What’s up with gmail?

laura
Industry
May 16, 2019

Increasingly over the last few months I’ve been seeing questions from folks struggling with reputation at Gmail and inbox delivery. It seems like everything exploded in the beginning for 2019 and everything changed. I’ve been avoiding blaming it all on TensorFlow, but maybe the addition of the new ML engine really did fundamentally change how things were working at gmail.

What folks are seeing

Cutting back to engaged only users is not effectively improving reputation.
Inboxing is no longer directly tracking with reputation on GPT (high reputation mail is going to bulk, low reputation mail is going to inbox).
Recipients are complaining about mail being misfiltered.

What can we do?

Right now, we’re mostly falling back on the things that worked 6 months ago: cut back sending to the most engaged recipients and then gradually add back in other addresses once you’re back in the inbox. The challenge is we’re not seeing the improvements we’ve become accustomed to seeing when using this strategy.

With one of my clients their reputation, as reported on GPT, actually fell during the period of cutbacks. Based on consistently high open rates and various inbox tests, including my own and those by one of the commercial vendors, we determined that recipients were getting mail in the inbox despite the low reputation.

Other delivery experts have reported similar patterns. Horrible domain and IP reputation (sometime in the deepest, darkest red) but reaching the inbox and seeing open rates in the 20 – 30% range.

I’ve also seen the flip side, green IPs and domain rep, but the mail is going to bulk.

That’s frustrating.

Yup. Sorry. Wish I had better news. Right now we’re falling back to what worked 4 months ago, because it’s what we had and it did work.

One thing that is new information to me is that, according to folks inside Google, the domain and IP reputation showing on google postmaster tools includes all domains handled by gmail, including GSuite hosted domains. Maybe these are having a disproportional effect on reputation, I don’t know.

My current thoughts are:

Pay attention to your engagement and open rates at Gmail
Don’t worry about domain and IP rep too much, if your marketing is performing.
Maybe we need to start including G Suite hosted domains in engagement restrictions, as painful as that’s going to be.

Anyone got any insight? Is there something we’re missing here?

July 2017: The month in email

August is here, and as usual, we’re discussing spam, permissions, bots, filters, delivery challenges, and best practices.

One of the things we see over and over again, both with marketers and with companies that send us email, is that permission is rarely binary — companies want a fair amount of wiggle room, or “implied permission” to send. There are plenty of examples of how companies try to dance around clear permissions, such as this opt form from a company we used to do business with. But there are lots of questions here: can you legitimately mail to addresses you haven’t interacted with in 5 years? 10 years? What’s the best way to re-engage, if at all?
We frequently get questions about how to address deliverability challenges, and I wrote up a post about some of the steps we take as we help our clients with this. These are short-term fixes; for long-term success, the most effective strategy is sending email that people want and expect. Engagement is always at the core of a sustainable email program.
We’ve also discussed the rise of B2B spam, and the ways in which marketing technologies contribute to the problem. B2B marketers struggle to use social and email channels appropriately to reach customers and prospects, but still need to be thoughtful about how they do it. I also wrote about some of the ways that marketing automation plugins facilitate spam and how companies should step up to address the problem. Here’s an example of what happens when the automation plugins go awry.
I wrote a few posts about domain management and the implications for security and fraud. The first was about how cousin domain names can set users up for phishing and fraud, and the second was a useful checklist for looking at your company’s domain management. We also looked at abuse across online communities, which is an increasing problem and one we’re very committed to fighting.
I also highlighted a few best practices this month: guidelines for choosing a new ESP and active buttons in the subject line for Gmail.
And finally, we celebrated the 80th birthday of the original SPAM. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know why unwanted email is called SPAM, but just in case, here’s a refresher….

More from Gmail

Campaign Monitor has an interview with Gmail looking at how to get mail to the Gmail inbox. It’s a great article and I think everyone should go read it.
One of the most important things it talks about is how complex filters are.

TLS and Gmail delivery

I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.