How to Improve DirectMail Deliverability

By Jonah Wang, Alibaba Cloud Solutions Architect

Introduction

DirectMail is a simple and efficient email delivery service built on top of Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with reliability and stability. Users and developers can use DirectMail to support several email use cases, including:

Transactional
Marketing
Mass Email Communication

Users can use the DirectMail console, APIs, or SMTP to send their emails through the DirectMail service.

DirectMail's IP pools and email authentication options will help you with higher email deliverability and sender reputation protection. However, there are still a lot of factors that may impact your sender reputation and make your future messages harder to reach the inbox.

This article provides a few tips to improve deliverability when sending emails to your users using DirectMail.

Prerequisite

Before sending emails, users should configure the email sending profile in their DirectMail account. The mandatory information of the sending profile includes a registered email domain name and a sender email address under this domain name.

Please refer to this link for the setup details about domain names in DirectMail.

When creating a sender email address in DirectMail, an email type must be selected for this sender's email address. Note: There are two email types:

Triggered Emails can send immediate, transactional communications from your application to customers, such as purchase confirmations or password resets.
Batch Emails can promote your products and services (such as special offers and newsletters) or send bulk communications (such as announcements and notifications.)

Tips for Higher Delivery Rates

1. Keep a Good Email Registration / Subscription System

The quality of your recipient email pool will impact your sender reputation, email credit, marketing accuracy, and customer engagement. Thus, before entering a customer's email address into your email pool, ensure the email verification mechanism and email subscribe/unsubscribe systems are in place.

Allowing customers to unsubscribe to emails they don't want will increase the chances of customers receiving and opening the emails you want them to see.

2. Choose the Correct Email Type

In DirectMail, each sender address will be configured as Triggered or Batch. Please ensure the correct email type is configured for the sender address and use the sender address for the assigned type of emails only. Normally, Triggered emails are used for transactional messaging, while Batch emails are used for marketing. Be sure to separate your transactional emails from your marketing emails.

In DirectMail, Triggered emails and Batch emails use different IP pools. Normally, Triggered emails are considered a higher priority, meaning the Triggered IP pool will have a better IP reputation. Due to the massive amount of Batch emails sent, the Batch email IP pool will normally have a lower IP reputation.

If a transactional email is sent through the Batch email IP, the low IP reputation may cause the email to be rejected. If a marketing email is sent through the Triggered email IP, the email behavior will be detected by the DirectMail backend, and the email sending process will be stopped.

3. Warm up Your IP

DirectMail will assign an IP for each email service. We recommend Batch emails with a large amount of recipient email addresses to start with a smaller group of recipients at first. Then, increase the amount of emails progressively within the first few weeks to warm up your email IP address. Each email receiver can detect if an IP address is a new IP. If a new IP address is found with a large amount/high frequency of emails sent, the reputation of the IP will be lower, and the emails will be rejected or go to spam.

The recommended starting amount of emails to be sent in one batch should be less than 100. The starting sending rate should be less than 10 emails/second.

Note: Apple private relay email addresses (endin@privaterelay.appleid.com) are anonymously-generated email addresses that are not the user's original email address. We recommend excluding those email addresses from your recipient list. You need to register your sending domains with Apple to make sure the email is delivered. Please refer to the links below for details about Apple's private relay email addresses:

Community

How to Improve DirectMail Deliverability

Introduction

Prerequisite

Tips for Higher Delivery Rates

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