Dotdigital Email Deliverability

Dave Carr
Dave Carr
  • Updated

In this article, we’ll explain the concept of email deliverability in Dotdigital. You’ll also find information on where to find and how to improve Sender Reputation, troubleshooting email deliverability and best practice for sending emails through Dotdigital.

Before you read this article, you should be familiar with:

In this article, you’ll find information on:

 

What is Email Deliverability?

Deliverability refers to the ability of an email to reach a customer's inbox. This includes:

  • Whether the email has been accepted by the email provider.
  • If the email passes through the email provider’s spam filters.
  • Where the email is delivered to. For example, inbox, spam/junk or promotions folder.

Whether an email is delivered and which folder it is delivered to depends on your Sender Reputation.

 

What is Sender Reputation?

Sender Reputation (also known as a sender score) is a rating assigned by email providers to your sending domain to determine whether your email is delivered, and which folder it is delivered to.

A good Sender Reputation means your emails are more likely to be delivered to the customer’s inbox. A poor Sender Reputation means your emails are delivered to another folder other than the inbox (for example Spam/Junk or Promotions (Gmail)), or not delivered at all.

TIP: Your Sender Reputation is evaluated by Dotdigital every 14 days.

 

How to view Sender Reputation in Dotdigital

To view your Sender Reputation in Dotdigital, follow these steps:

  • Expand the User menu and click Settings:

     

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  • Go to General:

     

    general_settings_dotdigital.png

  • Click Sender Reputation:

     

    sender_reputation_menu.png

You’ll see your current Sender reputation:

sender_reputation.png

Next to your Sender Reputation you’ll see your Reputation indicators.

 

Reputation Indicators

Reputation indicators are used to calculate your Sender reputation.

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Next to each indicator, you’ll see an Improve this score link. Clicking on this link will take you to Dotdigital’s Support articles where you’ll find advice on how to improve your Sender Reputation. We’ve listed these links below:

For more information read Understand your sender reputation on Dotdigital’s support centre.

WARNING: If your Sender Reputation has decreased, we recommend immediately taking steps to resolve this.

Delaying taking action means it will take you longer to improve your Sender Reputation and the deliverability of your emails.

It isn’t possible to immediately resolve any issues with your Sender Reputation. Your Sender Reputation is decided by email providers. For more information about actions you can take, go to How to improve and maintain Sender Reputation.

 

What can cause a poor Sender Reputation?

There are several factors that can cause a poor Sender Reputation:

  • You can view the delivery statistics for your emails by following these steps:

    1. In Dotdigital, go to Analytics > Dashboards:


      analytics_dashboards.png

    2. Scroll down to the Delivery section. Click on the stats to view the report:


      delivery_dashboard.png

    3. You’ll be able to view the stats for your email campaigns:


 

ISP Complaints

An ISP complaint occurs when a customer marks your email as spam. Too many ISP complaints could result in your emails being blocked by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or email provider.

If a customer marks one of your emails as spam, they’ll be added to your suppression list. Their Contact Preferences in Spektrix will be updated overnight and (as long as you use Contact Preferences to build Customer Lists) they will no longer receive any more emails from your organisation.

For information on resubscribing customers, read the How to resubscribe a customer section of the Managing Unsubscribes and Suppressions article.

TIP: If an email campaign receives a high number of complaints, this usually indicates that the email has been automatically marked as spam by the email provider/ISP.

  • To view ISP complaints for a specific Email Campaign in Dotdigital, follow these steps:

    1. Go to Analytics > Reports:

       

    2. Select the email campaign you want to report on
    3. In the Campaign report screen, click MORE REPORTS:

       

    4. Select ISP complaints:

       

    In the ISP complaints report, you’ll be able to see customers who have marked your email as spam and the email address it was sent to:

    TIP: If one domain is affected, for example Hotmail, this can indicate that the email provider is automatically marking your emails as spam. For more information on how to resolve this, go to Issues with specific email domains.

 

High number of Bounces

If an email can’t be delivered this is known as a bounce. There are two types of bounce:

 

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce occurs when an email has reached the customer’s email server but it has bounced back as undeliverable. Soft Bounces are usually temporary.

An email can soft bounce due to the following reasons:

  • The customer’s mailbox was full
  • The email server was temporarily unavailable
  • The email was too large for the customer’s inbox

An email will soft bounce a certain number of times before the customer’s email address is added to your suppression list.

TIP: You can adjust your soft bounce settings in Dotdigital to control how many consecutive soft bounces are returned from an email address before it’s automatically added to your suppression list.

