Avoiding Blocklistings: Part 2 - Monitor and Educate Your Customers

Proactive Strategies for Avoiding Blocklistings

The first step is to start at the very beginning and grow a relationship with your customer based on a shared understanding of their business (and by extension email) needs. If you need some guidance, we went through this in Part 1 of this blog mini-series, so head over there to get caught up. We’ll wait.

OK, are you back? Good. Now that you’ve got your first steps mapped out, it's time to start moving into a different stage of your customer relationship. Your mission now is to be their advocate...whether they like it or not, since sometimes our advice can be hard to swallow for less-than-perfect senders.

You want to make sure you’re a reliable resource who is there when they need you.

It’s even better if you can be there before they know they need you.

Monitor Your Customers to Make Sure They’re Doing the Right Things

Well, duh. But hear me out here.

Email’s Changing More Quickly Than Ever

There’s a shift happening in email. Mailbox providers are continually getting more granular with their reputation monitoring, which means senders are getting more of the deliverability they deserve.

For an ESP, this can be bittersweet: Your good customers are less likely to be negatively impacted by a poor sender on their shared IP (yay!). But you also have less ability to positively influence individual deliverability because senders’ choices about their domain will mean more than your hard-earned ESP reputation.

Don’t get me wrong: IP reputation is still a key factor with many providers (including Google and Yahoo), so monitoring is still super important. You just need to look more closely at domain-based reputation as well.

The good news? Email is just about the most data-rich marketing channel around, so senders have the ability to monitor performance more easily, and us ESP types can more easily keep tabs on those senders.

Making Email Data Talk (and Walk!) is More Important in 2024

All of that sweet, sweet email data also means there are lots of ways to protect one sender from the rest. You could:

• Put those senders on different shared IP pools.
• Have them use a dedicated IP and sign mail with their own DKIM domain instead of (or in addition to) yours.
• Restrict volumes when a sender’s statistics drop (or spike!) to a dangerous level.

The not-so-good news: How you monitor and protect those customers will be slightly different for everyone, based on your ESP’s tech stack. Our advice is to list out all the data you have access to:

• Data you have instant access to without having to get help from other teams, such as delivery and engagement statistics.
• Data you need to request from another team, such as custom reports or exports.
• Data you have regular access to through 3rd parties, such as Google Postmaster Tools (GPT), seed testing or deliverability monitoring tools, etc.

Once you’ve done that, figure out your workflow!

• What is it you’ll monitor, and how will you monitor it?
• Do you have dashboards, data feeds, and/or tools in place to monitor, troubleshoot, and answer questions about deliverability issues, or will you need to build something?
• If you don’t have the resources (or access to data) that you need to build, do you have budget to purchase a solution?

All have their benefits and downsides, depending on the resources at your disposal: team size and level of experience, tooling, access to data, and how much cross-functional support you have within the organization are all things to consider before finalizing your workflow.

Traditional Monitoring Has Its Challenges

Monitoring dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual senders ain’t easy...so first of all, mad respect to all of you helping your customers avoid blocklistings by jumping on the problem before the problem jumps on your customer.

Fact is, customers rely heavily on tools like GPT...so do deliverability folks! (Be honest, you know it’s true.) But GPT is known to be buggy. It also keeps us in a reactive state since there’s a 2-day delay on the data. Which means identifying issues as they’re emerging is a struggle we all face. Either the issue gets missed entirely, or senders don’t turn the Titanic around before it hits the iceberg, which is what leads to all the fire drills when somebody’s open rates (or revenue from email) fall off a cliff.

By finding ways to monitor our customers’ email performance using the delivery and engagement data we tend to have access to behind the scenes (even if painstakingly gathered), we can monitor from a 10,000-foot view, in addition to the up-close-and-subaccount-personal view we’re all used to.

Proactivity For the Win!

Following the data (and finding customer issues before they do) is key, because we all know customers struggle with acting quickly when there’s a problem. Not to mention, how often they’re blaming us for their performance issues — even when the bounce responses mention their domain specifically! Ugh.

We need to follow those tasty little data crumbs all the way to Hansel and Gretel’s house so we can build a compelling case for why our senders need to make changes, not us.

Beyond looking at the hard numbers, proactivity is also the #1 way to build trust with your VIP customers (well, everyone, really) and ensure they’re confident in your ability to protect their performance.

Have an open-door policy and keep your ears open for any troubling practices they might mention doing, even if you haven’t seen an impact from it yet. After all, it’s a lot easier to caution someone against sending to a list they’ve purchased when they tell you they bought the list than it is to clean up the mess after they “spray-and-pray”. (ew)

Educate Your Customers When You Identify Issues or Gaps in Best Practices

During my prep sessions with Melinda, it was clear we both strongly believe in our role as customer advocates...and educators.

Melinda said, “One thing I really push for, and this is key to a lot of success, is truly educating folks. There’s a lot to understand in this industry and not everyone understands all of the best practices out there.”

True story, Mel. True story. I’m convinced there are more email myths, misconceptions, and claims about shortcuts *(that don’t work!)* floating around than accurate, helpful, no-nonsense guidance on how to send it right.

But that’s ok! We don’t have to teach them everything all at once. In fact, we shouldn’t. That would be overwhelming, frustrating, and well, pretty much pointless. They’ll tune out.

Customer Education Requires a Phased Approach

Instead, we need to break it down into digestible, achievable bites that are focused only on what they need to know at each stage to be successful.

The education piece can start before they even sign up. You can put it on your website, in your company’s blog and newsletter, in your terms of service (TOS) and documentation, it can be repeated via support communications, sales conversations, and your onboarding email sequence...everywhere.

You can educate them during the onboarding process by requiring them to do things you know are necessary for their success, like setting up authentication records that are now required by major mailbox providers.

Show, Don’t Tell

If you’re seeing problems after they’ve started sending, you can show them what’ll happen if they don’t send it right using their own data, or you can use other customer examples (anonymized), to show bad performance, followed by good performance after they made a change.

For example, if a sender has a problem with engagement and they’re going to the spam folder, don’t just tell them to target users who’ve opened or clicked within the past X days. Show them why that’s important!

Use their data to explain exactly what that problem means for their email program and, referring back to part one in this blog mini-series, how it impacts them reaching their business goals.

Be the Mother Goose they never had by providing the educational resources and gentle nudges they need to be successful. You can start building your own set of go-to resources for every scenario you encounter, and don’t forget to stress the negative outcome of not following the best practice you’re recommending.

No one wants to be blocklisted, particularly not by Spamhaus!

This Is The End...or Is It?

Perhaps now you’re starting to see why a 15-minute session didn’t give us enough time to cover everything we wanted to share. Check out the rest of our advice in 'Part 3 - Take Matters Into Your Own Hands.'