagement patterns, sending volume anomalies. Overall, it means that more emails are getting routed to spam and list health and sending practices matter more than ever for deliverability.
That’s why following deliverability best practices is crucial to maintain your email marketing performance. But what are those deliverability best practices? The technical ones like SPF records are relatively straightforward to check and fix, but the one we find most business owners struggling with is around sending strategies.
In this blog post, we will dig into the simplest and most effective sending strategy that can immediately help you recover your deliverability. While it may seem counterintuitive at first, the secret really is to slow down and scale back up. And we’ve seen how effective this can be through the success stories from our very own clients. Take it from Brett Scuiletti, who reached out to us when his brand started to experience email deliverability issues.
We were able to get our email domain reputation score fixed in less time than expected, and wouldn’t have been able to do it without Centric Squared. I would work with Sara and the team at Centric again in a heartbeat!
Let’s walk through how this sending strategy works, why it’s so effective, and how you can implement it.
What Is a Sending Strategy?
Most businesses that take the time to develop an email are still sending to their entire list at once. Now, most email service providers will have measures in place to automatically skip anyone from a list that has already unsubscribed, and skip those that have bounced. So in reality, you’re sending to 95% of your email list when you hit “all”. There are some technical checks on the backend in place.
A sending strategy is looking at your list and creating smaller groups or segments based on things like how engaged they are, how old they are, and sending your emails to segments at different times. So, instead of blasting your entire list at once, you might start sending to the warmest, most engaged contacts, and then gradually over a period of weeks, add in more segments as your metrics improve.
The strategy here is:
- Immediately stop sending to your entire list.
- Start sending to your most engaged group only.
- As metrics improve, start roping in additional groups.
It is a slow, intentional ramp-up and it is important because it teaches all the inbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) that your emails are trustworthy because the people you are sending to are overwhelmingly engaging with them.
Ultimately, this gives you the ability to return to full-volume sending and recovering your deliverability.
Think of it like navigating an injury at the gym. What do you do after an injury? You will immediately rest and take a breather. Then, when you feel better and start training again, you may take a few sessions to warm up first, start with some stretching, then lighter sets or fewer reps, and make sure you can handle it before going back up to your previous routine. Go too fast and you’ll injure yourself again, possibly more severely.
It’s a similar approach to email deliverability. The difference, however, is that whereas you’re always able to feel exactly where your physical injury is, with email deliverability you won’t be able to tell until you’re plugged into and monitoring your metrics closely. Most of the time, clients come to us just noticing metrics like open rates seemingly drop overnight and then continuing to stay low. They know something is wrong, but don’t know what exactly is happening or why.
Behind the scenes, there are a few possibilities for why your email deliverability may tank. may have happened, factors that cause your email activity to look unusual or unpredictable to inbox providers:
- Returning from a sending pause (Haven’t sent in a long time)
- Email list migration to a new platform (new infrastructure)
- Sudden list growth (tipping you over limits suddenly)
- Major drop in engagement (could be trigger words in a campaign or formatting issues)
- Reputation red flags (added to blacklists or blocklists)
If you want a better understanding of how deliverability works or need more of an expert opinion for your unique situation, book a deliverability consultation with us today.
Warming Up: A Simple Sending Strategy
You might understand the concept of warming up but doing this in email can be a bit daunting. What are the different levels? How do you define those in your own email system?
This is where segmentation comes in — you need a way to look at your entire email list and split it into smaller groups based on how likely they are to interact with your emails. You’ll need to decide who is “warm” and who is “cold”. Some email service providers have easy segmentation tools where you can easily set this up, but many don’t or don’t make it intuitive. So the first step with deliverability consultation clients is helping them define what these groups are.
Engagement is a commonly used term in email marketing — as it’s a good indicator of how likely someone is to open your email. But it’s also a vague term that will mean different things in different industries. In eCommerce it could mean recent purchases or website visits. In a service-based business it could be contacts recently added to your list. In any business that’s been doing email for over a few months, you’ll have data about whether people have opened or clicked your recent emails that can be used as a starting point. Then, each business might have different criteria to add to the definition to make it more granular.
| Group A | Group B | Group C | Group D |
| The most engaged people on your list | High to medium engaged list | Medium to low engaged list | Everyone emailable on your list |
One common misconception is that your groups are separate. But they’re really all subsets of your list. Below is an easy way to visualize it. Group A, your most engaged “kernel” sits in the heart. The other groups sit in the outer bands based on their varying levels of engagement.