For more information read Dotdigital’s article on Adjusting soft bounce settings.

Emails can also be marked as soft bounced when a ISP/Inbox provider temporarily blocked the email due to it looking like spam or a decrease in Sender Reputation.

To identify if this is the issue, follow these steps:

  1. In Dotdigital, go to Analytics > Reports:

     

    598caea2-c83f-48b0-8b9e-3e597c2930f3

  2. Select the email campaign you want to report on
  3. In the Campaign report screen, click MORE REPORTS > Email domain performance:

     

    email_domain_performance.png

Look at the domains to see if one particular inbox is an issue.

 

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce occurs when an email is sent but is permanently rejected by the email server. This could be due to:

  • An invalid email address
  • A non-existent email address

TIP: Once an email has hard bounced, the email address will be automatically added to your suppression list. For more information, read What are Suppressions?

 

Viewing the Bounce report in Dotdigital

You can view a list of all bounced email addresses for each email campaign in Dotdigital.

To view the Bounce report, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Analytics > Reports:


  2. Select the email campaign you want to report on
  3. Click the dropdown arrow next to MORE REPORTS:


  4. Select Soft Bounces or Hard Bounces:


In the Soft Bounce report, you’ll be able to filter on soft bounce or mailed blocked types:

In the Hard Bounce report, you’ll see an entry for each email address that bounced: 

  • Soft Bounce reasons

    • General bounce
    • DNS failure
    • Mailbox full
    • Message too large
    • Transient bounce
    • Challenge/response
    • Bounce - but no email address returned

    For more information on each reason, read Dotdigital’s article on Soft Bounces.

     

    Mail blocked reasons

    • Mail blocked
    • Mail blocked - relay denied
    • Mail blocked - spam detected

    If you see Mail blocked - spam detected, jump to Reviewing your emails for potential spam content for more information.

    For more information on each reason, read Dotdigital’s article on Mail blocks.

 

Increase in volume or frequency of emails

A sudden increase in the volume or frequency of emails can trigger an email provider’s spam filter.

There is no definite measurement as this can depend on the amount of emails you usually send. For example, let’s say you send a weekly email to 8,000 customers and then send an email every month to 25,000 customers. This increase might trigger an email provider’s spam filter.

If you want to increase the number of emails you send, you should consider gradually increasing (also known as ramping up) the amount of emails you send.

TIP: To send a one off email to a large number of customers, you might want to consider splitting the email and sending over multiple days.

For further information, read the following:

If you’ve already sent the email, check the following:

  • View your Sender Reputation in Dotdigital. If your Sender Reputation is poor, follow the advice given to improve your score.
  • Continue sending your normal volume of emails and regularly check your Email Campaign Report for signs of deliverability issues.
  • When sending your next email, consider ramping up your Dotdigital account.

 

How to improve and maintain Sender Reputation

If you have a poor or bad Sender Reputation, we’d recommend reading this section for best practice on maintaining your Sender Reputation.

Spektrix promotes a long-term approach to managing sender reputation by focusing on maintaining a positive relationship with both email providers and recipients. Rather than resolving issues with a particular email or Customer List, we recommend improving your overall sending practices.

 

Targeted, high quality content

Start by sending relevant, high quality content that aligns with your audience's interests and needs. By ensuring emails are valuable and targeted, you can reduce the risk of customers marking them as spam, or unsubscribing. If your customers mark your emails as spam this will negatively impact your Sender Reputation.

For more information, read the following articles:

 

Sending Frequency

Managing your sending frequency is crucial. Sending too many emails may lead to disengagement, while inconsistent sending can raise red flags for email providers. Striking a balance in email volume helps establish a trusted sending pattern, which is important for long-term deliverability.

For more information, read How to warm up a new Dotdigital Account.

You can also use Dotdigital Programs to ensure emails are delivered at the most relevant time.

For more information, read the following articles:

 

Improving engagement and reducing Unsubscribes

Personalised and dynamic content can drive higher engagement and reduce Unsubscribes and ISP complaints.

For more information, read the following articles:

 

Reviewing your Mailing List contacts

You should keep your email lists clean by regularly removing inactive or invalid email addresses. This helps reduce bounce rates and prevents your emails from being flagged as harmful.

For more information, read Mailing List Re-engagement Program Template.

 

Contact Preferences

By obtaining and using Contact Preferences, you’ll not only build trust with your audience but also ensure that your emails are welcomed. Additionally, providing a clear unsubscribe option means customers are more likely to unsubscribe than mark your emails as spam.

