My September blog focused on improvements to our email platform. I’d like to take a moment to update you on our progress and provide more details on what to expect this month.
All clients that sent email through egroups.connectedcommunity.org have been migrated to our new outbound email architecture and we have begun migrating clients that send email through their own domain. Our goal is to have all clients migrated by November. The results have been fantastic. We are seeing a bounce rate of roughly 0.1% and a complaint rate of roughly 0.01%. There will always be bounces due to bad email addresses and some members will occasionally hit the spam button often not realizing the impact. We are very pleased that our rates are very low as it shows that our planning and email delivery strategy work.
Low bounce and complaint rates help us maintain a very high email reputation. Amazon sets thresholds on how much email they will deliver on your behalf. Initially they start you at 10,000 emails per day and will only raise your threshold if your email statistics show that you adhere to good practices. We now have a threshold of 5 million emails a day.
What exactly is meant by “email delivery strategy” and how does HL partner with our clients to implement it:
- We validate email addresses for new clients prior to subscribing them to discussions.
- We monitor our email reputation and email statistics to alert us to any issues.
- We suppress delivery attempts to email addresses that bounce and to members that complain.
- We provide tools for our clients to monitor delivery issues so that they can work with their members to maintain current and accurate email address data.
When the new administrative interface is released, you will see a few new tools.
- Email Delivery Notification – A specified list of recipients may be notified about email delivery issues occurring on your site. Notifications will be sent via email. You may configure the notification to occur at specified times of the day or based on a time interval. An email notification will only be generated if there are delivery issues detected since last check.
- Email Delivery Summary - Summarizes email delivery issues by type and by bounce DNS status. You may click on the count hyperlink to view the details.
- Email Delivery Management – Provides reporting and actions for email addresses with delivery issues due to bounces and complaints.
Additionally, we will be alerting members to any delivery issues they have for email addresses related to their account.
In summary, the outbound email architecture is working very well and you can expect to see new tools this month. We are actively working on more exciting changes related to processing inbound email and to the look and feel of the emails themselves. More to come in a future blog.