Everest Certification Playbook: Beginner

• Ensure you have received confirmation of acceptance into the Certification program from the Validity Certification team. Certification is an add-on service to Everest requiring an application and approval process. 
  • Learn more about Certification 
  • Contact the Certification team at certification@validity.com for status updates. 
• 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 the Everest Basic Set Up Guide. 

Important! Be sure you know your Certification service tier. Your service tier is volume-based and there are limits to the number of Certified IPs your account may have as outlined in the Certification Requirements. You can find your subscription information by navigating to: My Everest>Account Settings>Subscription. 

• Certification terminology 
• Common Certification challenges 
• Important metrics related to Certification 
• How Certification fits into your process 
• Managing your Certified IPs 
• What to do next 

• Daily Performance Report (DPR): A daily summary report of your Certified IPs sent to a Certified member’s email address.  
• Active: Your IPs are receiving preferential treatment at all our partner providers. 
• Partially suspended: Your IPs are partially suspended, and performance issues are preventing preferential treatment at one or more partner providers. 
• Suspended: Your IPs are suspended and are not receiving preferential treatment at any of our partner providers. 
• Warnings: Your IPs are approaching suspension thresholds due to performance issues. 
• Sender Reputation Data (SRD) Rate: A Microsoft metric measuring the percentage of people in their SRD program voting your email as junk mail. 
  • For additional information, read: How does the Microsoft Sender Reputation Data (SRD) voting system work?  
• Cloudmark traps: A Certification data provider providing spam trap data from their internal spam trap network. 
• Group threshold: The sum of a specific metric across all IPs. Exceeding group compliance thresholds causes a suspension even if your IPs alone do not exceed the individual IP thresholds. 
• Compliance threshold: The limit set by Certification partners causing a suspension when exceeded. 

Read the Certification Requirements for additional information about compliance thresholds.  

Common sender challenges prior to joining Certification are: 

• I’m a legitimate sender and follow sending best practices but our holiday campaign performance is not as good as expected. 
• We struggle with inbox placement at Microsoft and want more insights into possible causes.

By implementing sending best practices and qualifying for Validity’s Certification program, senders see improvements in: 

• Inbox placement rate 

Having a high delivered rate only tells you how much of your email the mailbox providers accepted for delivery. Your inbox placement rate tells you how much of the delivered email went into your subscriber’s inbox, spam folder, or went missing. Use Everest’s Certification to identify trends and troubleshoot deliverability problems. 

From Everest: 

• Inbox placement rate 
• Compliance thresholds 

Read the Certification Requirements for additional information about compliance thresholds. 

A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Deciding what campaign to run takes planning based on your company’s business objectives and how you perform against the competition.  

Pre-send 

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

In-Flight 

• Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list.
• Certification benefits applied by participating partners.
• View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement feature.
• View your Certified IPs performance.

Monitoring 

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

Monitor Inbox Placement for Certified IPs 

Active, Certified IPs receive filtering benefits at many mailbox providers and spam filtering companies. Monitor your inbox placement for campaigns sent to the Everest seed list (In-Flight>Inbox Placement) and check your Certification metrics daily. Certification data is provided directly to Everest by participating partners, so use it to help achieve and maintain high inbox placement rates during your critical sending times. 

Daily Performance Report (DPR) 

All Certification clients receive the Daily Performance Report (DPR) as soon as your user account is created in Everest. It is a valuable daily resource to quickly identify issues and risks with your email program.  

If you have not received your first DPR or would like to opt-out of the DPR, send an email to support@validity.com. If you opt-out of the DPR, it is recommended to login to Everest, set up important alerts, and view your Certification data daily. 

Upon receiving your first DPR in your mailbox: 

1. Check your Certification status. 

• Green: Active = Full benefits 
• Red: Suspended = Partial or Full Suspension 
• Orange: Warning = Approaching Suspension 

Even if all your IPs have a Green status, it is a good idea to check for metric trends as a proactive measure to help identify potential issues. It is natural for metrics to fluctuate over time, but a proactive approach to monitoring and troubleshooting helps your IPs consistently receive full Certification benefits. 

2. Check your IP metrics to see if any of them are approaching a threshold. 

If metrics are near a threshold, take steps to identify a possible cause. Please visit the Validity Help Center for additional information on managing your Certification account and troubleshooting potential issues.  

Login to Everest for additional data insights. 

1. Login to Everest 

2. Navigate to In-Flight>Certification 

3. Check your Certified IP status 

4. Click on the details arrow for each IP address in the IP Performance section 

5. If your IP has a Warning or Suspended status, check the Metric for the cause and compare your Rate/Count to the threshold. 

6. Review data exports and compare with deliverability performance metrics for campaigns sent over the past 30 days.

• Click Export Summary to see aggregate performance data over the past 30 days for the IP you are investigating.
• Click Export Daily Data to see daily performance data over the past 30 days for each Certified IP.

Please visit the Validity Help Center for additional information on troubleshooting potential issues.  

1. Check your DPR and login to Everest daily to proactively manage and monitor your Certified IPs. 

2. Proceed to the intermediate Certification playbook.

• Everest Certification Playbook: Intermediate 

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

• Everest playbooks