 

Reporting on the performance of Email Campaigns

Spektrix and Dotdigital provide reports on key email metrics such as sent, delivered, bounced, opens, clicks, and ROI. These insights help you assess the performance of email campaigns, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimise future emails and improve your reputation.

For more information, read the following articles:

 

Reviewing your Email Campaigns for potential spam content

When you send an email through Dotdigital, each email will be scanned by the customer’s email provider. If an email looks like a spam email, it will either be delivered to the spam/junk folder, another folder (for example, Promotions in Gmail), or not delivered at all.

You can check if emails are being flagged as spam by viewing the Soft Bounce report. Any emails with content that is detected as spam will have a bounce reason Mail blocked - Spam detected.

TIP: When designing your Email Campaign, you can use the Spam check in the Utilities menu in Dotdigital.

For more information, read Review tools for email campaigns: the Utilities menu.

To help prevent emails from being flagged as spam, review the following before sending your email:

As well as emails being automatically marked as spam, customers marking your emails as spam will lower your reputation:

Review the following:

  • Ensure you trust the data being added to your mailing list. Does your sign up form use captcha?
  • Ensure you include Contact Preferences in your Segmentation
  • Segment your data to send relevant content

 

Subject Line

An email is more likely to be flagged as spam if the subject line contains the following:

  • Overuse of emojis

Using Emojis doesn’t mean your messages will be automatically marked as spam. Think about your audience and what they expect to receive. Replacing too many words or using excessive amounts of emojis might mean your customers think your email is spam.

  • Incorrect punctuation or capitalisation

TIP: You can use Winston AI to check the grammar and tone of your subject line.

 

Links

Using incorrect links in an email means the email is more likely to be flagged as spam. Check the following:

  • The links within the email should direct your customers to a legitimate website.

     

  • Do not use link shorteners. Link shorteners can direct customers to malicious websites or initiate malware downloads on their device. If the link shortening service goes offline or is discontinued, the shortened link will no longer work.

     

  • Use descriptive text in your link. This will indicate the link’s purpose or destination. Using descriptive text can help to improve accessibility.

    Avoid using “click here” or “here” in your link text. Instead, write descriptive hyperlink titles such as “you can buy tickets from our website”.

 

Images

When an email is sent, text in the email is scanned by the customer’s email provider to identify any content that might be classed as spam.

If an email contains any images with embedded text, an email provider may mark the email as spam as not all providers can detect text embedded onto an image.

Emails should contain separate text and images. Adding Alt text to images can help to improve Sender Reputation and accessibility.

 

Profanity

Email providers use filters to identify works found in spam emails. Using profane language in an email can trigger spam filters.

Avoid the use of profanities to help improve your Sender Reputation.

 

Reply-to address

Providing a reply address can improve your Sender Reputation.

  • Having a valid and correctly configured reply-to address helps demonstrate that the email is not suspicious
  • A reply-to address that is correctly managed (where replies are responded to) signals to email providers that you are actively managing your email communications

TIP: When setting up a reply-to address, separate subdomains are essential to protect the reputation of your main domain. For example, we always recommend keeping your website domain separate from your email domain. This will protect your website from becoming flagged if there is an accidental misuse of your email domain.

 

Email Design

Before you send an email, you should test it thoroughly. Sending a test email to yourself and colleagues can help identify any issues.

  • Does the email and images display correctly on a mobile/cell phone or tablet?
  • Does the email and images display correctly using different inboxes? For example, Outlook 365, web versions of Outlook, Email apps on a mobile/cell phone.

 

Friendly from name

A friendly ‘from’ name is displayed in the ‘from’ field of an email.

Using a friendly ‘from’ name instead may help customers identify who the email is from and its intended purpose.

If a customer recognises who the email is from, they’re more likely to open it.

 

Troubleshooting Dotdigital Email Deliverability

The following sections should help you troubleshoot any Dotdigital deliverability issues. Proceed through the article, or jump to the relevant section for your issue.

 

Email delivery rate has decreased

If you notice your delivery rate has decreased, or more customers get in touch to report not receiving emails, read the following sections for advice.

 

Sender Reputation

Check your Sender Reputation and Reputation indicators. If you see any bad or poor scores, follow the advice on how to improve your Sender Reputation.

 

Imported data

Have you imported any new data? For example, a list of customers from a spreadsheet. The following can affect email deliverability and Sender Reputation:

 

Rebranding

Changing logos or email design, means customers may no longer recognise your emails and mark them as spam.

