Handling of mail campaigns

Email campaigns are a powerful tool for reaching and educating candidates. But there are important guidelines and best practices you should follow to ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns and maintain your domain’s reputation.

The risk of mail campaigns

Generally speaking, the more emails you send in an automated fashion, the higher the likelihood that your recipients’ IT infrastructure will see them as just that and possibly classify them as spam.

Note for Startups: If you are a new startup, you naturally want to do business as quickly as possible. Please keep in mind: Your domain is completely unknown and if then large amounts of mails are sent, it can be that you lose your reputation much (really much) faster than you want. Because: Nobody knows you and all of a sudden a large amount of emails comes in. This is classified as spam by most systems.

Start small and let your domain warm up

Before you start big campaigns, you should start with smaller campaigns over several weeks and not every day. Warming up is a proven principle, so that the reputation of your domain can increase healthily. Our recommendation is to run mail campaigns in the higher 3-digit range only after 3-4 weeks.

Reputation: Easy to lose, hard to regain

Email reputation is a measure of how trustworthy your email activity is. A bad reputation can get your emails marked as spam or blocked by mailbox providers. It’s much easier to lose a good reputation than to restore it. That’s why it’s important to follow best practices and keep an eye on the metrics listed below. For this reason alone, it’s important to start slowly and on a smaller scale as previously mentioned until you create and send larger campaigns.

Example Your email reputation can be compared to your credit score in the financial business. If you haven’t sent any emails, you don’t have a bad reputation, but you don’t have a good one either. Now imagine that you go to the bank without any basis and ask for a very large loan. You won’t get it because the bank doesn’t think you are creditworthy. It is the same with the reputation of your domain.

Send only to valid email addresses

Sounds easier in theory than it actually is. We know. Nevertheless, you should make sure that you don’t send your emails to invalid addresses. This also has an impact on the reputation of your domain. Can’t always be avoided, of course. There are services on the internet that check email addresses for validity. So you can check this in the context of a migration and sort out invalid addresses. If you need more information about this, please let us know.

Our provider for email campaigns is subject to regulations regarding data protection (EU-GDPR). In this context, there are limitations regarding the amounts you send or complaints that come back.

Thresholds

To ensure that your account is not blocked for security reasons, the following thresholds should not be exceeded:

Bounces: ≤ 5% (Calculated on the number of rejected messages).
Unsubscribes: ≤ 1.4% or 1% if unsubscribes > clicks
Spam complaints: ≤ 0.08% (Calculated on the number of messages reported as spam)
Blocks: <20% (Calculated on the number of messages blocked).

Of course, you can reactivate your account at any time, but you will have to fill out a questionnaire that will be evaluated by the provider. Please keep in mind that the blocking is done to protect you. If this did not happen, your reputation would continue to decline and each of your emails would end up in spam. This would undoubtedly be the worst case scenario for recruiters.

Double Opt-In

Make sure that all recipients of your emails have gone through the double opt-in process. This means that they have given their consent twice, once at sign-up and then again by confirming via email. This minimizes the risk of exceeding the above metrics because your customers know what to expect and can relate to you and your domain. Imagine that you get an email from someone you don’t even know. It is advisable to regularly ask for the recipients’ consent.

Long story, short

If you slowly start to use the mail campaigns, do not exhaust the quantities and your recipients know that they expect emails from you, you do not have to worry about the above.