*** This is intended for all clients sending their Seasonal E-Card through Vuture's Email Module.
Overview
This Help Desk Article serves as a checklist to make sure you're following email deliverability best practice when sending your seasonal E-Cards.
Why is this checklist important?
E-Card sends are typically one of your largest email sends all year. Often, we find that the lists used to send E-Cards contain many old, unengaged (i.e. no opens or clicks in last 12 months), and invalid email addresses (i.e. hard bounces). This increases your risk significantly for hitting spam traps and getting put on a blacklist. It also negatively impacts your sender reputation, which is used by ISPs for the placement of your email in the recipient's inbox (i.e. Spam / Junk folder).
Checklist for E-Card Sending
1. Remove any contacts who have not engaged with your mailings in the past 12 months (i.e. opened or clicked in an email) from your E-Card list. These unengaged contacts could be turned into recycled spam traps and may lead to blacklisting,.
2. Remove any contacts where there is no clear opt-in or you are not sure how this contact made it onto your E-Card list.
3. Verify that your contacts' email addresses are valid and up-to-date. This should be done continuously as part of your data hygiene strategy throughout the year. This will help to avoid high levels of bounce backs.
4 a. Use the Check List tool to double check your data and make sure you didn't miss removing any contacts that haven't engaged or have blank emails. Remove these from your E-Card list and CRM.
4 b. Alternatively, you can take advantage of the Whitelist tool to help automatically filter out those who have not engaged with your emails in the past 12 months. If this is not enabled for you, please contact your Account Manager.
Please note: Both the Check List and Whitelist tool should be used alongside your data hygiene strategy. While this will help to decrease your risk of sending to spam traps it is not 100% guaranteed. This is because ISPs will deactivate an inactive email after a certain period of time (i.e. some within 90 days), which then open up the possibility of that email address being re-purposed into a recycled spam trap. Read more here.
5. Make sure that your unsubscribe link is clear and visible in your E-Card.
6. Avoid sending an E-Card that is all image(s). There should be an even image-to-text ratio. This helps to avoid E-Cards from getting stuck in the spam folder. It also helps guard against email clients who have images switched off on open seeing only a blank page (i.e. the recipient has to right-click to download the images).
7. Schedule your send using "Send Later", that way all of the list processing (i.e. processing of bounce backs and unsubscribes) happens in advance of your required send time. When using scheduled send or Send Later, each individual personalised email is created and added to a sending queue. When the scheduled send time is reached, all that is left is the final delivery of the E-Card to the recipients. This helps to speed up the entire sending process.
Also, break down your list into multiple sends if your list is larger than 10,000 or your "maximum Vuture send size" if your Vuture instance integrates with InterAction. If you are unsure, please reach out to your Account Manager.
All of this best practice for large sends is covered in more detail in this Help Desk Article.
