We previously shared an article about Gmail and Yahoo’s new sender guidelines and six factors that affect email deliverability. A bunch of factors will affect email deliverability this Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), and for ecommerce brands, this might be daunting to manage. 

That’s why we’ve created a pre-BFCM deliverability checklist to help you capitalize on the holiday shopping frenzy. To make sure your Black Friday email campaigns reach shoppers, work through this checklist to improve email deliverability before BFCM.

🔲 Know your sender reputation  

Checking your sender reputation is a key part of making sure your emails land in the inbox. You can start by using tools like Google Postmaster Tools or Sender Score to assess your current reputation score. You’ll get insights on spam complaints, bounce rates, and engagement levels, helping you spot any potential issues. Keeping an eye on these metrics ensures that your emails are hitting the inbox and not the dreaded spam folder.

🔲 Update your content protocols  

Get yourself out of the habit of using any language or content tactics that email filters could see as spammy. Emails are a great opportunity to level up your brand, so create an email style guide to check all new campaigns against.  

When it comes to the ways content affects your brand, sometimes what people receive is just as important as what they don’t. They say if you love something, set it free. In email marketing, this is just as much your benefit as it is your customers’. 

If you frustrate someone by hiding or omitting an easy opt-out, you’ll likely never be able to retarget them. And if people aren’t interested in your emails, that’s valuable information to have. Regardless, this practice creates a negative user experience, which you always want to avoid.  

Most email marketers have to comply with this anyway. If you send 5,000 or more emails a day, Gmail requires that your messages support one-click unsubscribe. Regardless, it’s an important principle to keep in mind.  

🔲 Make sure your authentication is up to date  

This is the first step to ensuring you’re actually meeting the new mandates put out by Gmail and Yahoo. Per Google, you should have at least already set up DKIM or SPF authentication for your sending domains. And again, if you’re sending more than 5,000 emails a day, you’ll need to set up both DKIM and SPF authentication for your domain as well as DMARC for your sending domain.  

It might seem tedious, but remember: authenticating your emails using industry standards has benefits. It protects your customers from malicious messages, and it prevents bad actors from impersonating your brand. That means your emails are much more likely to end up in inboxes because filters aren’t marking them as spam.  

🔲 Clean up your email lists 

As an email marketer, you want to make as many people as possible see your emails. But it’s important to keep your email lists updated to people who are likely to want to receive them. Bounce rate, open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaint rate are all indicators of email list hygiene. You should keep track of all these metrics to keep your deliverability and sender reputation high. 

And a healthy email list is not only essential for deliverability of your campaigns. It’s also an important part of understanding which of your customers are actually engaging with your emails. This is the only way you can optimize the performance of your campaigns.   

🔲 Standardize your sending practices 

Much like your content protocols, your sending practices are an important thing to keep consistent. For example, say BFCM will be your first email campaign in six months. If you plan to send out 300,000 emails, you’ll probably take a hit to your sender reputation. 

Documentation can help here. Sit down and plan out an email cadence for the year and stick to it. Take some time to ramp up your email campaigns while focusing on content and list quality. This will help build your sender reputation ahead of high-volume times of year like BFCM. 

🔲 Stay ahead of AI spam filters  

Gmail and Yahoo are always improving their spam filtering efforts, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest updates. To do that, subscribe to industry newsletters that give updates on the latest technology trends impacting email marketers. You can also subscribe to Google’s own Gmail product blog. This is where they announced that they would be adding new authentication requirements.  

As mentioned, sender reputation is something these filters take into account. So focus on keeping your audience engaged throughout the year to maintain your reputation and deliverability. 

By working through this checklist ahead of BFCM, you’ll be well-positioned to build a truly successful Black Friday email campaign.

Want to see how Maropost can increase the deliverability of your campaigns? Get a demo.