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You’re probably aware that the devil is in the details. That’s why today we’re diving into a small yet mighty component that can significantly boost your open rates and engagement. Yeap. We’re talking about the email preheader. What’s a...by Steve Shugart | Jul 3, 2024 | For entrepreneurs
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Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to introduce you to the real MVP: email frequency. Yep, it turns out frequency is a crucial component of your marketing strategy. If you’re here, you’re probably wondering how to master it. Here are some tips: Know Your Crowd...So if you have been thinking for a while about running an ESP company, you likely have a monster “To Do” list to make it happen. This will include everything from having C++ coders on your team, to work on the server side of things, to hiring a development team to work on the user interface for your customers, to integrate with the recurring billing system to be able to charge your customers, to integrate with the support system to be able to support your customers, to develop an API so your customers can connect to your ESP.
Well, the list goes on and on.
Now, DeliverabilityAgent has all the above, ready within 48 hours within making the decision to move forward. We have done all the heavy lifting for over a decade. Helping companies to start their ESPs and taking customers within a month’s time.
We have different, custom-made user interfaces for all purposes that run on mobile, with a vast set of features. The best of all is, if you have a very unique feature in mind, that will make your business be unique, we can get it added for you. That’s the power of working with a company
like DeliverabilityAgent.
We are developers. We are email. We are technology.
Artificial intelligence is all about learning this days and training a model. From an ISP’s perspective, running an email server, hosting millions of accounts –it’s an ideal scenario to put AI in practice. Given that fact that they have the natural possibility to analyze the content of these emails and how the recipients interact with them. It’s literally millions of people teaching an artificially intelligent machine, daily. And this is priceless from an artificial intelligence research perspective.
Today we know that companies like Google on Gmail are making a lot of their filtering decisions based on the results of these neural networks and what they have learned, which has a huge impact on the email marketing industry. This trend will make smart email senders more aware of what type of content the recipients are actually interested in.
The process is highly challenging. That’s why you need to constantly split test your email creatives and understand the feedback coming from your engagement responses.
So, one of the most common strategic mistakes that high volume senders make is that they underestimate the complexity involved in deploying high volumes of email. Behind each piece of email sent there is an email server waiting for it. This is something that the technology involved in the sending process needs to have in mind. Respect and adapt.
Complexity comes in when you realize that they are all different. When you plan on deploying a campaign over a million recipients you must be open to the possibility that you will be interacting with one million technologies. This is not often the real scenario as most of the email addresses probably share a common technology.
For instance, you will probably have more than just one Gmail recipient on your recipient list. So this is obvious but for this matter it’s crucial for high volume senders to make sure they have specific rules set in place for each one of these recipient domains.
Your email servers need to be able to adjust their sending rates automatically when they notice a change in the amount of email that is being accepted by these recipient servers. We call this adaptive delivery. It’s a unique feature built into our MTA technology.
No matter how savvy our customers are regarding the email atmosphere, there is always something new to learn, be aware of, avoid, follow. Sometimes our customers need specific guidance on how to achieve different goals. We have “already been there” in the majority of cases. If not, we have different partners that we consult with in the industry. This allows us to always provide useful information.
The mailing process involves several roles between the message sender and the receiving. Such as the email platform, servers, security system, recipient notifications and of course error notifications –everything else in between as well.
Experience has shown us that there are a lot of things that can go wrong during the resolution of this email and the entire process. This can be for just one piece of email sent. You can imagine what happens when a million emails need go out to thousands, if not more, recipient servers in just a couple of hours.
This is one of the reasons why we have come to realize that the key for maintaining a successful high volume mailing company, is consciously monitoring of every piece involved in the origination of the email including the feedback receipt of the final destination. This is very important.
At DeliverabilityAgent we have put together a series of real-time monitoring system on a per client basis that notifies our tech team instantly whenever something happens that shouldn’t be happening –like a server outage or a permanent block. Or something as simple as an expired domain not able to receive a reply.
So one of the most important things and one of the concerns that you have is that you definitely want to be CAN-SPAM and GDRP compliant. DeliverabilityAgent was originally conceived to be CAN-SPAM compliant and to make sure everyone using it is protected –even from the human error.
We have engineered the creative set-up process in a way that it is impossible to proceed without having a valid unsubscribe mechanism, a physical address paragraph in place. Although this doesn’t include everything the CAN-SPAM act requires for you to be compliant. Our team will work with you to make sure you are following the rules.
