Avoiding Blocklistings: Part 3 - Take Matters into Your Own Hands to Protect Your Senders

When Education Fails: Proactive Steps for Helping Senders Avoid Blocklistings

Well, well, well…back for part 3! Way to go, you nerd. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

If you haven’t read part one or part two, please hop over to those now because you’ll need to go through those processes before we recommend pulling control levers on your side of the house. “Last resort,” remember?

But we all know some of you aren’t gonna do that, ahem. So, to summarize:

1. Get on the same page with your new customer and make sure you understand their business.

2. Educate them on the do's and don’ts of avoiding blocklists at every stage in their journey.

3. Keep an eye on their performance so you can get a sense of the kinds of practices they might be using and help them course-correct when a problem emerges.

Then...if all else fails and you’re unable to successfully educate your senders, or simply can’t convince them to do the right thing, it’s time to move onto our third major recommendation.

Take Matters into Your Own Hands to Protect Your Senders

Well...it’s time for some Real Talk™.

Not every customer will follow your advice. In fact, you should probably count yourself lucky if you have customers who eagerly adopt email best practices and listen to your guidance.

But the fact is, every business has their own email goals, priorities, and standards, and sometimes those simply don’t align with your recommendations.

It’s important to make sure you have safeguards in place to help avoid blocklistings, especially for senders who are trying to follow the rules. There isn’t much worse (in Email Land) than a good sender who’s suddenly unable to deliver mail to major mailbox providers because their shared IP is blocklisted.

To protect your customers, you should be prepared to take matters into your own hands.

1. Get strategic about your IP strategy. Create a shared IP or pool for new senders so you can monitor their behavior before putting them with other established customers. You can also create IP pools based on sender reputation, so riskier senders mingle with similarly questionable customers while stellar customers can be isolated from those with less ideal practices.

2. Automate it. There are so many options here! Think, everything I just mentioned…without you pushing any buttons. You could also make customers’ lives easier with automated alerting so they’re aware of low performance and associated risks or an auto warmup tool so it’s easier for people to follow your warmup plan without having to think about segmentation at all.

3. Throttle it (…just a little bit!). When sending statistics reach a critical level, rate limitations can help you protect your customer’s reputation and your own while you investigate what’s going on. Whether automated or manually applied, they can give you the leverage you need to get those stubborn senders movin’ towards Best Practice Avenue.

4. Build new features. For example, one that scans lists upon upload to prevent poor quality lists (often purchased, scraped, mismanaged) or routes suspicious increases in volume or senders with bad stats to a different IP with stricter sending ability. You could build customer-facing features, too, such as a way to easily segment lists or suppress unengaged users or help customers set up authentication during your onboarding flow.

5. Call in the firing squad.This should be a last resort, obviously, but when all else fails, it’s ok to fire a customer. Just make sure you’ve done your best to remediate the issue first when possible, by communicating what needs to change and why (multiple times), and involving internal stakeholders ahead of time if cutting that customer has notable revenue implications. Doesn’t mean you don’t cut ‘em, even if leadership doesn’t like it, but everyone involved will appreciate you not making it a fire drill unnecessarily.

Ultimately, ESP customers are always gonna span from great to…not-so-great…despite our best efforts to keep a tidy ship. And even the best senders can become blocklisted from time to time.

It’s our job to get customers’ email cars back on the road as quickly as we can, but of course, no IP or domain is safe from future listings if sender behaviors don’t change.

So, create compelling use cases that influence sender behavior by letting your (ahem, their) email data do the talking. And when they won’t listen, well, you know what to do…desperate times call for desperate (but fully justified!!) measures. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That’s a Wrap!

There you have it, folks. Super simple, right?

Don’t forget to follow Spamhaus’ instructions for delisting, and reach out to them if you really can’t figure out why a seemingly good sender of yours is having trouble.

Also remember you can call in a little backup from others in the community anytime. This industry is incredibly supportive and always willing to lend a hand - just reach out! I love troubleshooting deliv issues. 💌