If you’re going through a rebranding process, you might want to send an email to your customers to let them know.

 

Sending email address

If the domain of your sending address has changed, this can affect your Sender Reputation.

Changing a sending domain means email providers will reset your Sender Reputation due to no history with your sending address. You’ll need to warm up your new email address.

For more information, read How to warm up a new Dotdigital account.

 

Volume or frequency of emails

An increase in the volume of frequency of emails can affect email delivery. For example, let's say you usually send one email every two weeks, but are now sending more frequent emails.

To check, go to Analytics > Reports in Dotdigital:

If you see an increase in volume or frequency, this can affect your Sender Reputation. For more information on how to improve this, read Increase in volume or frequency of email campaigns.

 

Emails delivered to Spam/Junk/Promotions folders

When an email is sent, customers may get in touch to let you know they haven’t received it. Google and Apple utilise AI to track and sort these emails into folders by their type. This can mean the email may have been delivered to another folder other than the customer’s inbox.

For example, an email with a PDF attachment might be classed as marketing and end up in the promotions folder in Gmail.

When sending emails, you can’t control how an email provider categorises your email. Google and Apple decide how to categorise your emails based on their own policies.

 

Gmail categorisation

Google uses the following categories in Gmail:

  • Primary: Emails from people you know
  • Social: Social networks and media sharing sites
  • Promotions: Offers, discounts and other promotional emails
  • Updates: Automated confirmations, notifications and reminders
  • Forums: Emails from online forums, discussion boards and mailing lists

TIP: If an email is delivered to the promotions folder, Gmail users can still interact with the email. For example, opening a link, or viewing images in the email.

Customers can add the email address to their contacts to prevent future emails ending up in the Promotions folder.

 

Apple categorisation

From IOS 18 onwards, Apple has changed the way emails are categorized in Apple Mail. The categories are:

  • Primary: Personal and time-sensitive emails
  • Transactions: Confirmations, receipts and delivery/shipping
  • Updates News, subscriptions and social media notifications
  • Promotions: Marketing emails, special offers and coupons from businesses and organisations

Maintaining a good Sender Reputation should help ensure emails are delivered to a customer’s inbox.

TIP: The subject line of an email can determine which folder an email is delivered to. For example, referring to ‘sales or ‘discounts’ might mean a greater chance of that email being delivered to a sales or promotions folder.

 

How to ensure emails are delivered to the inbox

Email providers don’t provide any advice on how to stop emails being delivered to folders other than the inbox. You can offer the following advice to your customers:

  • Manually move emails to their main inbox
  • Add the sending address as a contact to their safe senders list

REMINDER: Maintaining a good Sender Reputation should help ensure emails are delivered to a customer’s inbox.

If only one email is being delivered to another folder other than the inbox, check your email for content that might be considered as spam.

If more than one email is affected, read How to improve and maintain Sender Reputation.

 

Issues with specific email domains

If your Sender reputation has only deteriorated with one email provider you should attempt to ramp up with that provider.

For example, if you notice an issue with all emails to hotmail addresses, this can indicate that the email provider is automatically marking your emails as spam. For more information on how to resolve this, go to Issues with specific email domains.

You can help improve your Sender Reputation by identifying less engaged customers and only emailing the most engaged customers with that provider to improve your reputation with them.

Follow these steps:

  1. In a Customer list, use a Customer Segment to identify all hotmail customers
  2. In the Customer wrapper, add the Email Address metric as criteria:


  3. To search for all customers with a hotmail address enter %@hotmail.com as your criteria:


  4. Use a Marketing Segment to identify which Customers opened the Email. You could then choose only to engage with Customers who clicked a specific link and exclude any customers who haven’t opened an email or clicked a link in the last six months:


    find_customers_who.png

  5. Send integrated emails to these customers only for a few weeks before adding back the less engaged customers. You should regularly check the Email Campaign Report in Dotdigital.  If this doesn’t improve, follow the steps in How to improve and maintain your Sender Reputation.

If you manage your own sending domain, you can also use the following tools to check inbox provider reports:

 

Setting up a Custom From Address

Sending emails from a custom from address (CFA) may help to improve your Sender Reputation, engagement and brand recognition.

Read Create a custom from address on Dotdigital’s support centre.

To set up a custom from address, contact our Support Team.

 

Further Reading

This article should give you the information you need to understand Dotdigital email deliverability. To learn more, visit the Communicate with your customers section of the Support Centre.