Everest Sending Reputation Playbook: Intermediate

• If you are a new Everest customer with no prior relationship with Validity, complete onboarding to ensure you are familiar with navigating and using Everest.   
• If you were a Return Path or 250ok customer and are moving to Everest, complete your migration process. 
• Ensure you have completed:
  • Everest Basic Set Up Guide. 
  • Everest Advanced Setup Guide 2: Sending Reputation (FBL Complaints, Microsoft SNDS, Google Postmaster)  

Important! Be sure you know the subscription allotments based on your service tier and plan according to your sending frequency and the size of your email database. You can find your subscription information by navigating to: My Everest>Account Settings>Subscription. 

• Common sending reputation challenges 
• How monitoring sending reputation fits into your process 
• Important sending reputation metrics and where to find them 
• Establish a baseline 
• Setting up alerts 
• Fixing sending reputation issues 
• How to use Everest to improve sending reputation 
• What to do next 

Common challenges associated with poor sending reputation are: 

• We are aware of the impact sending reputation has on our performance but find it difficult to know what to improve. 
• We have multiple brands and offices around the world and troubleshooting deliverability problems related to our sending reputation is difficult. 
• I want to be alerted to potential sending reputation issues as they occur instead of finding out days or weeks later. 

Monitoring your sending reputation helps you identify problems associated with: 

• Flat or decreasing inbox placement rates 
• Flat or decreasing open and click rates 

A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Sending reputation metrics are symptoms of your good or poor sending practices, so frequent monitoring is vital to identifying and fixing potential problems.

Pre-send 

• Inform your email campaign strategy with Everest’s Competitive Intelligence 
• Plan campaign 
• Select target subscriber list  
• Design campaign 
• Validate target subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation 
• Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content 

In-Flight 

• Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list 
• View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement 

Monitoring 

• Monitor engagement metrics using Everest’s Engagement, your ESP, or internal sending platform. 
• Monitor sending reputation metrics using Everest’s Monitoring feature to understand the impact to your deliverability. 
• Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature. 

To determine if your efforts to improve sending reputation are working, you need to establish baseline sending reputation metrics. Record the baseline metrics for the items listed below in a spreadsheet for future reference and compare performance to your baseline metrics monthly. Use historical data for your baseline metrics if available from your ESP or sending platform. If you do not have historical data, establish a baseline after 15 - 30 days of activity depending on your sending frequency.  Metrics are viewed on the Overview page within Monitoring>Reputation.

• Sender Score
• Spam Traps
• Complaints (Feedback Loops) (integration required)
• Signal Spam Complaints (integration required)

After establishing your baseline sending reputation metrics, create alerts to be notified of potential sending reputation issues. Setting the correct alert values may require adjustments over time. Frequent alerts may be ignored and don’t provide value, so make sure you set the alert criteria appropriately for your sending practices and personal preference. 

1. Login to Everest 
2. Navigate to My Everest>Alerts 
3. Click New Alert 
4. Enter description: Blocklist Alert 
5. Select the Blocklistings & DNS Issues Category 
6. Select if my IP address and enter the IP address number
   • Select Profile if you wish to use a monitoring profile. Profiles are a good option if you set up groups of IPs and domains as it may reduce the number of alerts received.
7. Select has any blocklist activity 
   • You can select individual blocklists if preferred by selecting is blocklisted on and selecting the desired blocklists.
   • Many senders prioritize alerts for important blocklists 
8. Select how you wish to be notified by toggling the options listed in the Notify me via section 
9. Select alert frequency in the Run this alert section 
   • Start with a daily alert and adjust as needed 
10. Repeat steps 3-9 for each IP address and domain 

Set up additional alerts for complaints (integration required) and spam traps. Use your baseline metrics to help determine alert thresholds. 