You might ask “Do I need all 4 groups?” Well, it really depends on your business.
Some say a list of over <20k subscribers might only have 2-3 groups, while lists with over 1 Million subscribers might have 6-7 groups. Ultimately, the approach should be tailored to your business and list.
Once you’ve defined your groups, warming up is simple: Start small with your most engaged (or warmest) group, then slowly over time broaden the audience as performance improves.
Your email list as a circle with different bands
Sending Strategy: Step by Step
Once your groups are defined, the next step is implementing a warm-up strategy. The way you implement this — how long you wait between campaigns, how closely you monitor metrics, and when you decide to fold in the next group— will determine how quickly your email deliverability recovers.
Step 1: Keep Tabs on Key Metrics
You won’t know when it’s time to level up if you don’t have key metrics front and center. You need to set up a system to monitor every email you are sending for at least these three metrics:
- Number of recipients
- Which group you sent to
- Open rates
- Spam complaints
You can expand on this and include click through rates, bounces, and other metrics you might have access to from your ESP or your postmaster tools.
You only want to fold in larger audience and “level up” when your open rates are above 30-40%. (Different industries may have different benchmarks, the idea here is a strong open rate whatever that means to you).
Step 2: Start With Group A
Your first emails in a deliverability recovery plan should go to the most engaged subscribers and most likely to open your emails. This group is small. It should be about 10-20% of your list.
You’re probably going to need to gulp a little here, and trust me: resist the urge to send to a larger list in the early stages even if you think “it’s an important campaign”.
Your campaigns aren’t getting through. That’s why you’re in this mess and your deliverability is injured. If you want your campaigns to get through, stay steady here.
You’ll start to see higher open rates again immediately. These high open rates show inbox providers that your content is wanted. This positive engagement signals that your deliverability is turning around and you can move onto the next step.
Pro tip: If your deliverability is really bad, you can create a list of 10-20 accounts like your team or organization or even friends and family to start with. Ask them to fish your emails out of spam if you don’t see strong open rates at first.
Step 3: Fold in Group B
Are you consistently getting 30-40% open rates now sending to Group A? Congratulations. Now you can start to fold in more and send to Group B. This increases your sending volume in a controlled way without jeopardizing your reputation.
Again, you’re going to get pressure to send to your whole list now (see, it’s better!?). Resist temptation and stay the course.
The purpose of this step is to increase your sending volume while keeping the risk of flagging further deliverability red flags low. You also get the added benefit of essentially training inbox providers on your sending consistency.
You may stay in this phase for several sends depending on how your metrics look. It’s important not to rush. Deliverability recovery is not a sprint, you don’t get a gold star for rushing back in too soon.
Just keep an eye on your metrics and when they’re holding steady at 30-40% opens (with low spam complaints) you’re ready to fold in the next group.
Step 4: Gradually Add The Remaining Groups
Once Groups A and B are performing well, repeat the same process with your additional groups.
- Send
- Monitor
- Review performance
- Expand when your indicators are positive.
Step 5: Resume Sending to Your Full List
Once your metrics begin to hold steady again and you’re on your last “group”, move onto your larger list. Pay special attention here: if you haven’t cleaned your list in a while – this step will put you right back to square one. Take the time to remove any invalid emails, bounces, or those that are 10 years old that you really should be emailing anymore if they show no signs of life.
Adopting the Framework to Your Business Needs
Congratulations, you did it!
Our clients can see recovery in anywhere from 1-8 weeks, depending on their list size and frequency of sending. We recommend this simple sending strategy because it works. That said, it’s not the only factor to recover deliverability – you’ll also want to make sure your technical setup is working, you practice list hygiene, and you’re following industry best practices.
If you’ve followed best practices and your emails still aren’t landing where they should, it may be time to bring in a deliverability expert. A consultant can help diagnose hidden issues, create a custom warm-up plan, and guide you through the process step-by-step so you can recover faster without guesswork. We diagnose and resolve deliverability issues for businesses of all sizes. If you’re facing persistent problems, we can provide expert assistance. Let’s get your emails back on track.
About Centric Squared
At Centric Squared, we believe in the power of authentic relationships with your customers and love growing email marketing programs for our clients. We offer email marketing, SMS Marketing, and List Growth services. Reach out and let’s talk about your email marketing strategy. Book a call today.