We provide full consultancy on everything else that needs to be taken care of from a legal stand-point in order to comply with these two regulations. And of course we are constantly watching for new ones to come into play. We are happy to report that over 200 DeliverabilityAgent clients, in a 12 year period, have never had any problems either with CAN-SPAM or GDPR, using our platform.
So, why is it so challenging these days to mail off your own IP space? Well there is an analogy between this topic and what a bureaucracy is like.
A bureaucracy is very annoying, complicated system to navigate. It’s a way to manage a process that has been severely abused by the bad guys. So there is a series of steps that need to be followed in order to accomplish what you are ultimately looking for. These irritating steps are there for the same reason a bureaucracy is; gate keeping.
You need to prove that you are an honest sender, before achieving your goals. The reason it is not as simple as just setting up an email system and starting to freely send emails is that too many senders, for nearly over 2 decades before you have abused the process.
DeliverabilityAgent has the capacity to let you become your own ESP. But you might be asking why go to all the effort of becoming your own ESP. Your reputation in the email space is only as good as your environment. And your environment is the IP space you are sending your emails from which is usually shared across many other senders while using a commercial ESP.
If your company cannot rely on the good behavior of others, then this is a no-brainer. Being your own ESP allows you to create and nurture your entire IP environment. Making sure that only you will be mailing off that IP space. This something that no other ESP can offer you. Since any other commercial ESP out there will take in other clients on the same IP space, or your surrounding IP space, there is no guarantee that your mailing is going to depend solely on your own reputation.
Do you have a very specific niche in mind? Do you run a service with multiple customers –that they will email their prospects and you do not want to become just another ESP’s affiliate? OK. That’s a typical client situation for us.
We of course welcome any questions about this. We’ve been there. We have helped so many companies to become their own ESPs that we have probably been there. So just let us know and we will be able to assist you with any information that you might consider, for sure, very useful so that you can make a very educated decision about it.
So you have tried and failed, using an email platform before. How is DeliverabilityAgent going to be different from the last time you tried to manage your own IP space?
There is a very important thing that impacts whether you will succeed or fail in your email efforts. The set-up needs to be done by highly trained, industry professionals –to make sure that you start off on the right foot.
This is one of the reasons why we provide full support; including the full set-up of things, testing of things. We even manage your DNS records if you need to. Making sure that there is nothing left out during the set-up of the entire email infrastructure.
There are several things that you need to have in mind before you send your first email out and this is very important. This includes proper authentication methods like DKIM, MTA STS, SPF, all of them. All of the industry standards are covered and properly set-up by our team and it comes in “ready to mail condition” with every new set-up of the platform.
Email marketing is an ever changing industry. You must adapt and you must adapt fast. We are constantly on top of the requirements. Since every single challenge that rises in the industry affects our entire customer base. And we stay ready for them before anyone else since we are in full contro ofl things.
DeliverabilityAgent uses no third party components that we need updates for. So if there is a new industry standard requirement that involves serious coding, we update our core software almost instantly. Most of the email platforms out there are based on third party software providers like PowerMTA or open source MTAs like Qmail.
Our technology is 100% proprietary. There is nothing we cannot manage in a reasonable amount of time.
If your company must send email in seven different ways, then it’s time to switch from an ESP to DeliverabilityAgent. You will need the flexibility of an email oriented software company behind your mailings. That’s exactly what DeliverabilityAgent means.
We have provided the technology for job search engines, email invitation based companies, ESPs…I can’t remember any other specifics but you get the idea. When you are thinking of a massive, email deployment infrastructure and you know that you will exceed your ESPs email capability, then it’s time for you to partner with the company that is the real muscle behind the commercial, standard services out there.
Your company can grow at a different pace than others this way. Because we enable you to maintain strong communication between your team and your provider. We understand this, since we’ve been the providers for the biggest players in the industry for over a decade. And we have the right team to make it happen.
The same people that created DeliverabilityAgent, still work at the company. You will be talking to them. That includes myself.
An enterprise level ESP will work wonders for the majority of the companies out there with a customer list that they need to reach out to from time to time. This is their main business purpose.
Now when you have to set up an email infrastructure, with very specific needs for different purposes, you will end up using a mix of ESPs to serve each one of these goals. It becomes really, really messy.
However DeliverabilityAgent will not only allow you to interact with other ESPs from a centralized standpoint but you will end up eliminating the need for it once you start getting full control of things. The same thing happens when you start a company where high volume email will the central in your business. You need more than just a user interface, or API, to send an email campaign or trigger based emails.