1. Complaints: Start with a 10% increase from your 30-day average and adjust accordingly. 
   • Keep in mind that subscribers can only mark a message as spam if it is delivered to their inbox. You can have a 0% complaint rate if all your email is blocked or sent to the spam folder. 
2. Spam traps: Start with all trap hits but set the alert for specific types of spam trap based on areas of concern. Alerts are especially important if you introduce new acquisition methods or make changes to your list hygiene practices. 
   • Pristine: list acquisition 
   • Recycled: list hygiene 
   • Typo traps: data quality 

Poor sending reputation metrics related to spam traps, complaints, and blocklistings are symptoms of poor sending practices. They are fixed by: 

• Sending to valid email addresses as identified using Everest’s List Validation.
• Using opt-in permission methods.
• Sending consistent and predictable volume from your IPs.
• Using the same IPs and domains to send your email over time and not frequently changing IPs and domains to try and game the system.
• Ensuring all subscribers know exactly what email to expect and when to expect it.
• Sending at a frequency desired by the subscriber.
• Not increasing frequency unexpectedly.
• Making your email easily recognizable as coming from your brand.
• Signing up with all available complaint feedback loops and suppressing complainers. 
• Suppressing email addresses identified as unknown or invalid after one bounce message. 
• Suppressing unengaged subscribers.  
• Creating relevant content that subscribers want to read.
• Ensuring your websites and image servers are secure and do not contain viruses or malware.
• If sending from shared IPs, IP reputation can be improved by sending from dedicated IPs when following good sending practices and sending adequate volume of email consistently.
  • Talk to your ESP about your options and ask if you are a good candidate to use dedicated IPs.
  • Your business size, sending volume, sending practices, and budget may not support moving to dedicated IPs. 

As you troubleshoot causes of poor sending reputation metrics, use this list as a guideline for improvement opportunities. 

Use Everest to identify important trends, outliers, and patterns to help point you to specific causes of poor sending reputation. Longer-term trends generally suggest issues with one or more parts of your overall sending practices. Short-term trends suggest one or more issues with a specific campaign, segment, or IP address. 

Spam Traps 

Use these spam trap guidelines to determine improvement opportunities. 

• Pristine 
  • You are acquiring email addresses that never belonged to a person, which suggests list purchasing or list harvesting acquisition methods from you or a co-registration partner.
  • You also may need to tighten up the criteria used for suppressing unengaged users. Tighten criteria slowly so as not to negatively impact revenue. 
• Recycled 
  • All senders have some recycled spam traps and they are tolerated to a certain degree by mailbox providers. 
  • You may need to tighten up the criteria used for suppressing unengaged users. Tighten criteria slowly so as not to negatively impact revenue. 
• Typo traps 
  • Check your points of collection or email address entry processes for manual entry points. Every time an address is entered manually, there is a typo risk.
  • Use Everest’s List Validation to identify malformed domains. 

Spam trap monitoring in Everest 

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to Monitoring>Reputation 

3. Locate the Spam Traps tile and click View Report 

• • The date range defaults to 30 days but you can adjust the date range on the lower left to identify trends and outliers over a longer time period. 

4. Locate the Spam Trap Trend tile and identify any patterns, trends or outliers. Review trends for each trap type. Roll your mouse over a date to see detail.

• • Filter by Monitoring Profile or Trap Type to help pinpoint problem areas

• • Pristine 
    • Click on each trend filter option: Day, Profile, Subject, IP, Domain, and Friendly From 
    • Focus on fixing the cause of a Pristine spam trap first as they have a bigger negative impact to sending reputation than recycled or typo spam traps.
    • Fix:  
      • Use opt-in or confirmed opt-in permission methods 
      • Suppress unengaged subscribers frequently 
  • Recycled:   
    
    • Fix:
      • Suppress unengaged subscribers frequently
      • Implement a win-back strategy that requires the recipient to click a link to re-subscribe after a period of inactivity. Suppress all recipients that do not click the link.
      • Remove unknown or invalid users after one bounce. An abandoned email address is bounced as unknown or invalid prior to it becoming a spam trap.
  • Typo traps 
    • Fix:
      • Use the Everest List Validation API (developer resources required) to identify valid addresses as they are entered at the point of collection.
      • Validate your list using Everest’s List Validation to identify malformed domains. 
  • Fix for all types of spam traps: 
    • Stop buying lists or using list harvesting techniques. If you must buy lists, make sure you understand the methods by which the email addresses were acquired and closely track performance by list source. Also track the dates of any list purchase, when the addresses were added to your database and when they were sent mail. You will likely see increases in spam trap activity shortly after new lists are purchased and sent mail.

