In June we notified you of a widespread drop in email sending reputations to Microsoft webmail addresses (such as outlook.com and hotmail.com). We’re pleased to report that this dip in reputation has now completely abated, and email sending scores have returned to normal levels again. This is after major mitigation efforts that we have undertaken in recent months, as well as our clients’ own work to improve list hygiene and email sending practices.
Currently, 90% of our IP addresses are operating at a Green (or ‘High’) score on Microsoft’s SNDS system, 5% at a Yellow (or ‘Medium’) score, and a final 5% at a Red (or ‘Low’) score. Clients that have been monitoring their engagement rates with Microsoft webmail addresses should now be starting to see a noticeable improvement.
It is still hard to say definitively what caused these problems in the first place. But the advice that we passed on in our last update remains the most relevant for bulk email senders. List cleaning, removing inactive supporters from delivery, and improving data hygiene all around have again proven to be the most effective ways to improve email deliverability.
The most successful efforts to increase sender reputation with Microsoft have been in those cases in which we have worked directly with clients to improve their deliverability, especially by keeping their sending to disengaged or inactive supporters to a minimum.
If you’d like to discuss your own email deliverability issues with us, please reach out by contacting support.
In the most recent software update to Engaging Networks, we made a raft of improvements to email delivery, including the addition of new sender envelopes to create categories and report on client delivery more effectively. In our next software update (scheduled for late August) we’ll be adding further improvements to outbound email including:
- A tool enabling clients to manage and align their own SPF and DKIM records from Engaging Networks
- A setting that allows you to include a master opt in question, when using a subscription management “unsubscribe” page in an outbound email, to better support Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and Gmail’s “list-unsubscribe” functionality
- Improvements to email suppression criteria in autoresponders (i.e. thank you emails) and in marketing automations
Again, please do reach out to us for more detail on any of these features.