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The final area we want to cover is the sending process. This process is all about showing the necessary respect and understanding of the recipient domains. All of us know how to ask for things in a polite way and we all can recognize rude behavior or bullying. Bad actors come in many flavors – denial of service attacks - phishing email attacks used to compromise data (data breaches) – ransomware attacks that locks out computers and extorts money to re-enable services – etc. Smart Marketers are wise to show some empathy towards what these schools and districts are facing and do their best to not look like a bad actor with their unintended actions.
How to Properly Send a Promotional Message
Randomize the email address that you are sending to. Many address files are sorted by some organized method (district name or domain address). If the order of your send file ends up sending lots of sequentially identical duplicate messages into the same receiving domain over a short period of time, it is likely to trigger concerns of some potential attack or phishing scam. By randomizing the sending list you help spread the delivery burden of the email promotion more evenly over time (from a receiving ESP). This gives receiving domains time to see message trends and monitor engagement and helps reduce needlessly trigger of other warning bells.
Throttle the sends over time. Find the maximum time limit you can live with and use it. Spread your message delivery evenly over an extended period. As is true with #1 above, this will help keep your promotional traffic outside warning thresholds. The slower and more deliberate your send the more likely you are to not encounter any issues. You are also able to self correct issues that do occur before the receiving domain takes actions against you. MCH Strategic Data will frequently span a single campaign over many days on bigger deploys to ensure that messages avoid tripping monitoring concerns.
Monitor your campaign’s progress and take immediate corrective actions to fix any issues. Hard bounces, low engagement, messages that point out threat identification (like broken links), etc. If you randomize and throttle you should be able to intervene and correct problems before they get your IP and domain reputations damaged.
In the end the goal is for your organization to have successful promotions. The schools, districts and educators want trusted messages that are relevant and help them improve education outcomes for the children and / or run a more efficient school. Both of these are possible if marketers get back to the basics and put in the extra effort to make their campaigns follow the steps outlined here.