5. Locate the Trap Aging tile (spam traps are reported from the Validity partner network)

For each age range, click on the details icon. 

• • Trap type 
    • What type of traps are represented the most? Use the guidelines above to pinpoint opportunities to improve your sending practices.  
  • Subject line 
    • Check your campaign’s segmentation attributes. Did you send email to a lot of unengaged or new subscribers? 
  • IP address or domain 
    • Is there one or more IPs or domains acting as a primary spam trap source? 
    • Many senders segment using subdomains and/or IPs for transactional, marketing, and brand email, so IPs and domains can help you track down the spam trap source. 

For additional information on troubleshooting spam traps, please read: 

• Troubleshooting spam traps  

Complaints (FBL integration required) 

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to Monitoring>Reputation 

3. Locate the Complaints tile and click on View Report 

• • The date range defaults to 30 days but you can adjust the date range on the lower left to identify trends and outliers over a longer time period. 

4. Locate the Complaint Trend tile and identify any patterns, trends or outliers. Review trends by Day, Subject, and IP.

5. Filter complaints by mailbox provider to identify if one or more specific mailbox providers contribute a higher percentage of complaints.

6. Locate the Worst Recipients tile 

7. Click Download Suppression List 

• • Ensure all addresses listed in the CSV file are suppressed from future messages as they marked multiple messages as spam. 
  • If any of the addresses on the CSV file are not on your current suppression file, check your feedback loop process with your ESP or email administrator to ensure it is working properly. 

8. Click on the Complaint Samples tab 

• • Sort by Date, Sending IP, and subject line to determine if any of those attributes are complaint contributors.
  • Click on the details icon to view the creative to make sure it rendered as expected. 
  • Using Everest’s Design & Content feature helps you identify potential problems, but last-minute creative changes can cause rendering issues that can make your content appear spammy and lead to complaints. 

For specific campaigns that may contribute higher complaints, look at the segmentation criteria for high risk characteristics such as new subscribers and frequency or recency of last email delivery.

For additional information on troubleshooting complaints, please read: 

• Troubleshooting a spike in complaints from a particular mailbox provider 

Tip: If you see an unexpected large spike in complaints at one or more mailbox providers, you may have sent email to your suppression list. 

Blocklistings 

Many blocklistings are caused by an increase in spam trap hits and spam complaints, however, you should investigate listings with each blocklist provider to ensure there are no other potential causes such as unauthorized access to your sending infrastructure. 

Troubleshoot and fix the blocklisting cause prior to submitting a delisting request or you risk recurring blocklistings and continued sending reputation and deliverability problems. Focus and prioritize your time on important blocklists first as they have the most deliverability impact. 

• Which blocklists are most important to senders? 

Monitoring blocklists In Everest 

1. Login to Everest 
2. Navigate to Monitoring>Reputation 
3. Locate the Blocklisted tile and click View Report 
4. The filter defaults to currently listed IPs 
5. If your IP is listed, click on the detail icon for help resources and to submit a delisting request. 

Tips:  

• If you set up multiple monitoring profiles, filter blocklist results by clicking on the profile in the filters section. 

• Check inbox placement and engagement results that coincide with any blocklistings. You may not see immediate, any, or only minor deliverability problems for blocklistings on low tier blocklisting providers.  

1. After each campaign, monitor your sending reputation and inbox placement results. Compare your performance against your baseline metrics to determine if your efforts to identify and fix sending reputation problems are working.

2. Proceed to the advanced sending reputation playbook.

• Everest Sending Reputation Playbook: Advanced

3. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.  

• Everest Playbooks