Applies To
- Outreach Users
Answer
To prevent bounces and to ensure the best engagement, Outreach suggests following these best practices for sending.
Best Practice | Reason |
---|---|
Engage with Individuals that Want to be Connected With |
Treat every email address as a person instead of an address. Humanizing the individual helps the content stand out to the targeted audience. |
Do Not Use Purchased Email Address Lists | Purchased addresses often include spam trap addresses and individuals that have not given consent to have their details provided. To avoid complaints, make sure to use fresh data that is collected ethically. |
Know Your Audience | Make sure that the content within is targeted to the intended audience. Ex: Do not send free offers with obfuscated links to security professionals, they are likely to immediately be marked as spam. Please include a great subject line that will act as a hook for your audience to open the email. |
Include Unsubscribe Links in Every Email |
Include unsubscription links in all emails (including emails considered transactional) and respect user requests to cease sending. |
Send Consistently |
Slowly and incrementally increase and decrease the volume of emails sent. |
Do Not Resend Emails to Hard Bounce Addresses |
Remove addresses that result in hard bounces to preserve reputation. |
Rely on Click-Tracking Engagement Data to Measure Success |
Measure the success of an email campaign by actual bookings and responses. This is the most accurate data available. |
Stop Recycling Content that is Unsuccessful |
If the content is not engaging or has high complaint rates, sending the same content in the future will be affected. If content does not have measurable engagement (click tracking/bookings) Outreach encourages using new content. |
Do Not Send Messages that Could be Perceived as Phishing |
Make sure that content is clear, uses good grammar, comes from a trusted email address and follows good DNS security practices (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). |
Respect Local/Federal Laws |
Make sure to research privacy and abuse laws for the emails being sent that include CAN/SPAM, GDPR, and CCPA. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why am I getting Bounces?
Inspect the bounce response for a reason for the bounce. There are different types of bounces (hard and soft). Hard bounces are permanent errors (ex. the mailbox does not exist), whereas soft bounces are temporary errors (ex. the mailbox is full). To better understand why your email is not being delivered, we suggest inspecting the reason. The most common reasons for hard bounces are using addresses that have not been vetted, communicating with individuals that have not opted-in to communication, and using purchased lists. Sending emails repeatedly to hard bounce addresses can lower the reputation of the sender and result in blocklisting of the sending IP address and/or domain.
What are Internal Bounces?
Internal bounces are when the email service provider will not send emails because the account has been flagged for suspicious activity. When a user attempts to send too many emails, has too many recipients, or attempts to send emails with phishy content some providers will use a “lockout” to preserve the inbox in case there has been an account takeover or to prevent what they believe might be malicious content from being sent. Most providers provide an error code as to why a user has been locked out of their account.
Why do throttle limits exist in Outreach?
Outreach employs throttle limits to prevent users from getting locked out of their email accounts and to minimize blocklisting risks for our customers. Each email/inbox service provider has a limit as to how many emails, recipients, and volume sent at one time. Setting reasonable limits lessens the risk of exceeding the limits that can be sent from a corporate email account. This also seconds as a way of reducing risk that a domain/ip will be blocklisted by a recipient domain from receiving too many emails at once or over a certain window of time.