Avoiding Blocklistings: Part 1 - Set Yourself AND Your Senders Up for Success

Howdy, email folks! Recently Melinda Plemel and I dove into the essential steps email service providers (ESPs) should take to help their senders avoid being blocklisted.

We covered a lot of ground, but there was one big problem: We didn’t have nearly enough time to get through it all!

To make sure we can share all our best strategies for avoiding blocklistings, we decided to spin up a three-part blog series to dive deeper into the most impactful steps to take.

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Foundational Strategies for Avoiding Blocklistings

There’s no shortcut to the inbox. You know that. I know that.

We ESP folk know that deliverability is a shared responsibility, and that senders’ actions (and inactions) significantly impact inbox placement. Most of our ESP customers, on the other hand, tend to find that out the hard way when their own customers start complaining about emails going missing. In a lot of cases, this is something they never even considered as a possibility.

And then there are those customers who are unwilling to change. Either they don’t see the need for it, can’t justify prioritizing it over other tasks, or insist that the practice that is continually causing deliverability issues is the essential lynch pin in their entire business operation, so they won’t budge.

We end up frustrated. They end up frustrated. Nobody wins.

If we want to stop being frustrated — ok, be frustrated less — we need to meet our customers somewhere in the middle and help them understand what actually keeps senders off blocklists. Let’s start at the very beginning. How do you set yourself and your senders up for email success?

Start on the Right Foot

The business-minded folks at your company won’t be happy to read this, but you don’t want to accept every potential customer who comes your way. Sender reputation matters, and you won’t be able to maintain yours as an ESP if you let just any old sender (ahem, spammer) in.

Create vetting questions and measures to help evaluate each potential customer’s quality. If a new signup raises enough alarms, you can decline it entirely. However, your sales and marketing teams are likely going to raise a few of their own alarms if you kick too many of those hard-earned new signups to the curb.

So, exploring less aggressive options when possible can help you maintain relations with key stakeholders internally while still protecting your network from abuse. For example, you can ask additional follow-up questions via your support team to further vet them before allowing them access to your platform. Alternatively, you can provision those questionable signups without learning more, but under restricted conditions that prevent them from sending large volumes of email until they’ve validated and authenticated their domain and/or sent enough mail for you to feel more comfortable with their activity.

Just ensure you’ve implemented multiple safeguards to properly monitor their behavior and take action quickly at the first signs of trouble to prevent spam and/or fraudulent emails from impacting your legitimate senders.

Also create policies that set your customers up for success. For example, making essentials like authentication a requirement right at the beginning so there isn’t any damage to clean up if they run afoul of major mailbox provider requirements. Or prohibiting non-permissioned email lists because you know hard bounces, spam trap hits, and spam complaints cause deliverability issues…for that customer, and for you as an ESP.

Be sure to involve other teams internally in the creation and socialization of your provisioning policies and processes for self-serve (aka “freemium”) customers and for higher-volume senders who’ve signed a custom contract. This cross-functional mentality will ensure your ESP’s policies are aligned with inbox success, but based in (business) reality. After all, those policies aren’t gonna protect anyone’s sender reputation if they’re not embraced by the colleagues you rely on to help enforce them: those folks in customer-facing teams, sales, marketing, and leadership.

Understand Your Senders’ Businesses

This is something I didn’t do enough of when I was working in the trenches. I’d make recommendations that were ideal for solving their deliverability issue but completely unrealistic from a tactical perspective. I dug pretty deep into how to speak to decision-makers in my "Send It Right" blog on Why Deliverability (Still) Matters, but here the most important things to consider:

Is what you’re suggesting (reasonably) possible?

Take the time to understand what it’s like to be your customer. Particularly when you have high-priority senders, you should make an effort to understand their business model, their goals, and what strategies they have for reaching them.

Also consider: Does your platform make it easy for them to do what you’re recommending, or are you asking them to do an email marketing back flip? Marketers are flexible, but not that flexible. For example, if you suggest something like segmenting their list to resolve a deliverability issue stemming from low engagement:

• Is it clear to them that change is required on their part, and why?
• Is segmentation something your platform enables, or are they gonna have to do it manually?
• If it’s a manual process, do they know how to do it?
• And do they have time to get that task done when their plate is already overflowing with spicy marketing meatballs?
• Which brings me back to my first point: are they clear on the fact that the answer to, “Do we really need to do this?” is “YES. 1,000 times, yes.”?

Their capabilities should impact the kind of advice, information, and assistance you’re able to give on their email performance.

Does what you’re suggesting really deserve priority within their org?

Let’s pretend you have a major recommendation that’ll take multiple stakeholders, weeks of work, a re-prioritization of the product roadmap (or marketing team’s workload), and lots of headaches…not to mention stress. You should be relatively certain their organization has the resources available to even implement the advice.

This understanding will also help you communicate your advice in an effective way. For instance, if what you’re suggesting is complex and time-consuming, their first question is gonna be, “do we really need to do this?” You need to present your recommendation in a way that illustrates why the juice is worth the (pretty arduous) squeeze.

What does doing (or not doing) what you suggest mean for their organization?

Speak in terms of business impact — dollar signs — not sender reputation.

They’ll be assessing the impact on their business…both how the work will impact their day-to-day and what long-term results it could generate (positive and negative).

The less you know about their business model or company culture, the less compelling your case will be. No compelling case means a low likelihood they’ll make the change, and if they don’t make the change, well...we all know how that turns out.

Blocklist City, here we come.

If you prioritize understanding their business on a holistic level, you can present multiple options for how to solve their issue(s) knowing full well they’ll likely need to do some horse trading to prioritize this work over something else. All those seemingly tiny choices have a ripple effect through the business, so, help your contact make your case to their decision makers to improve the chances the work will get done.

I’m gonna repeat the most important piece of advice for this section (whole blog, really): Speak in terms of business impact, not sender reputation. Dollar, dollar bills, ya’ll. This is the way to inspire action within the higher ups of your customers’ businesses.

We’re the email geeks here, they likely aren’t. So, align the negative impact of a blocklisting to their business and see how it goes.

For example, we have a feature at SocketLabs that highlights how many valid recipients you were expecting to reach, how many you actually reached, and how many were missed. With that information, a business who knows that email recipients are worth $1 each can very quickly realize how much revenue they’re missing out on — or how much more they can be making by following your advice.

Adios for Now!

Now do you understand why a 15-minute session didn’t give us enough time to cover everything we wanted to share? And this is only one part of the series! Check out the rest of our advice in 'Part 2 - Monitor and Educate Your Customers' and 'Part 3 - Take Matters into Your Own Hands'.